“The miners’ strike? What’s that?” “Well it’s a kind of action-love story about a bunch of reds who try and overrun the government.”
At least, that’s what it was according to the Comic Strip’s Strike!, which, a few years after the miners’ defeat, rather brilliantly imagined how Hollywood would handle the story. Arthur Scargill is played by “Al Pacino” (actually Peter Richardson with a New York accent even worse than his wig), who has some ideas of his own. “This history of the labour movement speech … it seems kind of misleading,” he tells Alexei Sayle’s beleaguered screenwriter. “You see, I can say all that just by the way I stand.” The facts of the actual strike are jettisoned in favour of a ticking-clock climax whereby Scargill/Pacino must race to parliament on a motorbike and make a tear-jerking speech before the miners blow up Sellafield.
Strike! hit the nail on the head. When it comes to the movies, industrial disputes, labour relations and workers’ rights are not exactly sexy. They’re too complex, too political, too real. What shifts popcorn is escapism and heroism: rags-to-riches, rise-and-fall, fantasy and superheroes. But could it be that the tide is turning? Those unsexy, unfashionable issues of labour relations and trade unions seem to be finding sympathetic audiences, especially here in Britain. As we approach the 30th anniversary of the miners’ strike, there’s almost a feeling of nostalgia in the air. Could it be that we’re weighing up what’s been lost? Or is it simply that the movies have got better?
The latter is certainly true judging by Pride, an irresistibly rousing new film based on the unlikely-but-true story of gay and lesbian Londoners who raised funds to support striking Welsh miners in 1984. “Who hates the miners? Thatcher, the police and the tabloid press – does that sound familiar?” as one leading activist puts it. Culture-clash opportunities abound, and Pride lays on plenty of broad, saucy humour: old Welsh ladies visiting Soho leather bars and laughing at dildos; miners frowning into their pints down the village hall while Dominic West camps it up on the dancefloor. Humour goes a very long way to sweetening what could have been a giant pill of social history in Pride, but it’s kept in check by the spectres of poverty, homophobia, Aids and, of course, the miners’ defeat. Still, the story ends with a glorious flourish that should be pure feelgood cheese but actually comes across as uncontrived and genuinely emotional (it would be a crime to spoil it). When you get to a point when filmgoers are moved to tears by solidarity, something’s clearly up.
“The idea of unions seemed to me as old-fashioned as flares or the penny farthing,” admits Stephen Beresford, who wrote Pride after hearing the true story of the Lesbians and Gays Support the Miners group (LGSM). “I really was one of Thatcher’s children. Solidarity was a thing we’d abandoned. I was an individualist. It was all about defending the rights of my own community: the gay community. It didn’t occur to me for a second I could have some kinship with other groups. I think we live in a far more divided society than we did.”
When they were making Pride, Beresford and director Matthew Warchus were staggered to discover that hardly any of the younger villagers in the Dulais valley in South Wales, where the events took place, knew what the miners’ strike was. They remembered LGSM better, and a few of them even remembered the Comic Strip’s Strike!, which, coincidentally, was also filmed there. Just as pitheads and slagheaps have disappeared from the landscape, so have the memories of what removed them. “It was a trauma on a country,” Beresford says of the miners’ strike, “and like a lot of traumas, the first thing we do is try to forget it happened. Nationally, we’ve kind of brainwashed ourselves out of remembering it.”
But cinema is a means of keeping those memories alive. Pride builds on what has become a veritable subgenre in British cinema post-miners’ strike (and post-Comic Book’s Strike!), conjuring accessible feelgood tales out of our industrial decline – which invariably culminate in a small but symbolic victory to reassure us that, contrary to Margaret Thatcher’s famous dictum, there still is such a thing as society. Billy Elliot winningly forsook his mining heritage to pursue a post-industrial career in ballet, pirouetting past the picketlines, but his dream was ultimately embraced by the community, whose whip-round gets him to the big London audition. In a similar fashion, The Full Monty’s laid-off steelworkers translated their workplace solidarity into Thatcherite entrepreneurialism by becoming male strippers – we never get to see how that panned out, long-term. In Brassed Off, the ravaged Yorkshire mining community is still bound together by the colliery brass band (and some cathartic anti-Thatcher rants), again climaxing on a slightly pyrrhic high. You could also include in this category 2010’s Made in Dagenham, even though it’s set in the 1960s, when we still manufactured things. Like Pride, it highlights a neglected piece of our social history: the struggle for equal pay for women in the workplace, and it does so with an ear for the retro soundtrack, the inspirational oratory and the saucy joke.
The granddaddy of these movies would have to be the Boulting brothers’ I’m All Right Jack, from 1959, which deftly played industrial dispute as an Ealing comedy. It’s a commendably even-handed satire, counterbalancing corrupt and scheming businessmen with equally self-interested unions – personified by Peter Sellers’ workshy Bolshevik leader: “We do not and cannot accept the principle that incompetence justifies dismissal.” Clearly there was far less sentimentality about unions in those days, and far more concern about their influence on politics, productivity and simple day-to-day work.
Perhaps some rose-tinting has been necessary to repackage these stories as popular entertainment. It’s telling that The Full Monty, Billy Elliot and Brassed Off have gone on to become successful stage musicals. Made in Dagenham joins them next month, with Gemma Arterton leading the West End adaptation. And you wouldn’t bet against Pride joining them one day. Warchus, after all, is best known for the stage musical Matilda – though he studiously avoided watching any of the aforementioned movies before he made Pride, he says.
All of this is some way from the real source of workers’ cinema: Soviet Russia. In that initial, spectacularly creative burst of Soviet cinema, attention inevitably focused on the proletariat and their struggle. Sergei Eisenstein’s first feature, Strike, juxtaposed images of striking workers being shot by government troops with animal slaughter, Dziga Vertov’s radically playful Kino-Pravda newsreels took cameras into the ordinary world, and the rest is film-school history. And even if Soviet cinema rapidly devolved into turgid propaganda – “boy meets girl meets tractor”, as it was dismissed by one Hollywood critic – it set the tone for the rest of the century in Europe, from cinema verité to Italian neo-realism to the French New Wave.
And carrying the torch in Britain – at times almost single-handedly – has been good old Ken Loach, a film-maker of such tireless, unimpeachable leftwing commitment that even Genghis Khan would have to concede the point by now. The history of British industry between I’m All Right Jack and Pride can almost be tracked by Loach films alone: from the hard-up mining community in Kes to Thatcher’s anti-unionism in Riff Raff, to
privatised rail workers in The Navigators, and, of course, his documentaries on the miners’ strike, End of the Battle… and Which Side Are You On? (the latter was deemed “too political” for broadcast by ITV). He even broached US labour rights in 2000’s Bread And Roses, no doubt appalled by Hollywood’s lack of interest.
This subject matter has always struggled to find a home in the US, where “vaguely socialist” equals “un-American” and individualism fits better with the hero’s-journey template anyway. John Ford had to go to Wales to deal with labour relations in his mining melodrama How Green Was My Valley. All right, it was actually filmed in Malibu, but it did justice to the social history and the pros and cons of unionisation – and beat Citizen Kane to the best picture Oscar that year. More often, America’s unions are portrayed as corrupt institutions controlled by organised crime, as they are in Elia Kazan’s On the Waterfront (which can be seen as Kazan’s apology for naming Hollywood communists to the House Un-American Activities Committee), or Jack Nicholson’s overblown Hoffa and Sylvester Stallone’s undercooked F.I.S.T. – both of which verge dangerously close to Comic Strip territory.
Hollywood also found it easier to tackle these issues through the prism of the musical, as in 1957’s The Pajama Game, where Doris Day and her factory superintendent resolve their industrial dispute by falling in love. Labour and capital literally get into bed with each other. These days, the best Hollywood can offer these is indulgent critiques of capitalism such as The Wolf of Wall Street, or David-and-Goliath issue movies such as Silkwood (starring Meryl Streep), or North Country, in which Charlize Theron proved women can be coal miners and have a perfect complexion.
But good old-fashioned workers’ cinema is by no means dead here in economically bewildered Europe. Pride strikes a populist balance, but there’s clearly an appetite for that serious, difficult, unsexy social realism too. Loach is still at it, of course, with this year’s Jimmy’s Hall, but the real case in point is the Dardenne brothers’ universally acclaimed Two Days, One Night. Here, in downsized Belgium, Marion Cotillard’s desperate factory worker must visit each of her co-workers over the course of a weekend and persuade them to forfeit their €1,000 bonus and vote for her to keep her job instead. The fact that Sandra is psychologically unstable and continually in need of propping up by her husband only adds to her plight. You can’t see them making a musical out of it, admittedly, but it’s by no means a “difficult” movie, carried along by tension and heart-rendingly empathetic performances.
The Dardenne brothers could be Belgium’s answer to Loach. They have also toiled at this uncommercial but redeeming face of cinema since their Cannes-winning debut, Rosetta, in 1999. Like Cotillard’s Sandra, Rosetta was another downcast young woman seeking stability and employment, but in a recent interview Luc Dardenne highlighted the difference. Rosetta is “a good little soldier of capitalism,” he said. “Rosetta is competing. Sandra, on the other hand, wants out of the competition … what she does, and the manner in which she does it, manages to defuse the competition and replace it with a form of solidarity.”
There’s that word again. What Two Days, One Night does so beautifully is distil the economic dilemma of our age down to a human scale. Each of Sandra’s co-workers must effectively choose between atomised, competitive, neoliberal self-interest and some form of collective power and mutual support. Is there such thing as society or isn’t there? Like Pride, it makes the political personal, and reminds us that the choice is actually in our hands.
Warchus agrees. “Pride shows a time when one could have a big idea and stand up for it. To believe that you could do that, and that things would change, now seems naive. There’s a sense of being powerless politically, so we use that as an excuse for lack of interest and that’s not acceptable. Politics, at its heart, is engaging with ideas about how to improve life, and it’s become so many other things. At a time when people are so disillusioned with politics, it’s moving to realise that at heart, it’s about caring for people and designing the kind of society that you want.”
Pride is released in the UK on 12 September
