Re: Fiction: "Rich and poor"

[Yoshie Furuhashi <furuhashi.1@xxxxxxx>]

At 7:46 PM -0500 11/21/03, Kenneth Campbell wrote:
>  >It's interesting,in this regard, to note that all
> > fictional plots involving the rich and the poor
> > changing places, always have a capitalist trade
> > places with a beggar...not a worker.
>
> Today, yes, often so. Not always so...
>
> One of my fave old movies is the "Devil and Miss Jones"... With a
> very sexy Jean Arthur as a retail clerk with a unionizing boyfriend.
>
> Evil boss goes to work in the shoe department to weed out
> "unionists" and meets her. Very funny ("What's a doomsday book?").
>
> But that was a rare moment in U.S. film history.

Fritz Lang's _Metropolis_ has the only son (Freder) of the biggest
industrialist (Jon Frederson), smitten with an angelic and virginal
working-class woman reformer (Maria), descend from the heavenly
paradise of the rich and idle to take the place of a laborer in the
subterranean hell of working-class toil.  Freder emerges from the
hell as the "mediator" between capital and labor, having "rescued"
his beloved from the evil scientist (Rotwang) and "saved" the working
class from the seductive android created by Rotwang in the likeness
of Maria, the mechanical agitator who escaped the control of her
creator and incited toilers to revolution.
--
Yoshie

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