"Political melodrama" might be a correct, but somehow insufficient tag for works like the recent Argentine film The Official Story and an earlier Brazilian contribution to the genre, They Don't Wear Black Tie. It's no small accomplishment to maintain a frank and forceful critique of the system while focusing on the conflicts within a family which are generated by the tumultuous political events in a country like Brazil. Leon Hirszman, a veteran of the cinema novo movement of the sixties, achieves just this in his closely observed tale of a middle-class family whose troubles are catalyzed by a looming factory strike. The problem expresses itself as a generational one: a middle-aged union organizer watches his social-climbing son become a strikebreaker in the name of working within the system. But Hirszman does not stop there, and the effects of the young man's decision are seen to be far reaching when his pregnant fiancée assures him that her child will be proud, not of its father, but of its grandfather.