The Working Class Goes to Heaven

Plot

Lulu Massa is a reliable Stakhanovite worker at a factory, where the employees are told to care for and depend on their machines. However, Lulu is disliked by his colleagues, and outside of the factory, the employees see radical student agitators speak out against increased hours for labourers while wages remain stagnant. At home, Lulu lives with his wife Lidia and stepson, but Lidia always finds excuses to refuse him sex.

One workday, Lulu loses a finger in a machine due to a work accident. Encouraged by the student protesters, he is drawn into the worker's rights movement, urging a strike action. Meanwhile, Lidia, refusing to live with a man with communist sympathies, packs her belongings and moves out with her son. The boy cries, but Lidia tells him Lulu never really cared for him, and would slap him from time to time. While the worker's assembly votes against lengthening the strike, Lulu's employer fires him for supporting the students. Lulu also attempts to have an affair with a female co-worker, finding having sex with her in an automobile is difficult.

Lidia and her boy return to the apartment, to find that Lulu has destroyed their inflatable Scrooge McDuck doll. Trade union members then arrive to inform Lulu that they have worked out a new deal with the employers on work regulations, in which they also won Lulu's job back.

Production

The film was shot in an actual factory in Novara, Piedmont, with many of its employees serving as extras in the film.

Reception

In The New York Times, A.H. Weiler reviewed the film under its U.S. release title Lulu the Tool, calling it "both fascinating and sobering". In Film Quarterly, James Roy MacBean compared The Working Class Goes to Heaven to the prison drama The Brig in a "jarringly abrasive" portrayal of factory work and the quote "The factory is a prison".

Clarke Fountain, for New York, said it rose above the level of a propaganda film, and deserved a place in Elio Petri's canon along with his 1970 Investigation of a Citizen Above Suspicion. However, in 1986 author Mira Liehm referred to it as a "weaker" Petri film, and "heavy-handed". In his 2015 Movie Guide, Leonard Maltin gave it three stars, declaring it a "Superbly directed, thought-provoking critique of capitalism".

Accolades

At Cannes, the film shared the Grand Prix International du Festival, the equivalent of the Palme d'Or of later years, with The Mattei Affair.