BRASSED OFF is a 1996 movie from England - written and directed by Mark Herman - in that tradition of those movies about the working classes attempting to better themselves: THE FULLY MONTY, BILLY ELLIOT and MADE IN DAGENHAM being other prominent examples. At the time it seemed like one of the last nails in the coffin of the outgoing Tory government.
It's set in a real-looking Yorkshire mining town a few years after the 1984/85 miners strike, where the local coal mine is about to be closed. The miners (Ewan McGregor, Jim Carter, Stephen Tompkinson and others) find solidarity in their brass band under their conductor - retired miner Danny (the late Pete Postlewaite in his finest screen role), a man for whom music matters above all else.
The pit closes, but the band makes it to the national brass band competition final at the Albert Hall. On winning, you expect Danny to make some sentimental speech about how - in spite of everything - music holds the band together. Instead, he delivers probably the explicit political diatribe against the then Conservative government and the devastation unemployment inflicts on people. It's a superb moment in a film with its heart and soul in the dying working class communities of Yorkshire. This isn't a piece of Ken Loach-like realism - it's prettified and sentimentalised for a mainstream audience, yet the movie looses nothing for it.
At the close, the brass band play Elgar's Pomp and Circumstace March Number 1 as they pass the Houses of Parliament. It's meant to be ironic but it's also very touching.
It's set in a real-looking Yorkshire mining town a few years after the 1984/85 miners strike, where the local coal mine is about to be closed. The miners (Ewan McGregor, Jim Carter, Stephen Tompkinson and others) find solidarity in their brass band under their conductor - retired miner Danny (the late Pete Postlewaite in his finest screen role), a man for whom music matters above all else.
The pit closes, but the band makes it to the national brass band competition final at the Albert Hall. On winning, you expect Danny to make some sentimental speech about how - in spite of everything - music holds the band together. Instead, he delivers probably the explicit political diatribe against the then Conservative government and the devastation unemployment inflicts on people. It's a superb moment in a film with its heart and soul in the dying working class communities of Yorkshire. This isn't a piece of Ken Loach-like realism - it's prettified and sentimentalised for a mainstream audience, yet the movie looses nothing for it.
At the close, the brass band play Elgar's Pomp and Circumstace March Number 1 as they pass the Houses of Parliament. It's meant to be ironic but it's also very touching.