Illustrious Corpses

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.

Does anyone know why this isn't on DVD?

Rosi always gives good opening sequences (see his "Carmen") and this one is the best.

This is the political thriller that should be listed even above those of Costa Gravas or The Manchurian Candidate, but is virtually unknown in America. When I saw it at an Italian film class in the late 90's not even the professor had actually seen it - ( though I had).

Rescreening this 1976 film in today's political/terror climate gives this film even more resonance.

Lino Ventura is the moral center of this unblinking look at Italian politics. He has the kind of "gravitas" of Bogart at his best. If you have any way of seeing this film, you won't be sorry.

If you enjoy it, check out Rosi's "Tre Fratelli" and Ricky Tognazzi's "L'Escorta" with similar subject matter.

FYI, Rosi (Dir) was an assistant to Visconti.

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.

Am a fan of foreign cinema and wanted to finally see more of Francesco Rosi's films, having loved his film version of 'Carmen' for years. That became one of my favourite opera films after seeing it for the first time at a relatively young age getting into opera and still is, it's actually even better now with the few things that didn't quite do it for me on my very first viewing, like the opening, not being issues.

Enough of talking about that film and lets talk about his 'Cadaveri Excellenti' ('Illustrious Corpses'). Was expecting great things after hearing a lot of positive things about it and was not let down, it deserves every good thing that has been said about it and deserves to be better known and accessibly. Am a subjective person but that 'Illustrious Corpses' was not available on DVD for a while and is to this day still underseen is inexplicable, when films nowhere near as good and in some cases not good films not only have wider coverage and highly marketed but are shown on television far more and are popular on DVD.

Talking now about 'Illustrious Corpses' as a film, it looks wonderful with some of the most strikingly beautiful and atmosphere-filled cinematography of any Italian film that doesn't have Federico Fellini's name on it. Some of it makes for many beautiful and at times nightmarish imagery, the mummified bodies will give one the creeps. The locations are also cleverly used and have both exquisite allure and stark atmosphere (apologies for throwing around this word a lot, it is hard not to when it is to me a crucial element of a film and should be mentioned). The music is haunting and has presence, whether understated or more bold, without being too loud.

'Illustrious Corpses' is intelligently written and thought-provoking, thematically it is bold and brutally honest yet human. Its depiction of Italian politics may not be innovative as such but was, and still is, honest and really quite daring (in a way that nobody expects) for back then. The story is deliberate in pace yet to me was transfixing, with a slow burning tension to the thriller/mystery parts sustained brilliantly with nothing being what it seems and .

The opening sequence is one of the best beginnings of any film seen recently, and perhaps ever, not just in how incredibly shot but also the emotion and chills one feels watching it. Even more striking is the shocking and really quite powerful ending that ends not in a way one expects, some may not like it but for me that it didn't end conveniently, predictably or less downbeat was actually appreciated and it did not jar tonally like those potentially would. There is suspense and there is nothing given away too early, one is kept guessing throughout with not much to help us. The killings are unlenting and the characters compellingly real with a lead character written with such honesty that it makes the outcome even sadder.

Rosi directs exceptionally with impeccable style and sense of mood and gets the best out of his cast. Lino Ventura is in the lead role and smoulders unforgettably on screen, giving a performance of magisterial and brooding intensity. It is a performance that has garnered comparisons as being the Italian Robert Mitchum or Humphrey Bogart and one can see why. The other standout is Max Von Sydow, an actor so consistently great that it would have been very hard to get a bad performance out of him. A bad performance this is nowhere near close to being, instead it is repellent unrepentance at its most chilling yet nuanced, it is a masterclass of saying a lot without always saying much or anything and Von Sydow always was a master at this.

Concluding, superb film and deserves far more credit. 10/10 Bethany Cox

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.