Elio Petri, an underappreciated master (Part 1 of two)

“I… believe in mainstream culture…. Concessions to the audience? Frankly, I don’t think I make concessions; I, myself, am part of this audience.” (Elio Petri, from two separate interviews; both quotes included in Petri’s Writing on Cinema and Life on p. xvii)

I’m very proud of the career retrospectives I’ve done thus far on this blog (and the Funhouse TV series), although they are currently not easily found by many online searchers, due to the fact that Google no longer “crawls” its own properties (including Blogger/Blogspot). Thus, there may be a big change coming up.... But more on that at another time. In the meantime, I wanted to talk about my fascination with the films of Elio Petri, a filmmaker who created a small but incredibly consistent and potent body of work. 

He is best known for The 10th Victim, his sexiest-looking film and his most overtly commercial endeavor. But his filmography, although small, really does have a consistency and a repetition of certain motifs that are utterly fascinating, as they belong very much to the period in which the films were made (from 1961 to 1979), but they also harken to a type of political cinema that used to be practiced in several countries, but most especially in Italy.

Petri in the Sixties.

I mentioned in the trio of pieces I wrote about Ken Loach that political cinema simply doesn’t exist in America, meaning fiction films with political narratives. There are politically-minded documentaries and some indie docs that definitely have political messages, but fiction film in the U.S. does not go near topics of political interest (with, yes, a few stray — and they are quite stray — exceptions) because it simply won’t sell. Those interested in political films would more likely see a documentary with the same content, and fiction filmmakers know that a political message is currently anathema to American viewers.

Elio Petri crafted a brilliant of five overtly political films that still hit very hard and are still relatable in their basic themes. For those who like to tally the numbers, he only made a dozen theatrical fiction features in total, plus a TV adaptation of a classic play (which is incredibly political) and a small handful of shorts. Out of that dozen features, five of the half-dozen I’m going to review in this part of the discussion about Petri (which will also be going on in weeks to come on the Funhouse TV show) seem to not be overtly political.

The Japanese
poster for
10th Victim.

Not overtly political on the surface, that is. Petri was a student of the Neo-realist movement. His first significant job in the film world was to conduct “investigations” on certain social problems for use by the director Giuseppe De Santis, so that De Santis would be able to weave a fiction with his scripters that would have some basis in reality. The notion of investigation became an integral part of his own filmmaking, in terms of him looking into problems and trying to find scenarios that reflected those problems.

In five of the six films here, he used the trappings of genre movies to make comments on political realities. He was quoted as saying, “A political film must be made in a popular form.” Thus, his films might seem like straightforward whodunits or sci-fi satires, giallo thrillers, and crime pictures, but they still convey something about the society in which they were made, as well as the international situation of that time. Five of the films in this part of my survey (minus 10th Victim) also qualify as well-sketched character studies.

I will note that the film that drew me to engaging in a “bender” of Petri’s work was Todo Modo, his most dense and complex (and extremely rewarding) film. It is the kind of a film that you can take on face value and enjoy as a political thriller/social satire, but any amount of thought expended on it is rewarded, as one realizes it is a comment on the way politics worked in Italy, and by extension, around the world. 

Now that I’ve seen all of his features, except for the completely missing Nudo per vivere, I can easily say that five of the dozen films (substituting the miniseries, Dirty Hands for the missing Nudo) are true masterworks. Four of the films are excellent, while the remaining three are uneven but have some great scenes in them. You’ll be able to spot which are which as I move through Signore Petri’s work….

The Assassin (1961). A pungent character study wrapped up in the trappings of a clever murder mystery, this film showed that screenwriter Elio Petri (who had 15 produced screenplays to his credit at this time) was a very elegant and yet no-nonsense filmmaker. He was still relatively young (32) at the time, but this film and his second one, His Days Are Numbered, show Petri creating a style that drew on the neo-realist movement (read: documentary aspects and heightened emotion in a fiction feature) as well as the French New Wave (who were in his age group).

Here, the script by Petri and Pasquale Festa Campanile, Massimo Franciosa, and Tonino Guerra is indeed about an investigation, in this case a murder investigation. An antiques dealer (Marcello Mastroianni) who is always in debt and is also a big crook (buying good-looking items for low amounts of money and selling them for inflated prices) is arrested for the murder of his wealthy patron (Micheline Presle), with whom he’s been having an affair.

The arrest and subsequent events are the frame device for the film, which deftly cuts between the present and the past. We see the antique dealer deny that he killed his patron, but then we see his crooked attitude toward his clients and begin to doubt his innocence. The plot is further complicated by the disappearance of his fiancee, a plot element that seems very intriguing (and damning for him) but which amounts to a mere distraction.

After the arrest takes place, we see the cops playing games with Mastroianni’s head, as they view him through a two-way mirror, pound on the door of the waiting room that he’s being kept in, and the police inspector (Salvo Randone, who was cast in nearly all of Petri’s films) takes the phone off the hook to prevent “distractions,” while he’s actually allowing the other policemen to more clearly listen in to the interrogation. This sort of toying with Mastroianni continues when he is put in a jail cell with two crooks who seem to be informers trying to get him to confess to the murder he’s been charged with.

The most intriguing scenes here at the ones that sketch the underside of Mastroianni’s character. He has a friend who is lusting after Marcello’s maid, so he tricks her into believing his friend is a doctor who must “examine” her (thus, getting her to undress for both him and the “doctor”).

His patron wants to give money to a drunk on an empty road late at night, but Marcello tags him as a con artist — until he sees that the man has leapt from a bridge and was indeed suicidal. A scene where he meets his mother, visiting Rome for an afternoon, shows how he doesn’t really know how to relate to other human beings.

Mastroianni and Presle.

The solution to the mystery is not exactly rewarding, but it does provide us with a view of Marcello crying (after the real killer is found), which is undercut by an epilogue scene taking place a year later, in which he is having a tryst with his (now ex-)fiancee, whom he clearly just wants sexually. The brilliantly written concluding scene finds him ordering a sports car on the phone, and bragging to the dealer, “Do you know who you’re talking to? The lady killer!”

The film shows that Petri knew what he was after, even in his debut behind the camera. There is a calm, quiet pace to the proceedings, with certain plot strands not registering when you see it for the first time, but it gains depth with repeated viewings.

Debuting here is one of the devices that Petri would use over the course of his career, namely linking the past to the present in one long take. Here we see Marcello on a bed in a flashback, then Petri’s camera pivots to the inspector in a chair (in the present). The inspector gets up and walks to the next room, only to find Marcello (now in the present) talking. The inspector walks back into the bedroom, where we see Marcello and Micheline Presle talking (in the past). It seems confusing on paper, but it is executed so beautifully that one feels the crushing weight of the past on Mastroianni’s character.

Of course, Mastroianni is perfect in the lead role, sleazy but still dignified throughout. The score for the film was composed by Piero Piccioni, who was one of Italy’s leading film composers (he wrote 300 scores), working with the likes of Visconti, De Sica, Rosi, Wertmuller, Bertolucci, and repeatedly with the comedian-turned-filmmaker Alberto Sordi.

His Days Are Numbered (1962). Petri’s first masterpiece is a film that has never been distributed on any home-entertainment medium in the U.S. It’s a touching work that beautifully combines Petri’s neo-realist influences (in the storytelling and the documentary feel of certain scenes) with his interest in the French New Wave (in the visuals). 

Although he was only 33 when the film came out, it definitely qualifies as his “old age” film, in the manner of Umberto D but also Wild Strawberries and Ikiru. In interviews Petri said he based the lead character on his father, who worked as a tinsmith. 

Petri in the trolley car that appears
at the beginning of the film. (This photo
takes on added resonance 
when you see the film.)

Throughout the film, we move through the Roman landscape with “personalized” camerawork that sometimes takes on the protagonist’s viewpoint but also positions him in oddly framed shots (a la Godard) and shows us things before he sees them. There are no genre movie trappings here; this is purely and simply a character study, and a quite eloquent one at that.

The plot concerns a plumber (Salvo Randone) who sees a man his own age die on a trolley car that he’s on. The next day he refuses to get out of bed and go to his job because he just doesn’t feel like working any more. He feels the crushing weight of age and wants to enjoy life rather than deal with the pressures of his job. 

He proceeds to have a series of encounters with other characters at various stations in life. First, he talks to his friend who works painting crosswalk lines on the pavement outside the Colosseum. He tries to revive his relationship with an old lover, who is now a grandmother working at a community bath house. He meets an art patron in a museum who wants to show him the art he pays for — but really only wants to have him fix the plumbing his artist’s studio.

He meets his son, who wants him to go back to work. He visits the beach with his friends and muses on death with them and tries to have sex with a hooker, but he doesn’t have the “spirit.” A visit to his hometown (which he wants to move back to) shows him that the community there is comprised of many unemployed people. Some of them are alcoholics, because of the emptiness in their lives — “Wine is used to kill time,” he is told. He follows a beggar who sings on the street home and finds that he actually lives quite well; the beggar tells him his philosophy of stealing and getting what one needs.

Given the impressively errant nature of the storyline (with the patron of the arts supplying a true assessment of our antihero: “without even knowing it, you’re an existentialist”), the film’s third act is surprisingly harrowing. The plumber is pitched a criminal enterprise (insurance fraud), for which he must have his arm broken. The scene in which he can’t voluntarily submit to the pain is a dark one, both in tone and visually, as Petri’s summons up an image of a crooked enterprise that is scarier than what is seen in many crime movies.

Randone ultimately returns to his plumbing job. (His final existential musing: ““Working doesn’t let you think. Actually, it chases the thoughts away.”) And one night he’s on a trolley car and all kinds of sights and sounds flood into his mind as he looks out the window. He then is found dead, just like the man he saw at the opening of the film.

A characteristically off-center framing
from His Days.

The above description doesn’t do justice to the film, which is, again, very innovatively shot and beautifully acted. Randone was a stage actor by trade, and his performance here is thoroughly relatable and wonderfully nuanced. Days is the kind of low-key character study that would’ve, in other eras, been internationally popular and very well-received by critics. Instead it is one of Petri’s least-seen films and one that definitely needs to be placed in the lineage of top-notch Italian films of the Sixties. 

And for those like this reviewer who are old enough to keep track of how old that the “old characters” in movies are, it’s interesting to note that Randone’s plumber is only 53 years of age when he has this “end-of-life” moment of wondering “Is that all there is?”

Petri’s next film, The Master of Vigevano (1963) was made because he liked the novel the film was based on and because he wanted to work with comic actor Alberto Sordi, who also appeared in serious films (and later became a filmmaker himself). As a result of this unholy union of an intellectual/artistic filmmaker and an immensely popular commercial performer, Master is an uneven Petri film. But, like his other misfires, there are some great scenes here.

The film sketches the life of an underpaid schoolteacher (Sordi) who makes so little that his wife (Claire Bloom) wears his underwear at night to keep warm. He may be poor, but he puts his dignity first — he finds that his wife has borrowed money from a local industrialist, and he pays it back immediately. As a result his wife goes to work in a factory, to raise their standard of living.

His wife eventually asks him to quite his teaching jobs, as she and her brother have come up with a scheme: to run a shoe-making business from the Sordi family apartment. Sordi, however, gets the company investigated and it is closed down.

Bloom and Sordi.

Here, the third act is an absolute mess, with the film turning from comedy-drama to tragedy, as Sordi’s best friend kills himself and Bloom begins to cheat on Sordi with the industrialist. She is eventually killed in a car crash with the industrialist (in what seems like a weird foreshadowing of the finale of Contempt, which was released the same year) and Sordi returns to his teaching job, now submitting openly to the abuse from the principal that he had earlier freed himself from.

The film suffered as a result of disagreements between Petri and Sordi, who disliked Petri’s approach to the material. Here, the schizo nature of the material is reflected by the fact that the character goes on a downward spiral but still has Walter Mitty-like fantasies that clash with the otherwise realistic tone of the picture.

Although only 105 mins, the film feels much longer than it should be. One of its saving graces is a score by the great Nino Rota, which at least adds some levity and wistfulness to the proceedings. 

Petri’s next film, the science-fiction satire The 10th Victim 1965), is his best known and is a lot of fun. That said, it is far from his best work, as its plot moves along on the same level throughout, with an occasional new idea cropping up. In short, though, the film works better on the visual level than as a piece of storytelling. 

Ursula and Marcello.

The film was the product of two of Petri’s private obsessions, as he read science fiction for pleasure and was also a student of modern art, so he was well acquainted with the pop art of the period. The picture thus looks terrific, with gorgeous imagery inspired by painters and sculptors of the period. Petri biographer Roberto Curti notes that items seen in the film clearly evoke works by George Segal, Joe Tilson, Jasper Johns, Andy Warhol, and Roy Lichtenstein. (Not forgetting the comic books seen in the film, including giant reproductions of panels from “Flash Gordon.”) 

The plot is a futuristic variation on The Most Dangerous Game (one of the most ripped-off thrillers ever written). It is the 21st century and violence has been legalized into a sport called “The Big Hunt.” All around the world Hunters and Victims are designated and the more kills a Hunter makes, the more he or she become rich and famous. 

The film starts in the thick of things with an Asian man hunting a woman on the streets of NYC (in the Wall St district). The woman, played by Bond girl supreme Ursula Andress, ducks into a nightclub and reappears as the strip act performing inside. The Asian man enters, sits down to watch the show — and is abruptly killed by Andress, who has guns located inside her bra. 

We then switch to Italy where Marcello Mastroianni plays a celebrated Hunter who knocks off a garden-variety German stereotype (who looks like a Nazi but is called “Baron von Richtofen”). He then gets his next assignment: He will be a Victim instead of a Hunter, and Ursula (who is playing an American) will be his Hunter. Her agents set up a deal for her to kill Marcello at the Temple of Venus in Rome; his elimination will be part of a TV ad campaign (for “Ming tea”). Both Ursula and Marcello have to obey the rules of the hunt, which allow for a lot of mayhem but innocent victims must never be killed or the Hunter will go to jail.

The rest of the film consists of Hunter and Victim playing cat-and-mouse with each other, while a subtle seduction goes on between the two. Along the way we encounter numerous items that come from Robert Sheckley’s original novel, as well as things concocted by Petri and his coscripters Tonino Guerra (who worked with Antonioni, De Sica, later Fellini, and Tarkovsky, among others), Giorgio Salvioni, and Ennio Flajano (earlier Fellini). These include the fact that, in this TV-centric society comic books are treated like literary classics. (Marcello swears his affinity to Lee Falk’s The Phantom — says he, “I’m a romantic”). There are also “relaxation service centers” along roadways, and participants in the various hunts can go to the Ministry of the Hunt building; those who are just fans can attend Hunt Clubs, where gladiatorial combat takes place. 

Other odd elements show up, like the fact that Marcello — whose character has basically no dimensions except his vocation as a Hunter and the fact that he’s cheating on his wife with a mistress who wants him to marry her — runs a side-hustle as the head of a cult of “sunset worshippers” (who are routinely mocked by an opposing group of moon worshippers. We also find that (three years before Wild in the Streets), old people must be gotten rid of in this society, so Marcello hides his parents in a secret room in his house.

The humorous bits in the film are hit and miss, but some moments resound quite nicely. Among them is the fact that, no matter how sleek and futuristic 21st century Italy is, divorce is still illegal. (Thus, Marcello desperately tries to annul his marriage.) Also, the fact that different advertisers will be involved if Marcello kills his Hunter (which is a legal part of the game) than will be the case if Ursula gets her “tenth victim” (namely Marcello). Initially, Marcello’s sponsor panics when he hears that a girl will be killed on television, but Marcello’s agent clues him in by asking, “Did you know that this year it’s said to be ‘in’ to kill girls?”

Elsa Martinelli.

Petri decided that Marcello needed to have blonde hair for this film; this puts him back into the type of character he played in his films of the 1950s (where he was definitely cast as a pretty boy), but his diffidence toward all the women throwing themselves at him is definitely part of the alienated early Sixties.

By this, his fourth film, Petri was starting to assemble a crew that he used for each of his films. Salvo Randone appears again, this time as a Bond-villain-ish character wearing a neck brace and sporting steel teeth (decades before the “Jaws” character in the Bond movies). Ruggero Mastroianni, brother of Marcello, also became Petri’s editor of choice with The Master of Vigevano and remained in this position until Petri’s last film, Good News.

Besides wonderful production design work by Sergio Canevari (The Battle of Algiers), the film also boasts a very bouncy score by Piero Piccioni that blends playful organ music with sublime vocalese. In essence, 10th Victim toys with the notion of what modernist Italian films felt like to foreign viewers. It is thus an anomaly in Petri’s filmography and, since it is so easy to grasp and extremely cool-looking, it has been the Petri film that has been distributed the most on home entertainment formats in the U.S. 

“To Each His Own” was the original Italian title for the film we know as We Still Kill the Old Way (1967), which is one of two masterworks (along with His Days Are Numbered) in this half-dozen films. The most impressive thing about it is how low-key it is for a film that depicts a completely corrupt milieu in a bright and sunny Sicilian small town, with a lead character who means well but is deluded from the start.

Petri was a fan of detective fiction, which makes sense if you consider that some of his greatest films are murder mysteries at their core but proceed to veer around the whodunit aspects to become very incisive character studies. Petri said that his intention here was to make “an unconventional giallo,” which he did, primarily by avoiding many of the hallmarks of the giallo (which, aside from the great scores found in those films, are elements lifted from other thrillers).

The plot, taken from a novel by Leonardo Sciascia, concerns a small town in which a pharmacist is receiving anonymous threatening letters in the mail, which are constructed via words cut out of newspapers (in this case, L'Osservatore Romano, the Vatican newspaper that the great Father Guido Sarducci wrote for). The pharmacist is then killed, along with a doctor friend, while he is out hunting one morning.

Our protagonist, a law professor (Gian Maria Volontè) who lives with his mother, starts investigating the murder and finds out that the pharmacist and his affairs (and the threatening letters) were a smoke screen; the killers were actually out to eliminate the doctor. Volontè is soon informed by a friend that the doctor had secret info about a resident of the Sicilian town who is involved in various organizations (one of the nice, oblique references to the Mafia) and is entirely corrupt. 

Volontè continues to assemble the puzzle pieces, until he makes a fatal error in falling for the widow (Irene Papas) of the slain doctor. He obsesses over her, although she keeps rebuffing him and it becomes apparent that her cousin (Gabriel Ferzetti), a very well-connected man in the town, is likely the individual about whom the doctor had damning evidence. 

The cat and the mouse:
Gabriele Ferzetti
and Gian Maria Volontè

Our hero initially blunders into some valid truths, but his love for the widow ultimately becomes his downfall. He hasn’t understood that the forces of the church, the government, and the Mafia (all embodied in the figure of the cousin) are going to keep secrets from coming out, and Volontè is in fact walking right into a set-up. 

Despite bearing an English-language title that sounds like it came off a tongue-in-cheek spaghetti Western, We Still Kill is a masterclass in crafting a character study that also happens to be an indictment of how deeply corrupt a sleepy small town can be, and how different institutions will eliminate those who find out the truth about their complicity with each other. 

For one thing, the word “Mafia” is never uttered — we simply see goons and henchmen appearing in different sequences and it’s clear that they are following orders from someone in the community. Petri and his coscripter Ugo Pirro (who went on to coscript Petri’s “trilogy of neuroses” in the Seventies) also brilliantly put at the center of the narrative a clueless hero who thinks he’s capable of solving the murders and bringing the killer to justice. In truth, he’s completely clueless and doesn’t realize that he’s being suckered into victim status by the widow. 

Volontè and Papas.

Petri introduces the world of his best Seventies films here by depicting a completely corrupt community. He is aided dutifully in this by the sunny imagery, which is lovingly rendered by d.p. Luigi Kuveiller, who wound up crafting equally haunting visions for the quartet of “corrupt world” films that Petri made in the Seventies. Composer Luis Bacalov also does a beautiful job of “commenting” on the action via a playful score that sounds light-hearted but also seems to be underscoring how futile the efforts made by Volontè ultimately are. 

Everyone in the film is perfectly cast, but Petri’s use of Volontè is particularly apt. The actor went on to work with him three more times, in each case creating a very memorable (and very different) characterization. Here he is centerstage, assuming a crouched, threatened posture throughout the picture, constantly toting a leather document bag and some newspapers. Petri biographer Robert Curti noted that the character is “too focused on details to notice the bigger picture” and is far too devoted to the idea of justice for his two murdered friends (and passion for the widow) to understand the game being played on him.

Petri’s last film in the Sixties and the last to be treated in this part of my survey (I should say “investigation,” but Petri biographer Roberto Curti got there first) is A Quiet Place in the Country (1968). It is one of my least-faves of his films because it starts out as a very challenging work and winds up a straightforward giallo, albeit one with incredible skill in its art direction, cinematography, and music. (I’m not a big giallo fan — they have wonderful music and are frequently wonderful on a visual level, but their storytelling is often mundane and stolen from older horror films and Hitchcock thrillers. Bava seemed to be the exception, whereas a deathly dull filmmaker like Jess Franco became the rule.)

The film’s opening six minutes are terrific, constituting Petri’s most “Sixties” sequence ever (and that’s after he made 10th Victim, which was “mod” but was also set in the future). The credits are a mix of paintings and grainy, scratchy film leader. Experimental music — made by Ennio Morricone and the “gruppo di improvvisazioni NUOVA CONSONANZA” — plays throughout the scene. 

An artist (Franco Nero) sits in a chair, tied up and wearing only a towel as a kind of diaper. His girlfriend (Vanessa Redgrave, Nero’s real-life partner back in the Sixties and from 2006 on) comes in and tells him about the electronic gadgets she has bought. (“… an electric toothbrush, a transistor refrigerator, an electric knife sharpener, an erotic electro-magnet...”) She proceeds to come toward him and bites his chest, then plugs in all the devices. Nero’s image can be seen between his own legs on a small TV screen, while the noise of the machines mingles with the noise-music.

Redgrave and Nero.

Nero frees himself from the ropes, takes a carving knife, and follows Redgrave into the bathroom. He is too scared to attack her; she pushes him into the shower wall and proceeds to stab him (below camera level). He is next seen in a bathtub with Redgrave still stabbing him, with alternating images of her nude and clothed. He wakes up — it was all a dream. 

This opening scene is indeed the most radical-looking sequence in any of Petri’s films but, true to form for the rest of the film, he had to “ground” it in a familiar artist-going-mad trope in order to present it in a mainstream Italian movie. The film settles into a familiar ghost story plotline after that, where the moments of horror are seen as emanating from Nero’s mind as he goes insane. 

The details of the plot seem very familiar: Nero’s character wants to get away from the city, and so he chooses a mansion to stay in to get his artistic juices flowing again. We soon learn that Redgrave is not just his girlfriend, she’s also the gallery owner who sells his works to rich art collectors. 

The house he’s staying in “destroys” his artwork one night. He then learns about the countess who owned the house and died during a British air-raid on the area during WWII; she is said to be haunting the house. The film has numerous anti-climaxes, including one truly unpleasant scene where Nero brutally beats Redgrave to death (shown as reality — then, of course, as a fantasy). 

The film is Petri’s only horror picture — he referred We Still Kill and his later Todo Modo as giallos, but as noted above, We Still Kill is a top-notch character study while Todo is a very complex work that functions as a whodunit, a political satire, and a provocation aimed at a specific Italian political party. 

That said, Nero and Redgrave do make a very attractive couple. And the technical work done by Luigi Kuveiller (d.p), Ruggero Mastroianni (editor), Morricone (providing his first score for Petri; he scored every Petri film after this), and art director Sergio Canevari is excellent. Petri also ensured that the artwork was true to the moment the film was made in by using the paintings of Jim Dine, who also was the model for Nero’s artistic side and visited the set of the film. 

Nero and Petri.

Petri closed out the Sixties with an uneven piece of work that is too conventional on certain levels to be one of his great works. He began the Seventies, though, with the film that would establish his name internationally and jumpstart his second career as a political filmmaker.

Bibliography:

Curti, Roberto, Investigation of a Filmmaker, McFarland and Company, 2021

Petri, Elio Writings on Cinema & Life, (edited by Jean A. Gill; translated by Camilla Zamboni and Erika Marina Nadir), Contra Mundum Press, 2013 

NOTE: I thank cineaste pal Paul Gallagher for help in obtaining some of the films.