Elio Petri: Making the political personal (Part 2 of two)

“‘I believe that the only way to understand the future is to watch the present with a certain pessimism,’ [Elio Petri] claimed, adding that ‘Pessimism is a weapon of research…’ ...Petri firmly believed that cinema must first and foremost be useful, and therefore there must be a dialectical relationship between the film and its audience, for ‘pessimism generates utopia as a revolutionary ferment.’” [Curti, Investigation of a Filmmaker, p. 3]

In this second and last part of my survey of the work of Elio Petri, I dive straight into the period that established him as one of the great political filmmakers (of fiction films) in the latter half of the 20th century. As I noted in the first part of this piece, seeing Petri’s work in today’s climate — where political filmmaking does not exist in the U.S. at all and the brightest lights are cast on documentaries from around the world with political themes — is extremely enlightening, as it shows how fiction films with overtly political messages can be made that are both very entertaining and thought-provoking.

The first three films here have been grouped together by critics as a “trilogy of neuroses.” The subjects to which those neuroses adhere are power, then work, and finally property. They were made in a politically tumultuous period in Italy when there were regular bombings by terrorists and party politics were coming under intense scrutiny. 

Petri in his later years.

During this time the infamous “strategy of tension” prevailed in Italy, wherein various bombings occurred that were committed by the Far Right but were blamed on the Far Left. Thus, the leads in the trilogy (actually, every film included in this part of the survey) look pressurized and seem to be operating under a great deal of stress, although the first protagonist initially projects a calm demeanor as he plots to show that he is so “important” in society that he could brazenly commit a crime and get away with it. 

The film in which that occurs is one of Petri’s masterpieces and one of his most critically lauded, Investigation of a Citizen Above Suspicion (1970). We follow a police inspector (Gian Maria Volontè) who commits a murder and eventually leaves ample amounts of evidence that he is the culprit, in order to show that he can’t be “brought down” by the police detectives he works with and he is in fact so important to the functioning of the police force that he will be deemed “above suspicion,” even as eliminates the few red-herring characters who are initially thought to likely be the murderer and replaces them all with himself. 

The victim in question is his mistress, who enjoys engaging in murderous role play with the inspector (who is known simply as “the Doctor”). His proximity to many murder cases turns her on, but she also feels compelled to diminish him with insults about his looks and behavior. He slashes her throat and leaves his own DNA and prints all over the crime scene. 

He feels compelled to do this just at the moment when he is leaving the homicide department and is being moved to a high-ranking position in the “political division” of the police. (Handling the riots and terrorist activity.) We see him giving a very serious speech to the rank and file about how it is important that the rioters be cracked down on, as subversion must be eliminated because “repression is civilization!”

Throughout the film, we see that the Doctor feels he is a master criminal who has committed the perfect crime, given his status in society. (He acknowledges this in a line of dialogue: “We policemen aren’t that different from criminals… sometimes even the same gestures….”) He feels he is immaculately attired and has perfectly oiled-down hair, but we see in flashbacks that the one person who was brutally honest with him was his mistress, who makes fun of his policeman’s “odor.” 

One of the key sequences depicts the way in which cops view the people they police, as the Doctor admits to the head of the political division that he was having an affair with the murder victim; his boss simply wants to know from him how good she was in bed. As the film moves on and the investigation seems like it will end with an innocent man (the victim’s husband) taking the rap, the Doctor sends evidence (his shoe, her jewelry) to police headquarters to provide the homicide squad with more legitimate “leads.”

Throughout the film, Petri and his coscripter Ugo Pirro ground the action in political realities. The Doctor leaks juicy details of the case to a reporter from a Left-wing newspaper, thus showing Petri’s view that “alternative media” can be corrupted if the Establishment gives it some attention. We also see Leftist radicals arrested in the film and arguing with each other in a holding cell. “It’s a good thing they’re not united, or we’d have trouble,” says one cop to the Doctor. (A brilliant reflection on how schisms in the Left prevent certain goals from ever being reached.)

The most striking sequence relating to these themes is one where the Doctor is shown proof that Italy was in effect a police state, as a room full of officers listen in on phone calls. The Doctor is also shown the filing system for information about political radicals, broken down by political and religious affiliation. 

The Doctor begins to slowly crack up as the film moves towards its brilliantly calculated conclusion. Throughout, Volontè does an excellent job conveying the Doctor’s arrogance and his childishness when confronted with an obstacle that offends him. The nuances in Volontè’s performance (done with a Sicilian accent for the character) are brilliant and make the very certain-in-his-smugness Doctor seem worlds away from the mild-mannered professor that he played in We Still Kill the Old Way.

Petri and d.p. Luigi Kuveiller continued their visual experimentation here, using several new techniques, including one where the lenses on the camera are switched during a scene, so that we get the impression of a jagged reality (whereas a zoom would establish fluidity). The aspect that sold the film throughout the world, however, was its script, the germ of which came when Pirro witnessed a cop running a red light on purpose. For his part, Petri didn’t cloak his intent at all in interviews about the film, saying point-blank, “I wanted to make a film against the police.”

Ennio Morricone’s music is, as always, attention-getting here, as it has a playful aspect that mirrors the way in which the Doctor is toying with his colleagues. He wrote two themes for the film, a sensuous one for the flashbacks, and what he called a “folksy and perverse tango” for the present-day sequences. Petri biographer Robert Curti notes that the tango was similar to Morricone’s main theme for a gangster film from the preceding year, Le clan des Siciliens; both were based on Bach’s Fugue in A Minor. 

Investigation won several awards in different countries, the two most notable of which were the Grand Prize of the Jury at the Cannes Film Festival and the Best Foreign Film Oscar award. It is noted by Curti, though, that Petri must have taken specific pride in winning (along with Pirro) the Best Film award at the Mystery Writers of America’s annual Poe awards, given his personal love for reading mysteries.

The neuroses trilogy became a bit more complex (for lazy viewers) with the second film, The Working Class Goes to Heaven (1971) because, for the first time since His Days Are Numbered and The Master of Vigevano, Petri didn’t add the trappings of a genre film onto his tale of a factory worker who becomes radicalized. The film is strictly a character study that attempts to depict the character and his environment without any sort of mystery, thriller, or fantasy aspect to the plot.

Petri noted that he felt compelled to do the film because the life of workers — and, more importantly, the work of workers — had not been depicted in Italian cinema since the neorealist period. The lead is also a fully developed character who is not thoroughly likeable, as he treats the women in his life quite shabbily, refers to his coworkers from the South of Italy as “Africans,” and initially is the kind of fast-paced worker who puts his colleagues to shame (and enjoys doing so). 

Lulu (Gian Maria Volontè) does, however, became more sympathetic as the film goes on. He starts out as a vulgar factory worker who is devoted to piecework, creating one metal part (of what would later be fitted into a car) all day long at his machine.

He is asked to train two new young workers and tells them his philosophy — that one can produce more if one likens to the creation of a part to the movement of a female ass (belonging in this instance to one of his coworkers, with whom he has a memorably awkward sex scene later in the film). “… it’s all a matter of technique. I concentrate with my brain… and think of her ass. And so I go… a piece, an ass, a piece, an ass...” [Petri cuts to a tight closeup of Lulu’s eyes that quickly go out of focus.] 

Volontè.

He pays no mind to the students protesting outside the factory for better conditions and higher pay for the workers; nor does he care about the activities of the union that is present in his shop. Until, that is, he loses a finger while operating his machine and not paying full attention to what he’s doing. (The Freudian significance of a mostly impotent worker losing a finger is not lost on most viewers.)

He then becomes more radical than the radical students outside; he takes over a union meeting and demands fairer conditions, as well as an immediate walk-out of the workers. For a while he feels comfortable with the radicals he is now friendly with, but they desert him for a time after he is fired and he realizes that the only one who has a truly valid perspective on his situation is his old friend Militina (Petri favorite Salvo Randone), who was committed to a mental hospital for having a breakdown at the factory.

Lulu and Militina
(Gian Marie Volonte and Salvo Randone)

Petri and Ugo Pirro conceived of a brilliant third act for the film: After nearly suffering a breakdown of his own (in one great scene, he wanders through his apartment and starts cataloguing all of the useless things he owns), he is told that the company wants to rehire him and the workers will now be working on a connected production line, instead of inhabiting different spaces for piecework. 

The film ends with Lulu telling his comrades about a dream he had, about how it would be possible to enter “paradise” if one could break down the wall that prevents one from entering it. His coworkers don’t understand what he’s driving at, but he continues to tell them the events of the dream as the production line continues to move in a steady fashion….

Petri knew he was courting criticism when he made Working Class: “A political film must be made in a popular form; it must have the maximum communication. Therefore, the triple somersault consists in telling a hard story in a popular form. Maybe with this triple somersault I’m going to break my back.” [Curti, p. 174] 

The most interesting thing about the bad reviews that the film got was that the majority of them came from Leftist critics and filmmakers. (The Left has always been nothing if not divided, and its doctrinaire faction is always annoyed at all the other factions.) In his Petri biography Investigation of a Filmmaker, Robert Curti summarizes film historian Claudio Bisoni’s summation of the reasons Marxist critics pounced on the film: “In their view the film lacked class analysis, and therefore was not authentically Marxist. Moreover, the filmmaker was interested in alienation instead of class conscience. Lulu was too stupid a character, and the analysis of his situation was considered too simplistic and politically apathetic. Finally, Petri’s pessimism was inconceivable to Marxist critics who firmly believed in revolution and the rise of Socialism and saw the working class as the motor of history.” [Curti, p. 190] 

Most famously, minimalist filmmaker Jean-Marie Straub (considered a forefather of the New German Cinema) attended a screening of the film that Petri was at and “yelled that all the copies of the film must be burned because it was a reactionary work.” [Curti, p. 178] In an interview Petri vividly remembered Straub’s “grim and upset expression” and his “livid complexion.” He declared that “if my film had in itself something could offend such a fanatic, a Swiss chalet Calvinist, it was certainly something anti-fanatic and anti-intolerant. Bad, if you like, but positive.”[Curti, p. 178] 

The film may have received a great deal of criticism when it came out, but time has been very kind to it. Firstly, there is the exquisitely fluid camerawork of d.p. Luigi Kuveiller, who glides over the machines in the factory and does justice to Petri’s famous long takes. 

Then there is, of course, the presence of Volontè in the lead role. Here, he creates a third character who is nothing at all like his leads in We Still Kill the Old Way and Investigation of a Citizen. Lulu is a harsh character but one who grows on the audience. We realize as the film proceeds that he is trapped in his job, but it is the only thing he knows and thus he must keep on doing it until he reaches retirement age. Salvo Randone is also terrific as Militina, who is the only character who has a clear view of how the factory dehumanizes its workers.

And, as was always the case, Ennio Morricone provided a very memorable score to the picture. His evocative music includes bursts of sounds that echo the machines in the factory but also do remind one of machine guns. These sounds continue throughout the film and are even heard as the final credits role, after Lulu has told his fellows about his dream of paradise.

The final entry in the neuroses trilogy, Property Is No Longer a Theft (1973), is one of Petri’s most ambitious films and one that doesn’t work as well as his other films from this period. It is overflowing with ideas and broad provocations, and yet is too obvious in its metaphors and its messages. There are terrific moments — and, as always with Petri, some great performances — in the film, but it neither contains genre elements nor is it a solid character study (in the manner of His Days Are Numbered and Working Class).

The plot is very simple but is encumbered by characters who clearly stand for specific concepts and a subplot that sees one of the biggest speeches in the film delivered by a minor character whom we have barely seen before. Its basic premise is this: An accountant (Flavio Bucci) at a local bank, who breaks out in rashes when he touches money, develops a disliking of a wealthy butcher (Ugo Tognazzi) and begins stealing things the butcher prizes: his best knife, a hat, his car, and his girlfriend (Daria Nicolodi). 

Total, the larcenous accountant.

While Petri may be on the side of the accountant, the character is too stock a schlemiel to ever become even mildly realistic. The best scenes he has involve him in discussions with his father (who else but Petri fave Salvo Randone) about the notion of property and stealing. He becomes bolder and bolder with each item he steals from the butcher, but he also realizes that his fascination with the butcher’s power and corruption will lead nowhere.

Petri and Ugo Pirro came up with a nice name for the accountant’s philosophy: “Mandrakian Marxism,” after the great Lee Falk cartoon character Mandrake the Magician. (The accountant is making the butcher’s possessions “disappear,” like Mandrake could; “I only steal what I need,” he tells his father.)

Mario Scaccia.

The film runs a very full 126 minutes and it offers us a side plot that finds the accountant involving a professional thief (and entertainer, doing a half-woman/half-man act onstage when we first see him; see photo) that really should’ve been cut. It seems to exist to merely underscore how the accountant is a “moral” thief, and to introduce a speech given near the end of the film where one of the thief’s friends delivers a eulogy for him that spells out how society is defined and perpetuated by its thieves. 

Petri was always good at putting his intellectual ideas into play in an entertaining way, but the speech at the thief’s funeral becomes little more than a moment where the author’s message is being transmitted. Among the lines is this certainly true but overly wordy proclamation: “What would the world be without [thieves]? ...Society owes its established order and social equilibrium to us because we, stealing under cover of darkness, cover up and justify the thieves who operate under the cover of legality.”

One interesting aspect of the film is that it came in the thick of Petri’s spate of films in which the whole world of authority is corrupt. Here we see the butcher preparing to declare to the police that millions of lire of his possessions were stolen, when only a handful of significant things were taken. He also outlines how many of his corrupt activities will have to be paused while his possessions are being taken. 

The plot also puts emphasis on the notion of sex. As had been the case in Working Class, the accountant (whose given name here is “Total”) is both attracted to and not able to sexually satisfy Daria Nicolodi’s character. The butcher, however, is constantly horny and seemingly can please her (or she is willing to stick with him as long as the presents and money keeps on coming). The film’s one big sex scene was the subject of some controversy in Italy, because it depicted Nicolodi on top of Tognazzi, which (for that time and that place) made it exceedingly racy.

Tognazzi as the Butcher.

One of the most prescient quotes about the film came from Ugo Tognazzi, who underscored that the film had two different “modes”: “Property is an important movie — actually, it is two important movies. An Expressionist film in which characters tell their reasons in turn, or rather deliver their sermons as if from a tribune, a balcony… and a naturalist, even Neorealist film, with a bit of commedia all’italiana… we’ll have to see if the films stand together.” [Curti, p. 215]

The Brechtian, “distanced” side of the film is represented by theatrical moments in which the main characters each deliver a monologue directly to the screen. Here Petri’s fine eye for casting shows, as each character tells us where they stand in society, and the performers can communicate directly with the viewer.

Total discusses how “class hatred” is created in society. The butcher tells of how he yearns to be immortal. The girlfriend tells us she is treated like a thing and that she has few recourses: “But if I wasn’t here, I’d be somewhere else, in another shop, in another house, in another neighborhood or even… sitting in the cinema like you are.”

Daria Nicolodi in her meta moment.

The police chief investigating the thefts tell us that “arresting people is a wonderful thing.” And the film ends with the father getting his moment addressing the camera with a simple phrase (as he playfully moves toward us and away, on a playground-type swing), “My son was like a father to me.”

These moments are in line with the fact that Petri uses a number of intense close-ups through the film that end up making the characters seems grotesque. This and other techniques only serve to distance the viewer and thus prevent identification with the characters — surely that was what was intended but it is too severe here.

One can’t help but assume that the critical drubbing he received from Leftist critics and filmmakers for Working Class triggered the “downer” quality of Property. He stated that it was “a movie on the birth of desperation amid the Left.” He got even closer to communicating his pessimism about possibilities for liberation from state corruption in this quote from a Q&A where he answered an accusation by an angry Leftist: “I’m an outraged, nauseated man. I wanted to provoke. That’s intentional… It has been said that the film is too pessimistic. Well, I say, let’s have a look around. What reasons do we have to be optimistic in a society like ours?” [Curti, p. 201] 

Still in all, the film has its virtues. Foremost among them is the production design by Gianni Polidori, who conveyed Petri and Pirro’s feelings about the “sacred” place that money holds in the heart of the corrupt by using an actual church as the location for the bank seen in the film. Tognazzi’s butcher shop also resembles a sacred place, with marble walls and Tognazzi’s counter looking more like an elevated altar. Polidori also crafted wonderful designs for both the butcher’s palatial suite and the trashier apt inhabited by Total and his father (wherein we do see a giant cartoon of Mandrake the Magician on Total’s bedroom wall).

Ugo Tognazzi was very vocal in interviews about how he sought out the role of the butcher, and he is excellent in the part. Like Mastroianni and Volontè, Tognazzi was such a charismatic performer that we enjoy his big moments more than we do those belonging to Bucci. 

And, as was always the case, Morricone came up with another brilliant score to punctuate the onscreen neurosis. His main for the film contains heavy breathing and sounds sexy (in what could’ve been a Gainsbourg-like manner) but actually becomes scarier and scarier as it continues. 

Now we reach the pivotal entry, the film that brought about my fascination with Petri, his most extreme and arguably his best film, Todo Modo (1976). The film should have a cult but it’s barely been seen over here. (I saw it as part of MoMA’s Xmastime 2024 tribute to Marcello Mastroianni on the 100th anniversary of his birth.) It was recently restored in Italy but has yet to ever come out on an American home-entertainment medium.

It also previously qualified as “missing” in Italy, since it was pulled from distribution in 1978 after the killing of the former Italian prime minister Aldo Moro by the Red Brigade, since the film was seen to “predict” that action (inadvertently). Although there is not a single terrorist in the picture and it is clearly a speculative piece of fiction that does mock Moro’s public image but didn’t urge viewers to kill him.

The reason the film is so striking is that it plays like a mystery but is based on real events and real individuals. As it stands, the film could be accurately described as a whodunit, a dark comedy, a 1970s paranoia film par excellence, and a massive provocation against the corrupt dealings of one of Italy’s most important political parties. When Petri was asked to describe the picture for those who hadn’t seen it, he described it as “grotesque” and definitely meant as an attack on the Christian Democracy party, “the party that shipwrecked the country politically and culturally.” [Petri, p. 257] 

Taking place in that same milieu that had pervaded his preceding films with Gian Maria Volontè, in which a thoroughly corrupt world is depicted, the film was adapted from a novel by Leonardo Sciascia, who had written the novel that served as the source for Petri’s great We Still Kill the Old Way (see the first part of his piece) and Francesco Rosi’s brilliant Illustrious Corpses (also 1976). 

Sciascia’s novel had been based on real events, namely a series of spiritual exercises he saw politicians from the Christian Democratic party engaging in while he was at a literary event. He decided to add a murder into the mix and delve into the rigorousness of Ignatius’ exercises while also critiquing the CD party’s behavior. (Italo Calvino called Sciascia’s novel, which laid the groundwork for Petri’s nightmarish vision but wasn’t as incredibly grotesque, as being “as strong as has ever been written on the subject” of that particular party’s role in Italian politics. [Curti, p. 225])

The author witnessed an event in which Christian Democrat politicians “cleansed” their souls by performing exercises created by St. Ignatius Loyola (while also reorganizing their party). The film centers around these spiritual exercises, which are engaged in an underground labyrinth by members of a political party that has reached an impasse. Although the head of the party (called “Him; played by Michel Piccoli) is briefly present at the exercises, there are two key figures to the drama. 

Volontè.

The first is the Moro-surrogate character (Gian Maria Volontè), simply called “M.” in the credits; he is a perennially suffering politician who seems to carry the weight of the world on his shoulders. There is only one woman politician present at the spiritual exercises, but M. has his wife hidden away in his room. Played by Mariangela Melato, she shares what Petri called M’s “veritable vocation for martyrdom.” [Petri, p. 257] 

The other main character is the priest who runs the exercises, Don Gaetano (Marcello Mastroianni). He’s a complex figure, as he is clearly both deeply involved in corruption (it is hinted that he has been part of scandals, presumably sexual) and is the most honest character in the film, as his faith is the purest. He wants to run the politicians (including some journalists among their number) ragged, to get them to atone for the sins he knows they have committed. (It’s also revealed that he has been keeping in-depth files on the background of every participant in the event.)

Events change course from a being a straightforward satire of political intrigue when a participant is murdered during one of the most grueling exercises, in which Don Gaetano has the participants walk barefoot across a large room over and over again as the recite the rosary. Additional murders then take place, with each victim found in an embarrassingly sexual position. (Piccoli’s character is found bottomless, lying on a bed.) As the murders begin to pile up, everyone becomes a suspect, from M. and Don Gaetano to the lowly servants who tend to the clergy and politicians. 

Mastroianni.

There are many masterstrokes in Todo Modo, but I’ll just cite two here. The first are two sequences where the acronyms of the secret and not-so-secret organizations that the murder victims belong to are probed by M. and a police detective (the very-busy-in-Italian-cinema Renato Salvatori). The participants begin to deny their involvement in certain ridiculously named organizations, while others decide to out others in the group. (And during the recitation, the acronym CIA is present during one read-out for one individual.) 

These acronyms, it is posited by M. in one of the film’s more frenzied scenes, point to which of the attendees at the retreat will be killed. One need only see if the acronyms (“MITRA, LOGI, TROP, MIG, TUHOGAS, FADER, TULIP, MAGIC….”) contain any of the letters clustered in the phrase Todo modo para buscar y hallar la voluntad divina. The last-mentioned phrase comes via Loyola; it translates as “One must use every way to seek and find the Divine Will.” It became the title of Sciascia’s 1974 novel and Petri’s film. 

The second element that is quite striking to current-day viewers is the backdrop for the action. It seems that an epidemic has been killing off people throughout the country. It has gotten so bad that the government has mandated that all citizens must be vaccinated at roadside tents. This isn’t probed at much length in the film, but it sticks out like a sore thumb for viewers encountering the film after the events of 2020-2022.

The film is a masterwork on several levels. The most obvious one is the scripting by Petri, who worked on this occasion without Ugo Pirro (who cowrote We Still Kill and the “neuroses trilogy”). Although the film directly satirizes organizations and people that are only known by those familiar with Italian politics in the Seventies, it remains timeless because of its depiction of politicians behind closed doors. Petri was indeed very adept at depicting a state where the entire government is corrupt (as were some of his colleagues in Italian political filmmaking), but here he takes that notion the farthest — there is no coming back for the characters in this film. They are basically all doomed by their own corruption.

Impromptu confession:
Mastroianni and Melato.

The film is also immaculately cast. Volontè gave his fourth and last performance for Petri here, and he outdid himself with his depiction of M. as a constantly suffering, often sniveling, inherently immoral politician. Mastroianni is sublime as Don Gaetano, the ringmaster of the retreat, a character filled with contradiction and who, much like Oliver Reed’s lead character in Ken Russell’s The Devils, is a consummately sleazy individual who also happens to be the only honest figure in the film. 

Melato does much with her supporting role as the wife of M., who is more a mother to the politician than his wife. (Although they are both incredibly turned on in one scene by the notion of the spiritual exercise having to do with sin.) The rest of the cast is comprised of amazing faces (as is common in Italian cinema), most especially Ciccio Ingrassia, who plays a devoted follower of M. prone to flogging himself in his room and stealing women’s panties. 

Throughout, Luigi Kuveiller’s camera studies the actors and offers the most menacing angles of the underground labyrinth in which the story occurs. Roberto Curti expresses it best in his Petri biography when he says that “[The camera] ascends and descends with surprisingly fluid and unexpected dolly movements, like some invisible death angel beating its wings on human misery and then flying away in disgust; it sticks to the characters’ faces in insistent close-ups and often observes them from behind their shoulders, like an unseen judge that never leaves them for a moment….

"Overall, it transcends the story’s claustrophobic mood and displays the director’s attention to style as a means to convey the message in the most spectacularly effective manner.” [Curti, pp. 245-46]

I’ve mentioned above the fact that Petri had a “family” among the crew that he worked with on every film. One position where he did utilize different individuals, though, was production designer. For Todo Modo he used Dante Ferretti, whom he had worked with on Working Class and nothing else. Ferretti is still with us and has a sterling resume, having done design work for the last few Pasolini films, some of Fellini’s final films, every fiction film Scorsese made from 1993 to 2016, and, most important here in the Funhouse, Marco Ferreri’s infamous Bye Bye Monkey (1978).

His work on Todo Modo is exquisite — while the film has aspects of fantasy, the proceedings for the most part are grounded in the reality of Italian politics and the Church. Ferretti added a thriller element (and a baroque one as well) with the underground setting, which contains various caverns in which important conversations occur between the characters. 

The other contributor who must be singled out, as always, is Ennio Morricone. He created a score full of church music that comes to the fore at some points but is mostly heard as quiet background sound while the characters have their twisted conversations. As a result, the proceedings take place on a “bed” of devotional-sounding music that lends an equally ominous note to the proceedings. 

A strong wave of critical and political outrage greeted Todo Modo upon its release in Italy. Petri had made no bones about his filmic act of provocation, and this worked against him in the period from 1977 to his premature death from cancer in 1982, during which he was able to direct only one play (Arthur Miller’s The American Clock in Genoa), one prestige television drama, and one last feature film.

Petri (right) during the
Todo Modo shoot.

Todo Modo was taken out of distribution completely once Moro was killed by the Red Brigade. It is indeed high time that this film receives the recognition it deserves as a drama, a mystery, a satire, and a pungent political statement about the private lives of politicians. 

Both Petri and Pasolini were shown to have been utterly correct about the corruption in the Christian Democrat party and Italian politics in general. In 1981 the “P2” scandal was exposed, and the world saw that there was a criminal conspiracy that had formed which involved Italian politicians, the Catholic church, leading bankers, media moguls, and a Masonic lodge. There is only one film about this real-life conspiracy: The Calvi Affair (2002), starring Giancarlo Giannini and Rutger Hauer. (The P2 conspiracy was feebly evoked in Coppola’s script for The Godfather Part III (1990).)

After the scandalous response to Todo Modo, Petri had trouble getting film projects off the ground. So he worked in a medium he deeply distrusted, one might even say disliked: television. He wrote an essay to introduce the television project he took on, an adaptation of Sartre’s Dirty Hands (1978) that had many specific references to what he found disturbing and discouraging about TV. (The essay is contained in the one book by Petri that we have in English, Writings on Cinema and Life.)

The reasons Petri chose the Sartre play to adapt are rather obvious, if one considers that Petri had been a devoted follower of the Italian Communist party who left it at the moment in 1956 when the Soviets occupied Hungary. He retained his Marxist beliefs but never again felt like he could be at home in the party. 

His adaptation of Dirty Hands appears to be one of very few full-length adaptations of the play; there was a Swedish TV production in 1963 that adapted the full play and another that aired in Iran in 1998-99. The official French film version was made in 1951 under the original French title Les mains sales, and was 99 minutes; in 1989, Funhouse fave Aki Kaurismaki made what must be the shortest version of it for a telefilm that runs only 68 minutes. Petri’s adaptation, shown in three parts on Italian TV, runs a full four hours.

Giovanni Visentin.

Sartre had based the events in the play somewhat on the events that had occurred in Hungary in the late 1930s, as well as the assassination of Trotsky. Simply put, the plot concerns Hugo, a party member (Giovanni Visentin) who leaves prison after being arrested for killing Hoederer, the “Proletarian party” leader (a phenomenal Marcello Mastroianni) in a fictional East European country during WWII. Hugo was assigned to kill Hoederer, but we find out through his chronicle of events that what drove him to finally pull the trigger was jealousy over Hoederer flirting with his wife. His shame is not that he killed Hoederer — it’s that it isn’t seen as a political killing. 

Petri’s filmed the play by the book, except for an opening and closing in which we see an audience file into the theater to watch the play — and after the bows are taken by the cast in the third and final episode we see that one audience member has remained in the empty theater: the ghost of Josef Stalin, watching from a box seat. Other than these opening and closing sequences, the film is comprised of a very energetic and emotional staging of the play.

There is a cinematic edge to the whole affair, though, as Petri utilizes some graceful camera movements worthy of his best film work. He also uses very tight close-ups, which give us unflinching glimpses of the performers. This highlights the incredibly nuanced performance given by Mastroianni and simultaneously shows how hammy lead actor Visentin is.

Guiliana de Sio,
Visentin, and Mastroianni.

This imbalance in the acting department brings to mind the contrast between Flavio Bucci and Ugo Tognazzi in Property Is No Longer a Theft, but that was a didactic piece that contained theatrical distancing, whereas Petri’s telefilm of Dirty Hands is meant to welcome the viewer “into” the world of the play. 

And while Kaurismaki’s telefilm made us feel for Hugo, as incarnated by Matti Pellonpää, this version makes Hoederer a more sympathetic character. The reason he has been targeted by the diehards in his party is that he is proposing a collaboration with his country’s fascist party (on the side of its monarch) as well as a middle-class centrist party. 

As he and Hugo (who has been hired to be his personal assistant) argue about the possible collaboration, we begin to see that Hugo (despite his political “correctness” in wanting his country to be free) is dogmatic and unrealistic. Hoederer, on the other hand, wants to find a way for his party to still remain relevant and for people to not be killed. In short, Hoederer cares about the people in his party, while Hugo cares more about the principles of the party.

Visentin and Mastroianni.

It is during these discussions between the two lead characters that we see just how sublime Mastroianni’s acting had gotten by the late Seventies. His close-ups reveal Hoederer to be a tired but still vital leader who is trying to figure out the best path to go down as he is being cautioned by diehards like Hugo and is clearly manipulated (and even insulted) by the heads of the other two parties. 

The play’s finale — in which Hugo is given a chance by party member (and his soulmate) Olga to proclaim that he did his duty by killing Hoederer, but chooses instead to let himself be killed by the vengeful defenders of his party — was taken to be anti-Communist at the time of the play’s original performance. 

Petri conveys it as the clear act of conscience that Sartre intended it to be — but we still realize that, after all, Hoederer’s collaboration was correct (he’s being hailed as a hero after his death) and Hugo stuck too tightly to his youthful ideals (and really is overly disturbed, because he DID kill Hoederer as a crime of passion, not politics).

Petri’s last film was Good News (1979), which pretty much got made on the strength of its star (who also produced), Giancarlo Giannini, who was then a hot commodity internationally because of his starring role in a string of dark comedies by Lina Wertmuller. Petri had notions for other films in the last six years of his life (he died at the age of 53 in 1982), but they just couldn’t get made, as the Italian film industry took a drastic downturn in the Seventies. 

Good News does take a pretty dark view of male-female relationships but it remains, first and foremost, a comedy. Petri’s only commedia all'italiana starts out with a very promising beginning (that seems to convey the film will be a spoof of news media), but then it settles into an episodic structure, in which Giannini’s character, a self-involved sexist, continually gets humiliated by the women in his life. 

The premise is indeed intriguing: Giannini’s character works at the Italian RAI network, where his job involves monitoring the programs on six channels, which consist primarily of news shows about atrocities. (As the old saying in the newspaper biz goes, “If it bleeds, it leads.”)

However, this aspect of the plot is dropped very quickly as Giannini argues with his model-perfect (and thoroughly bored) wife (Angela Molina, one of Bunuel’s two Obscure Objects), gets rejected by a coworker (Ombretta Colli) whom he comes on to (to the extreme of flashing her in his office), and then becomes involved in the tangled life of an old friend from school (Paolo Bonacelli), who is married to a beautiful woman (Aurore Clement) but is rather obviously infatuated by Giannini.

His friend happens to be a tango champion and in one of the truly great scenes in the film — besides the scenes in which Giannini plays the ineffectual seducer who is quickly bested by the women in the cast — his friend gives Giancarlo a tango lesson that becomes a great piece of physical comedy, in which the larger friend ends up twirling him around the room. 

Giannini and Ombretta Colli.

The scene is not only very funny but Petri and cinematographer Tonino Nardi made it picturesque. As the dance-seduction continues and Giannini is pretty much being dragged on the floor by his friend, they are framed against a beautiful sunset (which Giannini doesn’t get to look at directly — this is a theme in the film’s dialogue, his desire to see a beautiful sunset).

One of the other notable cast members is Ninetto Davoli, who was discovered by Pasolini and became a regular cast member in every Pasolini movie. He has had a full movie career since the death of Pasolini (he’s still with us at 76 years of age), but one can’t help but think that Petri cast him because of Davoli’s very important connection to Pasolini. After all, it’s been declared that Todo Modo was Petri doing to the Christian Democrat party what Pasolini desperately wanted to do before he died. (And perhaps an inflammatory editorial Pasolini published about the Christian Democrats before his death might’ve had something to do with his wildly violent murder? That editorial is an incredible read….) 

The plot of Good News has a sting in its tail, with Giannini finding out that his wife (who he’s seemingly having bad sex with, mostly because of his very confused attitude toward the act) has been made pregnant not by him but by his school friend (who has died in the interim), who supposedly wanted to have sex with the wife to get to Giancarlo. 

Giannini and Aurore Clement.

The final scene in Petri’s career is a classically dark bit of humor: Giannini receives a large envelope sent to him by his friend before his death. The envelope contains a smaller envelope labelled “Do not open.” When he opens it (which he does in the park during a bomb scare that has forced his coworkers and he to leave their office building) he finds nothing but a bunch of small card-sized pieces of paper with three words printed on every one: “Do not open.”

Under the closing credits, we see Giannini trying to pick up the cards, which have fallen onto the grass in the park and succeeding only in spreading them around the area more and more…. (In the meantime, we hear a woman screaming for help as a man has been pursuing her; Giannini ignores this and continues to gather up the cards.) 

One wishes that Petri had kept with the idea that Giannini is somehow involved with the constant transmission of violent content on TV news; as it stands, the only connection occurs at the beginning when he has a TV news report on one of the television and finds he has an involuntary erection. 

Angela Molina
and Giannini.

The film therefore is primarily interesting as another Italian filmmaker of note tackling the idea that men in the Seventies didn’t know what to make of women’s liberation. Fellini, of course, made an entire film on this theme (City of Women, 1980), and Marco Ferreri seemed obsessed with this notion – it appears most prominently in The Last Woman (1976, with its ending that is cringe-inducing to every male viewer) and, of course, the Funhouse favorite Bye Bye Monkey (1978), wherein Depardieu is a sexist but envies women being able to give birth.

As was the case with those films, Good News is more of a time capsule than it is timeless (as Petri’s political films are), but it does contain some great set-pieces and solid performances. And the curious metaphor for a man’s life going beyond his control at the end is certainly both an amusing and poignant one. (And the visual does resemble the trailer of files strewn on the grass at the end of Todo Modo.) 

In short, Petri is best known as a “Sixties director” because of the cool production design he co-crafted on The Tenth Victim, but his true legacy should be for the political films he made with Gian-Maria Volontè and Mastroianni.

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: You can view (for free!) three of Petri’s masterworks on Rarefilmm.com at the time I’m posting this piece on the Funhouse blog. They are: His Days Are Numbered, We Still Kill the Old Way, and the brilliant Todo Modo.

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

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 anymore 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 five brilliant, 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 in the Seventies, and by extension, around the world (in any time period). 

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, they 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 are 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 the film 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 in 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, 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 adrift 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.