Watch The Working Class Goes to Heaven For Free

Truly Dreadful Film

Save your money for something good and enjoyable

Tells a fascinating and unsettling true story, and does so well, without pretending to have all the answers.

Excellent and certainly provocative... If nothing else, the film is a real conversation starter.

"Lulu the Tool" is yet another film that I watched because I loved Morricone's background score.Lulu (Gian Maria Volante) is an efficient worker at a factory. His co-workers hate him because of his productive abilities. The radical communists at the factory gates try to get Lulu to join them to save the workers from exploitation by the factory's management. But Lulu is proud of his productive skills, he even brags to his wife that his body is like a machine. But one day, Lulu gets his finger chopped off in an industrial accident. Depressed and overworked, he decides to join the radical communists who want to destroy the system. This puts him at odds not just with the factory's management but also the union who seeks not to destroy the system, but better pay and working conditions for the workers. Lulu also visits a mental asylum where he talks to a former factory worker who is completely cuckoo.While the film does underscore the plight of the workers, the film is not simply communist propaganda. The futility of labor. The futility of revolution. The position of the individual in a demeaning job as a factory worker and in a revolution where he has to suppress his individual desires for the good of his comrades. These are some of the themes that the director Elio Petri tackles in this powerful film. The radical communists are portrayed as ridiculous, with their loud speakers, yelling propaganda into workers ears as they make their way into the factory. Petri himself was an ex-communist.The scenes at the factory have a manic and stylish quality about them with the workers and managers yelling at each other. These scenes are set to Morricone's pounding score in the background (I wonder whether the makers of Blue Collar were inspired by this score). The score is used to great effect in the factory and protest scenes. It has a very edgy proletarian quality and its impact is tremendous as the film builds up towards a frenzied ending.Volante is sensational - what a transformation after playing the devious villains of Investigation of a Citizen Above Suspicion, Fistfull of Dollars and Luckily Luciano. He evokes pity and a few chuckles as a crummy and loud mouthed working class slob.Despite the heavy subject material, Lulu the Tool is a very entertaining and stylish film.(9/10)

Elio Petri directs his frequent collaborator, Gian Maria Volonte, in a drama about Lulu, an Italian factory worker contemptuous of his colleagues' attempts to get better pay and working conditions through their union. Lulu prides himself on being a productive worker, and the bosses praise him for his almost superhuman devotion to work. In spite of that, Lulu is just another worker scraping a meager job, living in a crummy apartment, with a woman he doesn't love very much. His personal life seems to amount to visiting a former work mate, who's now living in a mental hospital.Lulu's outlook, however, changes when he loses a finger in a factory accident. Although the accident doesn't leave him disabled, it makes him spin out of his numb existence as he gets more interested in the unions' struggles. But if before he was indifferent, now he starts getting involved with radical extremists preaching a new social revolution, instead of the more moderate but realistic unions.The movie is interesting because of the way it portrays the schism between unions: on the one hand, there's the traditional union, composed of workers, who just want to improve their lot, get a payrise. And then there are the Marxist-Leninist students and intellectual nutjobs who never put a foot inside a factory and who want to blow society up and rebuild it from the ashes. Petri is deservedly critical of the latter.The movie shares similarities with neorealist cinema in the way it portrays the squalor and working conditions of ordinary people, but Petri isn't particularly soft on the working class. Their inability to get organised, their own selfishness, and the lack of credible leaders to inspire them, is nicely dealt with in here. The viewer expecting just propaganda will be disappointed.Gian Maria Volente delivers a fine performance, especially in his mad outbursts of rage and madness. Petri has directed better movies, but The Working Class Goes to Heaven manages to tackle many of the issues in his oeuvre and so is also an indispensable movie for fans.

The efficient and productive Lulu Massa (Gian Maria Volontè) is an exemplary and beloved worker for his employers and hated by his coworkers. During a period of turbulence in the factory between the union and the radical students against the owners, Lulu accidentally loses one of his fingers. He changes his behavior and joins the movement of the students that wants to stop the factory with a strike as part of the fight of classes while the union wants a partial strike to reclaim benefits to the working class. When Lulu is fired, and gets confused with the new situation. But the union includes his readmission as a subject to be discussed with the owners and Lulu is hired again.When I saw "La Classe Operaia Va in Paradiso" in the movie theaters many years ago, the fight between capitalism and socialism was in the top in the world and this movie depicted actually the fight between ideology, represented by the movement of radical students, and the reactionary mass without political conscience and formed by explored workers. Lulu represents the servitude of the working class to the monopoly of the capitalist class. Presently this important movie is dated and youngsters may not understand its importance in the 70's. My vote is eight.Title (Brazil): "A Classe Operária Vai ao Paraíso" ("The Working Classe Góes to Paradise")

Young radicals come in to organize a factory, which the company resists. The company stooge, Lulu is an older, super-competent machinist, the person whose production sets the company's impossible standard for the rest of the workers. He gets so upset and distracted as a result of the alienation of his peers, he cuts a finger off. The company abandons him as he recuperates, and he joins the struggle of the workers and the radicals who've come to organize them. The student and radical activists eventually get distracted by a new campaign, abandoning the workers in the battle they helped organize. It should be shown to all community organizers to help create respect for those on whom they depend for support of progressive initiatives.