The Working Class Goes to Heaven (1971): Work is Hell (Review)

A new year brings a new Blu-ray distributor in the shape of Radiance Films whose first slate of releases includes The Working Class Goes to Heaven, Elio Petri’s brilliant 1971 polemic on totalitarian capitalism and the post-war Italian ‘Economic Miracle’, released January 2nd.

The film reunites Petri with Gian Maria Volonté, star of his previous film Investigation of a Citizen Above Suspicion. As factory worker Lulu Massa, this blue-collar figure is a world away from the well-oiled and reptilian police inspector of the 1970 film, but it’s a similarly electric performance. Productivity is a tool of capitalism and Lulu is the physical embodiment of that saying as he slaves away daily at his lathe with grim determination, like Albert Finney in Saturday Night and Sunday Morning, making components for…well, he doesn’t know what. Ours is not the reason why. A highly productive worker, Lulu’s work rate single-handedly props up the factory’s piecework scheme, justifying management’s demands for universal higher output and ensuring he is loathed by fellow colleagues who cannot compete with his efficiency. Inside the factory, the union argues against the injustice of piecework, whilst outside a group of radical students, armed with megaphones and Marxist theory, campaign for higher pay rates and less work. None of this matters to Lulu as he strives to get through the day and return home to his hairdresser girlfriend Lidia (Mariangela Melato) and her son, though all he is fit for once home is to sit stupefied in front of the TV.

Life changes for Lulu when he loses a finger at his lathe. As the workforce point to the industrial accident as an inevitable result of the demands for greater productivity that could have easily been averted if management heeded their concerns, the union take the opportunity to negotiate an increase in the piecework rate. They hope that Lulu will stand with them, a symbol of the management’s unfair practice but, when Lulu adopts the students’ extremist analysis to take strike action as a call for an end to piecework completely, they are shocked – though arguably not as surprised as Lulu, the previous model employee, is himself.

A deeply political filmmaker, Petri had been honing his practice of getting ideology across via cinematic convention for much of his career with films like The Assassin (1961) which centres around an antique dealer selling fakes who is himself a fake, the veneer of respectability hiding his true self and origins, His Days are Numbered (1962) which sees a working-class plumber give up work after witnessing a man his own age die of a heart attack on his morning commute, and even the seemingly kitsch The 10th Victim (1965) explores how a near-future society could develop humankind’s base tendencies towards violence into entertainment. The director first teamed up with Gian Maria Volonté, a similar political animal and star of several of Petri’s works, in 1967 with We Still Kill the Old Way where he cast him as a leftist academic who, despite obstruction from the Mafia and a corrupt establishment, sets out to uncover the truth about the deaths of two men at a hunting party, before following it up with the critically acclaimed Investigation of a Citizen Above Suspicion, which suggests that the higher up a person can go within the establishment, the more immunity he can claim for his actions.

In The Working Class Goes to Heaven, Petri takes his political messaging further to explore a specifically humane, Gramscian approach to Marxist theory and socialism as a means to indict the totalitarian capitalism he sees around him. His protagonist Lulu is little more than a cog in the wheels of industry; an unthinking automaton created as a result of the unthinking, negligible attitudes of his capitalist masters. Even at the start of the movie Lulu is aware of his lowly position, likening himself to a machine. His body, he theorises to the disinterested Lidia, is a factory; the brain is the director’s office, the raw material is food and the end product, after the factory operations within his digestive system, is shit. If only he could sell it, he laments.

This blurring of the body (the organic) and the factory (the mechanical) is further explored in Lulu’s specific approach to his work and the reason for his high output; whilst at his lathe, he thinks of nothing but the arse of a young virginal co-worker, Adalgisa (Mietta Albertini). Later, a workmate Tarcisio (Corrado Solari) explains to the foreman that he cannot possibly speed up his work, as he works to a specific pace – that of his masturbatory rhythm. All this talk of sex however proves to be just that, talk. At the end of the day, Lulu is too tired to satisfy Lidia because of the heavy workload he has undertaken. He only feels virile, he confesses, on a morning – when primed for work. His body is literally on the clock and, with one broken marriage already behind him, Lulu looks set for another. When he later gets the chance to take the virginity of Adalgisa – the girl of his working day dreams – in the back of his car (a product of industry) it’s a comically awkward scene of uncomfortable disappointment for the girl. Looming over Lulu throughout the film is the portent of insanity in the shape of Salvo Randone’s Militina, a once-respected factory worker who now resides in the local asylum like a broken piece of machinery, the debilitating end result of a lifetime of work under such a brutal and inhumane system. Equally portentous is a curious and striking piece of wall art on the factory floor. A giant hand, its finger protruding outwards, pointing presumably to a muster point is visible throughout; the finger is inevitably the one that Lulu will come to lose, but the digit can also be a dryly humourous ‘fuck you’ to the exploited workforce as they toil away their days.

Blessed by a pounding score from Ennio Morricone and the authenticity gained from shooting in an actual factory in Novara amongst real workers in the cast, The Working Class Goes to Heaven is a bitter and darkly comic classic of 70s Italian cinema, one that still has so much to say today. The 1970s was a period which saw battle lines drawn between capitalism and the workers with the arena often being the factory floor. It’s fair to say that the onslaught of neoliberalism that followed won the day for capitalism, but the battles still wage on, and anyone who is arguing the case for things like stronger, more effective unionisation and a four-day working week will identify with the themes Petri is expounding here. Lastly, the film is helped immeasurably by a stellar performance from one of Italian cinema’s finest and most intelligent, socially conscious actors in Gian Maria Volonté. The jury at Cannes in 1972 certainly thought so too, tying this film for its highest honour, the Grand Prix International du Festival, with another Volonté vehicle, Francesco Rosi’s The Mattei Affair.

This stunning release from Radiance boasts archive interviews from Petri and Volonté, a new appreciation of Volonté from filmmaker Alex Cox and a video essay on Petri and the film from Professor Matthew Kowalski. There is also a new interview with actor Corrado Solari reminiscing on his time making the film, and a 50-minute documentary from 2006 regarding the Novara filming location and the story behind the film’s production there. All in all, it’s a big welcome to Radiance and I look forward to more of their titles.

Mark’s Archive: The Working Class Goes to Heaven