The Colour Room (2021) on Netflix
Clarice Cliff works the floor of a 1920s Stoke-on-Trent pottery and supports her widowed mother and sister. Her ideas for colors and shapes run against what the trade wants.
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- Netflix4.2/5
- IMDb6.8/102,180 votes
- Rotten Tomatoes100%
Trailer
Plot summary
Clarice Cliff earns her wages on the floor of a Stoke-on-Trent pottery in the 1920s, and her mother and sister depend on what she brings home. She is full of ideas for color and shape that the potteries, fixed on Victorian notions of what women want in design, do not welcome. Rather than settle into one trade to earn more, she moves between factories and trades, learning each stage of production, and every change of job puts her income at risk. She then takes a post as an apprentice modeller, a role few women held, and the designer Fred Ridgeway trains her. The pottery's owner, Colley Shorter, sees her talent.
Cast
Did you know?!Facts and trivia about The Colour Room (2021)
Can contain spoilers, watch the movie first.
- Because of the 1926 general strike there was not enough material to make new ceramics, so Cliff covered up the imperfections on a huge stock of undecorated sub-standard ware held in the pottery with bright Art Deco-style patterns, thereby creating her Bizarre range.
- The pottery's skeptical head salesman took the Bizarre ceramics to a shop in Oxford because it had a female buyer, and the shop bought the entire stock.
- Despite resistance, Clarice Cliff persisted in suggesting her ideas on the factory floor; instead of mastering one skill to improve her earnings she started an apprenticeship as an enameller and then another as a lithographer at another factory, risking destitution while supporting her widowed mother and sister.
- Cliff got a job at another pottery as an apprentice modeller, a role rarely taken by a woman, and became apprenticed to designer Fred Ridgeway.
SPOILER
During the Great Depression the factory survived because of sales of pottery carrying Cliff's designs; she embarked on an affair with Shorter, and eventually they married after his wife's death in 1940.
