The Working Class Goes to Heaven (1971)

Director: Elio Petri
Writers: Elio Petri, Ugo Pirro
Stars: Gian Maria Volonté, Mariangela Melato, Gino Pernice    
Runtime: 125 minutes    

Plot: A conscientious factory worker gets his finger cut off by a machine. Although the physical handicap is not serious, the accident causes him to become more involved in political and revolutionary groups.

Review: "Lulu the Tool" is no more descriptive a title for Elio Petri's Italian social drama "La Classe Operaia Va in Paradiso" ("The Working Class Goes to Heaven"), the title under which it shared (with "The Mattei Affair") the grand prize of the 1972 Cannes Film Festival. If neither tag is memorable, there is little doubt that the director-writer, whose convictions are Communist, has projected a cynical view of the worker's lot that is both fascinating and sobering. Mr. Petri, who called his film "propaganda for the working class" at Cannes, hews to that hard line. His activists are weakly defensive when confronted by an unemployed Lulu, his unionists seem to be self-serving, and a once-tough Lulu is terrified by the lucid flashes of doom prophesied by an elderly mental patient, gently played by Salvo Randone, who has been wrecked by the assembly line. The focus, of course, is largely on Mr. Volonte, as the harried Lulu amid a company of unfamiliar players who seem to be at home in the factory and on the picket line. 

It is a varied, naturalistic and sensitive portrayal of a simple and vigorous man buffeted, frightened, anguished and perplexed by suddenly changing circumstances in his once comfortable bailiwick of the workers' world. It may not be an entirely original concept but it delivers the director's avowed "propaganda" forcefully, as the film's English subtitles make clear.

Reviewed by Mohaiminul Islam