Top 10 Union Movies
I'm All Right Jack, 1959
A half-century after the noble miners of How Green Was My Valley gave their lives for quite a bit less than 7½ cents an hour, some British labor unions had become as slow, overstaffed and corrupt as the management staff they tangled with. A heaping dose of cynicism was needed, and the twin brothers John and Roy Boulting happily obliged. The owner of a missile factory schemes to get an arms deal with the Arabs, then provokes a workers' strike that will move the order at a higher price to a rival company he's in secret cahoots with. To ensure the union's grievance, he hires his naive nephew Stanley Windrush (Ian Carmichael), confident that Stanley will screw things up.
The new man's nemesis is union leader Fred Kite (Peter Sellers), a confirmed Bolshie — "Ah, Russia! All them cornfields, and ballet in the evening!" — whose mission is to have his men accomplish as little as possible. ("We do not and cannot accept the principle that incompetence justifies dismissal. That is victimization.") Everyone sees through the fog of Kite's dialectic, from his wife ("The only time you ever jolly well do any work is when you're on strike") to, finally, Stanley ("Your politics: To each according to his needs, from each as little as he can get away with"). And with Sellers strutting about in a Hitler mustache and spouting Marxist jargon, Kite blossoms into a figure of mean fun. But in the end, his class suspicions are right: labor, however indolent, is the pawn of capital, in all its suave malevolence.