The 1970s were a tumultuous time in American history. There were gasoline shortages and high crime in the cities. The Vietnam War and Watergate eroded the people’s trust in government institutions. These anxieties can be seen in the cinema from that time. Films like The Parallax View (1974), Klute (1971), and The Conversation (1974), and many others featured murky plots full of dark conspiracies where hidden agencies and secret government departments seemed to be pulling the strings on everything.
Buy Illustrious CorpsesDuring this same time period, Italy was going through its own political and social upheaval. Various communist and neofascist groups committed numerous acts of terrorism for a period of 15 years, from the late 1960s into the early 1980s, which is now called Italy’s Years of Lead. Much like the conspiracy thrillers taking hold of American cinemas, the poliziotteschi (or crime thrillers with a fatalistic and decidedly political edge) became quite popular in Italy at this time.
Illustrious Corpses (1976) is something like a cross between down-and-dirty, gritty poliziotteschi and the slower burn of the American conspiracy thriller. The title refers to a party game in which a piece of paper is folded up accordion fashion. One person draws a part of a person’s body (starting with the head and moving downward), then folds the paper over so that the next person has no idea what the person before them drew. This continues onward until the entire person has been drawn. Then the paper is unfolded, revealing a ridiculous drawing of a person with mixed parts – fat and thin, young and old, etc. Much like that game, our film’s hero will discover that with each new bit of information he receives, he will be unable to tell what comes next. Every clue will take him no closer to his answer.
Someone has started murdering judges in Palermo, Sicily. Amidst a host of political demonstrations and flare-ups between two warring factions – the Christian Democrats and the Communists – the police assign an outsider, Inspector Rogas (Lino Ventura), to solve the case. After the first judge is murdered, another judge speaks to a crowd, telling them how valiantly the dead judge fought against the mafia. The crowd shouts back that he was the mafia.
At first, Rogas turns to the mafia, but when more judges are assassinated, he begins connecting different dots. Perhaps the killer was wrongfully convicted of a crime and is now seeking revenge on the presiding judges. He finds one man, Cres, that meets that criteria and seems to be a likely candidate. He was convicted of poisoning his wife, but Rogas thinks that since the woman didn’t actually die, she may have set him up to send him away. Cres is in the wind. When Rogas visits his old home, he finds that someone has cut Cres out of all the pictures that have him in them.
He runs this theory by Supreme Court President Riches (Max von Sydow, acting the hell out of his short time on screen), who rebuffs Rogas. For there simply could not be a miscarriage of justice, for, like God himself, when a judge proclaims guilt, then that person is in fact guilty, whether he did it or not.
When Rogas leaves the president’s home, he notices the commissioner of police’s car is outside and sees several high-ranking government officials leaving the residence as well. When Rogas asks the commissioner what he was doing there, he gets nothing but lies. The more people he talks to, the more questions he asks, the murkier the answers become. The mystery is as opaque as when he first began. While the higher-ups apply greater and greater pressure for him to solve the case by stating it was the neofascists who did it, the more Rogas thinks it was an inside job.
Director Francesco Rosi unfurls his story with great patience. Though there is violence, and quite a bit of assassinating, this is not an action film. It takes its time. Lino Ventura is excellent. He plays Rogas as an incredibly competent detective, one with a strong moral compass. Like the film, he doesn’t rush to conclusions but patiently moves from one clue to the next, letting the mystery take him where it needs to go. I won’t pretend to understand all the nuances of the Italian politics found inside this film, but much like those American conspiracy thrillers I love so much, at the center of this film are shadowy puppet masters pulling all the strings while we remain in darkness.
I will say there were times when I wanted things to move forward just a little faster. Every clue seems to go nowhere, and he gets there ever so slowly. But just as I was losing my patience, it came up with a terrific ending. As I’m watching any movie, I internally keep a rating of it in my head. This one went up a full star within the last ten minutes.
Radiance Films presents Illustrious Corpses with a new 1080p transfer from multiple CRI elements, as the original prints could not be found. It looks quite good. The extras are:
- Audio Commentary by Alex Cox
- Francesco Rosi (HD; 3:40) is featured in this archival interview from a 1976 French television interview. Subtitled in English.
- Francesco Rosi and Lino Ventura (HD; 4:46) is also culled from a 1976 French broadcast. Subtitled in English.
- Gaetana Marrone (HD; 28:53) is a newly produced piece with the professor, who offers sociopolitical context and various ways the film departs from the source novel.
- Trailer
- Gallery
- Booklet featuring an essay on the film by Michael Atkinson and a newly translated interview with Francesca Rosi.
