As I rather hoped and anticipated, readers of this blog continue to offer delightful suggestions of movies they love, all of which triggers my own memories. Since I make a big show of being left-wing, I really ought to mention I'm All Right, Jack, a splendid 1960 Peter Sellers comedy about British working-class communist life and politics. I have actually written here before about my favorite scene: a group of workers made superfluous by changes in the factory where they work are kept on at the demand of the union [headed by Sellers], and spend each workday playing cards behind a stack of material. One day Sellers calls a strike and the workers walk off their jobs. At first the card players do not notice, but when they see the walkout they jump up as if stung by bees and join their comrades -- presumably to go home and play cards!
It is the most perfect gloss I have ever seen on Marx's famous discussion in the Economic-Philosophic Manuscripts of the attitude toward work under capitalism.
And then, of course, there is Kind Hearts and Coronets [1949], a reminder that Alex Guinness had a long and distinguished career before Obi-Wan Kenobi and The Force.
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PS: I omitted what is perhaps Kaurismaki's best film: The Man without a Past.
My first message was somehow lost (also I can't rememember being arfamo -- I am not ashamed to identify myself). What I wrote was something like: I would also recommend a more recent series of films, Aki Kaurismaki's proletarian sequences: Shadows in Paradise, Ariel and The Match Factory Girl, indeed everything by AK (bar the Leningrad Cowboy movies). In my book Kaurismaki is one of the best filmmakers working today. The films are wonderfully made and left-politically trrific. Andrew Lugg
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