Made in Dagenham is a film about a strike at a Ford Motor plant in the London suburb of the title in 1968 by women workers seeking to achieve equal pay with men. The setting and plot allow for a soundtrack full of pop/rock songs of around that period, some of them touching on the theme and/or sung by women, most of those, naturally, Britons like
Sandie Shaw,
Dusty Springfield, and
Lulu. Jamaican
Desmond Dekker's renditions of his hit "Israelites" and of
Jimmy Cliff's "You Can Get It If You Really Want" both are in the spirit of the movie's message, as are the songs of some Americans, notably
the Temptations ("Get Ready"),
James Brown ("It's a Man's, Man's, Man's World," with its tag line, "but it wouldn't mean nothin' without a woman or a girl"), and
Mama Cass ("It's Getting Better"). Sometimes, the songs are just good oldies, like Sam the Sham & the Pharaohs' "Wooly Bully" or
Traffic's "Paper Sun." The album cover proclaims this to be "music from and inspired by" the film, but the only song that could have been inspired by it is the title tune, newly written by
David Arnold and
Billy Bragg, and sung by
Shaw, in the style of the other tracks on the album. ~ William Ruhlmann