I feel sure that there is already a thread on this topic but I can’t find it, even by typing in Matewan. So a short post about Made in Dagenham, mostly to say how much I disliked it. The movie tells the important story of 187 female machinists at the Ford Dagenham plant, who went on strike in 1968 for the principle of equal pay. It is an important story, both because it was path-breaking, and because the strike played some part in the passage of equal pay legislation both in Britain and elsewhere (though not as much as the movie claims).
But this movie is just a shining example of the worst kind of tear-jerking, melodramatic, feel-good crap that passes for social realism these days. Is there some factory buried deep beneath the BBC building in central London that pumps out these miserable excuses for movies about the class struggle? Brassed Off, Full Monty, Billy Elliot… we have got a steady diet of films feeding off a caricature of British class society to give us heart-warming drivel. This is little more than class porn.
Anyway, Made in Dagenham is utterly predicable: strong working class women; their menfolk who first support them, but then prove to be more sexist than interested in class solidarity; cowardly unions; personal tragedies that throw obstacles in the way of the strike; evil American Ford management (the UK Ford management is just incompetent); a ludicrous portrait of Barbara Castle (Labour minister for employment at the time); and most nauseating of all, a side story of the friendship between Rita (Sally Hawkins), the strike leader, and Lisa (Rosmund Pike), the wife of one of the Ford bosses. We even have Lisa visiting Rita in her council house to tell her how proud she is of the struggle for equal rights. Oh, and Bob Hoskins plays an adorable and saintly union steward. At a time when we desperately need good films about labor, when we need to be reminded of the central role the working class has played in constructing a civilized society, we get this instead.