Illustrious Corpses

The opening sequence and what follows are breathtaking -- every frame a jewel, and the messaging completely in sync with what Italy was going though during in the anni di piombo, the years during which life was controlled by the Christian Democratic party, the Mafia and the Catholic Church and when everyone else who mattered was more or less on the take.

Based on a novel by Leonardo Sciascia, the Sicilian bard of those years, the early sequence actually has the feel of a Simenon novel -- crimes are being committed, judges are being shot, and the best detective in Italy is being sent to investigate, landing in Sicily (unnamed, but clearly identified) as on a remote planet, The detective is played by the tremendous Italo-French actor Lino Ventura (who appears in just about any French film noir of the 60s and 70s that you can think of), whose face (like so many in this face-focused film) is almost a novel in itself. Nobody does faces like Francesco Rosi, and what faces he has to work with here, including not just Ventura's, but Fernando Ray's, Max von Sydow's, and many others that are at least as compelling, if not as instantly recognizable.

So for the first two-thirds of the film, the Simenon-like parts, with the Ventura character, Ispettore Rogas, trying, like Commissaire Maigret, to parse an alien environment and figure what's going on, the film is gripping. Then Rogas returns to Rome, and the plot becomes much more confusing. Suddenly we're no longer dealing with the crime Rogas thinks he has pretty much figured out, if not completely solved, but with a huge conspiracy -- we're suddenly thrust into a political thriller, more Costa Gavras than Simenon, and into what seems uncomfortably like agitprop. The Communist party, the hard-line PCI, seems for a time to be the path to salvation, but in the end, not. Youthful protestors seem to offer hope, but the basic message seems to be that the neo-fascists are always there, ready to turn whatever seeming threat they face into an opportunity. Sound familiar? The release is timely, but in the end I found the message kind of muddled.

The 4K restoration is fantastically vivid, but, until the later parts, with its huge crowd scenes, the original material was already brilliant. The English subtitles are incomplete and at times distorting...nothing new there.

The restoration, now showing at NYC's indispensable Film Forum, must be seen, even if it can be frustrating in parts. I assume it will go out on the art-house circuit, and any film lover who can should grab the opportunity, even if that is only through streaming or the DVD that I assume will come out soon if it hasn't already. The first 2/3 will knock your socks off, and maybe it's me only who finds the rest a bit indecipherable. Guess I'll just have to go back and see it again.

I managed to see this at a film society showing about 25 (oh, help!) years ago. I have never forgotten the air of menace and foreboding it generates as Lino Ventura (a great performance) doggedly pursues his case among the great and the good. An air of strangeness, too, such as the strange rumbling noises Ventura hears when he moves to his anonymous new apartment complex.

This is a film I would dearly love to see again but for the last quarter of a century (makes a girl think) nothing, nada, zip! I doubt whether the current controller of the Italian media will be interested in releasing a film about political conspiracy for public consumption but I wish someone would. This is a film which deserves to be seen and to be appreciated much more widely.

Near perfect political thriller, with a perfectly cast Lino Ventura in the leading role. Supporting roles, cinematography, direction and score, it's all very close to perfection. This film has this unique dark, typical European 70's-movie atmosphere, of which these French-Italian productions seem to have the copyright.

A big 8.

The good news first: Cadaveri eccellenti is now out on DVD. Which is how we came to see it again last night. - Second, my own two cents since I've just read the negative comments on the discussion boards, where people are actually wondering if this is the worst movie ever. No way! OK, my own approach to it was an uphill journey. First saw it ages ago because Tre fratelli and Cristo si è fermato a Eboli had impressed me. This one is quite different, and I didn't get a thing. Years later, I stumbled over the story it's based on: "The Context. A parody" by Leonardo Sciascia. Even readers only passingly familiar with Sciascia will realize that the baddies are never caught in his books, reflecting the realities of his native Sicily. Of all the books of his I've read, this one was the toughest, because evil is omnipresent and not identified with individuals. A parody perhaps, but a bitter one, and one he took a long time to finish because writing it distressed him. Rosi read it on a long journey and it hit him like lightning. Like Sciascia, he was interested in the ways power corrupts people. So that's what we have here: a relentless gallery of corrupt officials in every walk of life. Not only in the Mafia but also in the realms of politics, justice, the military and religion. Max von Sydow's character is as repellent as anything I've ever seen. The whole caboodle is not meant to be fully understood, and that's where a large part of that all-pervading sense of menace comes from. The locations are gorgeous - wish I knew where that bus stop was where Rogas watches the procession of high-and-mighties drive by. And those catacombs! Someone here said the location wasn't clearly identified, but given that both Sciascia and Rosi were Italian, and that the film features a map of Sicily rather prominently in one shot, I beg to differ. IMHO this is indeed Sicily. And bella Italia. Berlusconi may look more benign than certain of his predecessors but... oh, all right, all right, this ain't the Speaker's Corner. The rest is silence.

Director Francesco Rosi calls ILLUSTRIOUS CORPSES "a trip through the monsters and monstrosities of power." It is a detective thriller with the format of a political expose and deals with an unseen killer whose victims are judges, public prosecutors and magistrates. Viewers who have seen Rosi's THREE BROTHERS remember that one of the episodes in that film deals with a magistrate has a nightmare in which he envisions his own murder my terrorists. In ILLUSTRIOUS CORPSES Rosi elevates the crime of assassination to a cataclysmic dimension within which a modern industrial society is dragged to the brink of collapse. It is a structurally elliptical but harrowing picture of the weaknesses in social foundations and the fragility of all government. The country the movie is set in is unspecified although it clearly seems to be Italy. Yet the film is unspecific enough to represent any nation portrayed as being on the brink of anarchy. The eerie opening is set in Palermo's Convento dei Cappuccini with its crypt of 8000 bodies, some mummified, some rotting in subterranean corridors. Rosi turns those images into a horrific metaphor of political and social transience that are the themes of this movie. In the final sequence, oceans of banner-waving Communists are cut with noisily revving tanks being readied for a rightist takeover of power. One should observe that Rosi's left-wing political biases admit only of right-wing coups as being ominous. Nevertheless, it is an unsettling finale to a remarkable and unsettling film.