Jean-Luc Godard
1967
96 minutes
This is a Godard film where he's starting to get political but is still being hilarious about it. The film follows a bunch of Maoist French college students who are trying oh-so-hard to be radicals. It has a fantastic prop gag, an enormous pile of Little Red Books that keeps being shaped and reshaped into different formations over the course of the film. It almost takes the form of a mockumentary at times, following the vicious in-fighting and purging and bickering within the group as they strive for ideological purity and become more and more radical.
In one of the film's best gags, one of the members gets tossed out of the group because he is too enthusiastic about how much he enjoys the film Johnny Guitar. Eventually the group radicalizes to the point where they carry out a plot to assassinate a Russian communist politician for being insufficiently radical in the correct way. Naturally they bungle this because they are idiots and kill the wrong person, then they have go to go back and redo things until they kill the right guy.
You're familiar with many of these pathologies from the time you spent around the more radical members of your labor union back when you were an officer. Several of your fellow executive board members would likely either find this movie very funny or very offensive, depending on their past and current ideologies, if you could get any of them to watch it.
This film pairs nicely with Mr. Freedom, which is your annual patriotic July 4th viewing.
Time to choose something different: