A coal miner called Paul manages to sell a screenplay featuring the British miners strike of 1984-85 . Since it's getting produced by American money the Hollywood producers demand changes made to the screenplay while hiring Al Pacino as Arthur Scargill
You might have heard of the term " audience identification " which simply put is an audience identifying with the characters in the film . This explains over the decades why so many British films have had the lead character being implicitly an American or played by an American actor . The idea of the thinking behind this that an American audience wouldn't be able to empathise with a non American in the lead role . This explains why a British film like MEMPHEIS BELLE has an American aircrew on a mission rather than a British one because a Lancaster bomber crew would be of little interest from an American marketing point of view . It also explains why an eagerly anticipated event movie like ALIEN 3 flopped at the US box office almost mainly down to a cast composed of British character actors
This film by the collective of comedians known as The Comic Strip hit creative gold with THE STRIKE . It's take 1980s satire to new levels in what was a turbulent period in domestic British politics . The obvious target is Hollywood and its philistine attitude to making money but other targets are carefully sniped in its sights not least the politics of the middle class champagne socialists who claim to be on the side of the people but their principal is mainly built upon being fashionable in public . To a degree all this is somewhat dated because you'd have to remember who Arthur Scargill , a firebrand socialist leader of the miners union who in order to save the workers went in to the year long strike with a large union and a small house and came out of the strike with a small union and a large house
You could be churlish and say perhaps Peter Richardson as Al Pacino and more especially Jennifer Saunders as Meryl Streep aren't all that identical to the actors they're playing but that's not the point because they're exaggerating and parodying the characters rather than emulating them . And whatever the minor faults of THE STRIKE the scenes were the audience get to see the film proper where Britain has been turned in to an almost surreal Americanised landscape are genuinely laugh out loud funny along with some fantastic and scathing dialogue
You might have heard of the term " audience identification " which simply put is an audience identifying with the characters in the film . This explains over the decades why so many British films have had the lead character being implicitly an American or played by an American actor . The idea of the thinking behind this that an American audience wouldn't be able to empathise with a non American in the lead role . This explains why a British film like MEMPHEIS BELLE has an American aircrew on a mission rather than a British one because a Lancaster bomber crew would be of little interest from an American marketing point of view . It also explains why an eagerly anticipated event movie like ALIEN 3 flopped at the US box office almost mainly down to a cast composed of British character actors
This film by the collective of comedians known as The Comic Strip hit creative gold with THE STRIKE . It's take 1980s satire to new levels in what was a turbulent period in domestic British politics . The obvious target is Hollywood and its philistine attitude to making money but other targets are carefully sniped in its sights not least the politics of the middle class champagne socialists who claim to be on the side of the people but their principal is mainly built upon being fashionable in public . To a degree all this is somewhat dated because you'd have to remember who Arthur Scargill , a firebrand socialist leader of the miners union who in order to save the workers went in to the year long strike with a large union and a small house and came out of the strike with a small union and a large house
You could be churlish and say perhaps Peter Richardson as Al Pacino and more especially Jennifer Saunders as Meryl Streep aren't all that identical to the actors they're playing but that's not the point because they're exaggerating and parodying the characters rather than emulating them . And whatever the minor faults of THE STRIKE the scenes were the audience get to see the film proper where Britain has been turned in to an almost surreal Americanised landscape are genuinely laugh out loud funny along with some fantastic and scathing dialogue
