The Working Class Goes to Heaven · reception & legacy

How The Working Class Goes to Heaven has been received, argued over, and remembered.

The arc

It shared the top prize at Cannes in 1972, yet at home it was savaged from every direction — the establishment press found it crude and the militant left found it defeatist. After decades of Petri being weirdly forgotten, restorations and the Letterboxd-era rediscovery of Italian political cinema have pushed it back toward masterpiece status.

What's debated

The eternal Petri fight: is his grotesque, everything-at-eleven style thrilling maximalism or a sledgehammer — and this film, attacked in its day by both right and left, is still the test case.

Its footprint

Ennio Morricone's clanging, machine-press score — music that sounds like the factory itself — is a legend in its own right, and Gian Maria Volonté sweating over the assembly line has become one of the defining images of 1970s Italian political cinema.

Where it stands

A cornerstone of the Petri–Volonté partnership and a 'you must see this' for anyone getting into Italy's political-cinema wave — long beloved-but-hard-to-see, now a steady canon climber.