On 2010-03-15, at 7:20 PM, shag carpet bomb wrote:
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> I couldn't actually think of a radical movie, not off the top of my head. That's why I asked others what examples might be. I thought about it some more, and a few popped into my head: Norma Rae, Reds, Matewan, Modern Times, Metropolis. Films that appeal to a striving u.s. progressivism: Working Girl -- if you count the subtle criticism of the striving American dreamer at the end of the film when Nichols pans out to reveal that she's still just another worker bee -- Wall Street for hokey romanticization of manual labor as superior to "intellectual" labor, and hokey romanticization of the needs for ethics to temper greed, as well as and Good Will Hunting for hokey romanticization of manual laborers.
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Those are all good choices, though I haven't seen Working Girl.
The Organizer with Marcello Mastrionni, Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner with Tom Courteney, and Lindsay Anderson's If with Malcolm McDowell, all from the 60's stand out for me, as well as Salt of the Earth from the 50's. Haskell Wexler also made some good political films: Medium Cool, Matewan, and the Woody Guthrie biopic Bound for Glory, and I like all of the Ken Loach films I've seen over several decades. Loach also directed a BBC miniseries, Days of Hope, in the 70's, which brilliantly traced the political fortunes of two working class brothers, one a Communist, the other a Labourite, and through them, the history of the British labour movement from the turn of the 20th century through the 1926 general strike. I wish it were still available in Dvd. Ditto for perhaps my all-time favourite, the film version of Peter Brooks' astonishing play, The Persecution and Assasination of Jean Paul Marat as performed by the Inmates of the Asylum of Charenton under the Direction of the Marquis de Sade. Martin Scorcese's The Last Temptation of Christ based on the Kazantzakis novel was also an extraordinary political film, as were Costa Gavras' Z, Missing, and State of Siege. And Gillo Pontecorvo's two great films: Battle of Algiers and Burn! with Marlon Brando. I'm sure I've forgotten others.