This half-hour featurette addresses what was, at the time, a serious subject: the dysfunctional system of quality control within one of the largest car manufacturers in the world. What makes it remarkable is that it was not produced by a crusading consumer watchdog or a trash-talking competitor, but by the manufacturer itself.
British Leyland, the conglomerate behind such then-popular automotive marques as Morris, Austin, MG, Jaguar, Rover, Triumph, and others, had acquired a reputation as a maker of horrible cars, a company that couldn't fit two parts together without them falling apart within a year, that is if they didn't turn to rust first. And that doesn't take into account its slapdash approach to design (ultramodern here, antiquated there), bumbling management, inefficient manufacturing, and horrible labor relations all around. BL was obviously aware of this. Most car companies would have chosen to deal with these sorts of problems internally, far out of the public eye, while promoting themselves as capable of no wrong.
BL did the opposite. In "The Quality Connection" they hang all their dirty laundry out to dry. They admit that their cars are crap. An engineer carelessly sets a cup of coffee on a technical drawing of a brake system. Production managers fail to catch or correct the error, factory workers have their eyes more on the office secretary or the Page Two girl than on their machine tools. That secretary types up specification sheets while applying makeup, and so on. And who pays for this negligence? A hapless middle-aged man, who purchases a Morris Marina...which breaks down, forcing him to walk to work that day. As a result, he is struck and killed on the street by a runaway Austin Allegro. With faulty brakes. The whole tragic chain of events started with a coffee stain on an engineering drawing in a Longbridge office.
This could have been a dry-as-a-biscuit, pedantic training film, or a browbeating of the factory workers from a haughty manager's eye view. But here no one gets off lightly. The choice to make that unsuspecting car buyer the main character gives the whole issue a very human dimension: this is why we all need to care instensely about what we're doing and how we're doing it. Little problems become big problems by accumulation, and big problems have big consequences, not just to the company's reputation and the numbers, but to people's lives. There are no sugar coating, no silly business-world catchphrases or mnemonic acronyms, no slick graphics to get the message across. The inner workings of the car industry are just shown to you, plain as day, and it's not pretty. (Although that secretary certainly is.)
That BL acknowledged the deficiencies of their own products and indeed their own operations is astounding. They are often sympathetic to their workers, particularly the men on the line who have the Herculean task of assembling and checking the cars for acceptable quality. The film points out that an assembly line for the Allegro was originally designed for the much smaller and simpler Mini, leaving the workers with less room to move around and less time to do their jobs. Whose fault is that? Management's, of course. It's not explicitly said, but implied.
I think that's the main fault of "The Quality Connection". While it exposes and explains the reasons for BL's abysmal quality control problems, it doesn't offer any concrete solutions other than to rap the knuckles of careless employees and admonish them to wake up and start paying attention on the job. The blame isn't given to any one person or department, but to everyone overall...except the upper management, who during the whole exercise are never seen, much less mentioned. They certainly make no obvious effort to promise to change their ways. I suppose it's asking a bit much to expect that bunch to take responsibility for the idiotic decisions they've made that result in the conditions depicted here. But they could have instead whitewashed the whole thing, or ignored it entirely, or blamed it on the Japanese.
As a film it's typical '70s fare, shot on grainy 16mm with library music, gritty location shooting, casual sexism, and a police-procedural style framing story (complete with voiceover narration from the hardboiled cop character). There are comic moments scattered throughout, which makes the climax as shocking as it is inevitable. The film is more fascinating than entertaining, and it would never win an Oscar or a BAFTA award, but it's a solid example of period sponsored filmmaking and an intriguing snapshot of a dark age in the car industry that today seems unimaginable. Well worth a look, particularly for car enthusiasts.
British Leyland, the conglomerate behind such then-popular automotive marques as Morris, Austin, MG, Jaguar, Rover, Triumph, and others, had acquired a reputation as a maker of horrible cars, a company that couldn't fit two parts together without them falling apart within a year, that is if they didn't turn to rust first. And that doesn't take into account its slapdash approach to design (ultramodern here, antiquated there), bumbling management, inefficient manufacturing, and horrible labor relations all around. BL was obviously aware of this. Most car companies would have chosen to deal with these sorts of problems internally, far out of the public eye, while promoting themselves as capable of no wrong.
BL did the opposite. In "The Quality Connection" they hang all their dirty laundry out to dry. They admit that their cars are crap. An engineer carelessly sets a cup of coffee on a technical drawing of a brake system. Production managers fail to catch or correct the error, factory workers have their eyes more on the office secretary or the Page Two girl than on their machine tools. That secretary types up specification sheets while applying makeup, and so on. And who pays for this negligence? A hapless middle-aged man, who purchases a Morris Marina...which breaks down, forcing him to walk to work that day. As a result, he is struck and killed on the street by a runaway Austin Allegro. With faulty brakes. The whole tragic chain of events started with a coffee stain on an engineering drawing in a Longbridge office.
This could have been a dry-as-a-biscuit, pedantic training film, or a browbeating of the factory workers from a haughty manager's eye view. But here no one gets off lightly. The choice to make that unsuspecting car buyer the main character gives the whole issue a very human dimension: this is why we all need to care instensely about what we're doing and how we're doing it. Little problems become big problems by accumulation, and big problems have big consequences, not just to the company's reputation and the numbers, but to people's lives. There are no sugar coating, no silly business-world catchphrases or mnemonic acronyms, no slick graphics to get the message across. The inner workings of the car industry are just shown to you, plain as day, and it's not pretty. (Although that secretary certainly is.)
That BL acknowledged the deficiencies of their own products and indeed their own operations is astounding. They are often sympathetic to their workers, particularly the men on the line who have the Herculean task of assembling and checking the cars for acceptable quality. The film points out that an assembly line for the Allegro was originally designed for the much smaller and simpler Mini, leaving the workers with less room to move around and less time to do their jobs. Whose fault is that? Management's, of course. It's not explicitly said, but implied.
I think that's the main fault of "The Quality Connection". While it exposes and explains the reasons for BL's abysmal quality control problems, it doesn't offer any concrete solutions other than to rap the knuckles of careless employees and admonish them to wake up and start paying attention on the job. The blame isn't given to any one person or department, but to everyone overall...except the upper management, who during the whole exercise are never seen, much less mentioned. They certainly make no obvious effort to promise to change their ways. I suppose it's asking a bit much to expect that bunch to take responsibility for the idiotic decisions they've made that result in the conditions depicted here. But they could have instead whitewashed the whole thing, or ignored it entirely, or blamed it on the Japanese.
As a film it's typical '70s fare, shot on grainy 16mm with library music, gritty location shooting, casual sexism, and a police-procedural style framing story (complete with voiceover narration from the hardboiled cop character). There are comic moments scattered throughout, which makes the climax as shocking as it is inevitable. The film is more fascinating than entertaining, and it would never win an Oscar or a BAFTA award, but it's a solid example of period sponsored filmmaking and an intriguing snapshot of a dark age in the car industry that today seems unimaginable. Well worth a look, particularly for car enthusiasts.
