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.