Book Review: Fight Like Hell: The Untold Story of American Labor by Kim Kelly

Abstract

Chaplin’s Modern Times, Billy Wilder’s The Apartment). Not only do her glosses of scenes from these films and others undercut her denial; so do her sideways explorations of the substantial body of fiction by and about Italian workers, especially those set within factories. Pinkus teases many topics out of one image, repeated in variations in several films: a closeup of a hand on a calculator, which for Pinkus becomes the springboard to examinations of male/female and white/blue collar work roles, automation in the workplace, and how Olivetti, an early “tech” company, gets left behind by advances in cybernetics. The boomcomedies provide—at least in retrospect, Pinkus demonstrates—somefirst glimmers of the transition from mechanical to digital workplace technologies. Along the way she explores the rise and fall of Olivetti’s model of paternalist private social welfare in a nonunion but relatively enlightened workplace owned by a socialist employer. I don’t know how useful this smart, eclectic, quirky monograph might be for labor educators unless you’re teaching a graduate seminar on Italian mid-century labor history, or “Film at Work: The Italian Model.” But if you’re into Italian neorealist cinema and ever wondered what came afterward and why, this book is for you.