PimpinAinttEasy "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)

MARIO GAUCI The Spirit of Social Justice of the May '68 uprisings is still very much alive in this heavy-going but compelling parable of the rise and fall in the fortunes of an Italian factory worker dubbed Lulu (Gian Maria Volonte'): starting out as the Boss' darling for being the exemplary employee and pacesetter of the company, the loathing of his co-workers (who despise him for how his excessive zeal makes their own lackluster performance look bad in the eyes of the manager) and his female companion Mariangela Melato (who never gets any piece of the action at night because of his constant fatigue) eventually gets to him one day – with the result that he loses his concentration at work and suffers the loss of a finger in an accident. This changes his whole outlook on life as he becomes engrossed in an extremist workers' union, finally makes love in his car to a virginal female co-worker/union member he is obsessed with, is quitted by his consumerist hairdresser companion and his surrogate son and, when he is given the sack at work and is on the point of selling off his belongings, another more moderate workers' union comes to his aid by winning him his old job back. Although there is obviously much footage here of socio-political discussions, scenes of picketing and police riots, confrontations between diverse unions, etc., the film also has that winning whimsical streak promised by its title and exemplified by amusing episodes in a mental institution (where Volonte' visits his cracked-up ex-colleague Salvo Randone), the quasi-surreal sequence of Volonte' taking it out on all his useless possessions (including a giant inflatable doll of Scrooge McDuck!), and the concluding description at the assembly line of the titular incident itself which Volonte' had in a dream the previous night. Ennio Morricone's inventively 'metallic' music underscores the robotic gestures of the factory workers who, despite slaving eight hours a day at their machines, are not even aware what becomes of the parts they produce! While the film may seem overdone and dated in today's apathetic age, it clearly hit a nerve at the time of its release winning a handful of international awards including the Palme D'Or at the Cannes Film Festival.

Gerald A. DeLuca "The Working Class Goes to Heaven" stars Gian Maria Volonté, who appeared in earlier Elio Petri films like "We Still Kill the Old Way" and "Investigation of a Citizen Above Suspicion." The Marxist director's critique of capitalist society is at play in this movie as in so many of his others. Volonté plays Lulù Massa, a lathe-operator in a Milan factory which pays by piece work. Lulù is a fast worker, the pride of the management and the bane of the workers who consider him a threat. The work is a nightmare of monotony, and the workers are continually timed and fined for underproduction. "Even a monkey could do this work," Lulù says.Like the comic tramp in Charlie Chaplin's 1935 "Modern Times," he feels dehumanized, exploited, empty. His relationship with his mistress and her TV-mesmerized son is strained. He asks an older friend in an insane asylum, "How did you know you were going mad? A man has a right to know what he is doing, what he's useful for."At the end of the conversation with his mad friend (Salvo Randone) at the asylum, the man begins to leave and Lulù inadvertently remains. The insane asylum seems normal, while the factory, the "real" world, appears insane.Lulù ignores the worker movement and strikers until he loses a finger in an accident while carelessly overworking. He becomes a symbol for the ills of the factory, and a radicalization process ensues until he is fired for taking a stand against the managers.Eventually re-hired and given a demeaning assembly-line job, he daydreams enviously of his friend in the madhouse.Gian Maria Volonté gives the beleaguered hero a pathetic and comic dimension which is always convincing, performing with bold strokes rather than by subtle illumination. Petri's directorial technique uses a similar approach. A highlight is an uproarious scene of lovemaking in a Fiat with co-worker Mieta Albertini.The film won the grand prize at Cannes in 1972. It runs two hours in its full version and 1½ hours in a truncated version peculiarly called "Lulu the Tool." It is a major Italian film from the 1970s.

Fritte-3 The movie has a great power, first of all he gives to Lulu a mechanical soul, the camera follows his unhuman movements caused by too much work and let us understand something strange like madness. Then we have the political part: outside the factory people are pemanently screaming verses against owners like another machine that creates words, but the real impressing moment is inside the factory where man and machine became the same things so that the camera let us see the hidden mechanical part and the human movements togheter; the music too (by Ennio Morricone) adds a sense of robotic condition.