The Rank and File

Episode aired May 20, 1971
1h 18m

IMDb RATING

6.8/10

YOUR RATING

Comedy Drama

When a pay discrepancy continues without any resolution, glass factory workers turn to their union for support. But when it is not forthcoming, they take things into their own hands.When a pay discrepancy continues without any resolution, glass factory workers turn to their union for support. But when it is not forthcoming, they take things into their own hands.When a pay discrepancy continues without any resolution, glass factory workers turn to their union for support. But when it is not forthcoming, they take things into their own hands.

IMDb RATING

6.8/10

YOUR RATING

Top credits

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Peter Kerrigan in The Rank and File (1971)

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Trivia
Barry Norman expressed reservations about this edition, beginning his review in The Times (21st May 1971) with:

"The instant reaction, my instant reaction. anyway, to Jim Allen's play was one of enormous disbelief. Quite obviously the man had gone too far, even allowing for the fact that his view of industrial strife is admittedly one-eyed and very much left-eyed at that."

Goofs
Some of the actors appear to be smiling during the street fight scenes.

Crazy credits
On-screen caption in opening titles: "A film based principally on events that took place in Lancashire in the Spring of 1970".

Connections
Featured in Versus: The Life and Films of Ken Loach (2016)

User reviews1

Review

Featured review

6/10

Rousing Call for Real Democracy

This early Tv film by the great politically conscious British director Ken Loach (arguably no other movie maker has done more with their work to illuminate timely issues of social justice) uses an event that had happened just one year before the telecast to call for industrial democracy. Workers in a company town at a glass factory go out on a wildcat strike for fairer pay when the bureaucratic union structure that is legally supposed to represent them fails to support their issues.

The dramatization, following up on a similar exploration of labor problems in Loach's The Big Flame two years before, raises a larger question of democracy beyond just the workplace. Governments around the world not just in the UK claim to be democracies but in fact leave most of their citizens without any direct say in politics and with a system of representation where the officials claiming to act in their interests have become way too settled and comfortable with the corporate powers and have actually sold out and become corrupt.

Loach's recreation of a specific local action in its historical context is devastating and we are reminded that the British Labor Party hadn't really done much to help the workers since 1926, when there had been a General Strike.

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