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Essentially a murder mystery with a RASHOMON-esque narrative structure involving a prostitute's death - THE GRIM REAPER makes for a supremely impressive debut for Bernardo Bertolucci. The ensuing investigation focuses on the unreliable testimonies of various bystanders through flashbacks, as they recollect their movements on the previous day. However, unlike RASHOMON there's very little contradiction in the suspects' accounts and are merely disjointed by time. The elaborate digressions into each suspect's personal life get tiresome after a while but Bertolucci never loses track of the event that brings all these characters together. Based on a story by Pier Paolo Pasolini and shot in chilling B&W — THE GRIM REAPER offers a fascinating glimpse into marginalized Rome of the 60s - thieves, petty mariners, pimps, prostitutes, homosexuals and assorted disgruntled folk living on fringes. It's primitive Bertolucci to be sure lacking the visual flamboyance and aesthetic vigour of his subsequent epics but when viewed through the neorealist prism: the intentional pseudo documentary—rough edged—slice of life approach, works wonderfully. For a neophyte, Bertolucci displays extraordinary maturity and uncanny command over the medium attested further by his ability to extract effective (if occasionally inconsistent) performances from virtual amateurs.

Bertolucci, while a cinephile, had spent very little time on actual movie sets before making this film at age 21.

It's a Rashomon like exploration of the murder of a prostitute. We see various men being questioned by police in a stylized way – we never see the questioner, only the witness, sitting in a pool of harsh light. We hear the man begin to tell what he did or saw on the fateful day, while cutting to images of his actual experience, often at odds with what we hear him telling the police. By the end of the film we get a picture of what happened that night for each of these men and the woman who was killed. Beautifully photographed,, with a strong sense of composition, it's a pretty strong little film.

There are weak spots; the acting is variable at best, in a few cases cringe-inducingly over the top. Also, much of the dialogue was evidently post recorded, so even though the actors are Italians speaking Italian, their mouths are sometimes out of sync with their voices, and the dialogue often has a tinny artificial quality.

But quibbles aside, the film has a haunting quality that marks the start of a great film- maker's career, and makes this well worth seeing.

Bertolucci's debut, based on a story by Pier Paolo Pasolini, shares some qualities of the worlds of both authors and is clearly inscribed in the Italian Neorealism movement. Unfortunately, it occupies a kind of "no man's land" in the filmography of both artists and its non-linear structure is more confusing than interesting. Far from the best from this director.

Bertolucci, at one time production assistant of "Accattone" (1961), here makes use of a Pasolini story and does it with that style will be characteristic of this director works. "La commare secca" is simply the death, the death who visits a roman prostitute using the violence of the emargination and disperation. The reconstruction of the facts, through probably inspector voice that interrogates the witnesses, is based on flashback and shows us some people on the border of that time society. Everyone is suspected but only one saw the killer. Very interesting debut by Bernardo Bertolucci, who is able to recreate the right atmosphere e make playing no professional actors letting express their spontaneity and simplicity.

La commare secca is an interesting film that students of Sixties cinema, particularly Italian, must see. It's neither a forgettable oddity as some say nor a small masterpiece as others do. It is an artifact of Italian cinema, an early example of Bertolucci, and an offshoot of Pasolini. Pasolini provided the "soggetto", the story-theme, and Bertolucci and Pasolini's collaborator and Roman dialect coach Sergio Citti wrote the screenplay, which Bertolucci, terrified and inexperienced at only 21, got so shoot because Pasolini had gone on to make Mamma Roma, but the producers demanded a "Pasolnian" film. (This and much more you'll get from Bertolucci's 2003 interview for the Criterion edition of this film.) But Bertolucci sought to shoot in a very fluid, kinetic style, camera always in motion, to detach his style from Pasolnii's "frontal" imagery influenced by the Tuscan Primitives. Bertolucci had not seen Kurosawa's Rashomon, but may have known of it; anyway everybody calls this a "Rashomon film," including Bertolucci in the interview. The film does go repeatedly over the same period of time (introduced by the start of a heavy rainstorm) as lived by a series of people who were in the park where the crime took place, the murder of a prostitute. They are all suspects or witnesses who are being questioned by an unseen cop at the police station, and what we see are their experiences which often ironically contradict what they have just claimed earlier. They're nearly all liars and thieves and lowlifes of one authentic Roman kind or another.

But here the similarity to Rashomon ends, and the weakness of Bertolucci's film begins. However interesting and in some cases haunting, creepy, and Pasolinian the episodes are, they are not different tellings of the crime story at all. They emerge as a series of shaggy dog stories, because they mostly take us nowhere in solving the crime or describing it. Hence, La commare secca is poorly constructed. The framework does not unify the episodes, nor do they draw us with increasing excitement as Rashomon does to a desire to understand what actually happened. And we don't see events retold differently. The events are mostly unrelated, though paths cross, as in many films, such as Kieslowski's A Short Film About Killing. Each episode is vivid and interesting in its own way. But they begin to seem so random it's easy to become impatient and bored. Things look up when we get to the soldier, a good-looking rustic with a goofy smile who begins to seem retarded, maybe dangerous. And they look up more with the two teenage boys with their "fiances," who become hysterical with guilt and fear, leading to tragedy. At this point the action seems haunting. But then the final sequences are obvious. We know who the killer is. We just don't know that this act too is connected to an attempted theft -- the connecting thread, perhaps, but not one that's made clear enough, being that everybody's getting in trouble in this park by trying to steal something.

As has been pointed out, some of the non-actors are good but some violently overact, and some of the post-dubbing works but some is shrill and/or out of synch. The fluid camera-work, which Bertolucci claims as his idea, is fun to watch. The film never runs out of kinetic steam. Obviously this is polished work with excellent cinematography by Giovanni Narzisi, editing by Nino Baragli, and music by Piero Piccioni and Carlo Rustichelli contributing to the outward sheen. But the screenplay is the weak point with its lack of a unifying conception. Though Bertolucci uses the word "thriller" in the interview, we never get the feeling till the end that we're on the verge of solving the crime, nor are the string of petty crimes and personal clashes suspenseful or exciting enough to be worthy of the term. La commare secca, despite its fluency and lively action, comes to seem an unsuccessful example of the Italian omnibus films of the Sixties -- one that, unlike the ones with Mastroianni and Loren, or Pasolini's early-Seventies trilogy from Bocaccio, Chaucer, and the 1001 Nights, doesn't quite hold together as a unit. I wonder what Pasolini himself would have done with it.

Anyway, two years later Bertolucci made the semi-autobiographical Before the Revolution, his real first film, emerging as an exciting young European intellectual filmmaker. Pauline Kael called his youth at this time "astonishing" and described this second film as "a sweepingly romantic movie about a young man's rebellion against bourgeois life and his disillusion with Communism." Then would come The Conformist, The Spider's Stratagem, Last Tango in Paris, and Bertolucci would be put on the map once and for all as an important filmmaker, who happily has now (2014) gotten back to work after a decade-long hiatus.

I bought this movie from Criterion thinking a film accepted by them couldn't lead me astray (only later did I learn Armgageddon and The Rock were part of their collection), and boy was I wrong.

This is really one of the most pointless films I've ever seen. It took a big risk trying with it's innovative non linear structure (ala Rashamon) and gambles like this are usually hit or miss; Rashamon was a hit, this was a miss.

The plot is quite similar to Rashamon in that it's told by four separate accounts of the same event, a murder of a prostitute by a soldier, a pimp and wife, a devious night club worker, and a punk kid who were all near the scene and interrogated as suspects. One of the chief problems though is it is missing characters who actually care or discuss what happened, making it hard for a viewer to relate to what he just saw.

In Rashamon the character's discussion at the beginning and end of the trial as it be validated the themes of that movie, not to mention the hollowed out building they sat in to avoid the rain was the chief visual metaphor of the film. There were constant cuts back to that structure throughout the length of the film.

The Grim Reaper really doesn't have that basis so the cinematography and editing just wander around aimlessly, and I use the word wander because the camera is quite free moving about in this film, apparently thats supposed to be one of the virtues of this film.

Overall the central problem of this film is that it's non linear structure and subjective accounts of the same event generally just don't work unless there are common themes and setting throughout or any way for the audience to relate to what just happened. Normally if a film tells a good linear story with beginning to end plot it doesn't have to be particularly meaningful; this film put itself at risk by trying to be innovative and suffered the consequence.

Even though for whatever strange reasons Bertolucci sliced three years from his age - it was originally claimed around the time of its release the Director was but 19 - La Commare Secca is a stunning debut for any film maker.

In a nutshell, then, here's the proposition and it's a grand one: Five suspects, (well, there is a "pair" of suspects in one instance) are questioned about a whore's murder. We all lie. So do they. The suspect's lying versions of events are depicted; reality as they would have it. All it happens, are guilty of something, as is everyone in this world, Bertolucci's point and almost never seized upon.

Frankly, this is also Bertolucci's best film. Throw out wholesale, such criticisms as: "not a bad try for a beginner," or, "better things were to follow," ...they weren't and they didn't ...

Economical use editing tricks as well as its compact run-time, mean that unlike the 'masterpieces,' The Spider's Stratagem, and especially, Before the Revolution, this film enjoys a continuity which - 60's (and his own) ethos aside - the masterpieces lacked. Though of course disjointed film-making was what was later intended in this director's canon, it hasn't aged well. It worked for Antonioni, (usually) and Fellini, (sometimes) and Italian cinema generally (with greatly uneven results), but it didn't work often, for our BB.

The performances - in some scenes by real street urchins, are superior. All ring true, particularly when the second crook tells his 'version' of events. As the camera gives the lie to his protestations of innocence, we see through the casual violence of his life, the essential truth: most crime is fueled by boredom, rather than bad breaks or genetic disposition. And while photorealistic acting in the hands of say- late Al Pacino, is dry as dust, in this director's hands, his absolutely true-to-life observations are small beauties.

The haunting soundtrack - nice cliché, right? actually haunts. It works perfectly. It fulfills the purpose of a cinematic score - it enhances the film - frequently raising the dramatic stakes all on its lonesome.

Particularly memorable, is that in this movie, background details are utilized for their own sake. Unlike Antonioni's Ecclise for example, where 'incidental' detail is of course the real foreground detail, Bertolucci's approach seems to be: While such details don't bear on the story, why not use them to best effect? Indeed, why not?

Thus, in some ways overshadowing all others, the teenage dance party and the "two boys two girls" scenes of innocence that precede it, are simply indescribably hypnotic. Seldom has the big screen been graced with such perfect realizations of adolescence. The facial expressions of the girls when the boys refuse to dance are not only peculiar to Europe - there are no comparable expressions on the faces of young America ... but, as the world becomes a common, drag-filled strip mall, such pulled faces may soon - like certain Italian dialects, (Milanese) be extinct.

My only beefs are for a scene in which an Italian boy takes to the Tiber to elude the police; the actual outcome of his swim is not made clear, indeed I had to see the thing twice to understand. And two ... when the villain, the murderer, is caught, it is without any twists - he was simply one of the suspects and he did it. There are no red herrings, no surprise innocence or guilt He DID it. Minor gripes.

This film, while regarded a poor sister to Bertolucci's alleged later masterpieces, is truly Before the Revolution - the title of his next film, a, yep, 'masterpiece' that isn't. Like so much of art generally, and unhappily film especially, cute proclivities in Commare Secca, all-to-soon became compulsive and dull, mannerisms.

A Director too often lauded and far too often castigated (Pauline Kael's insane rants against Tragedy of a Ridiculous Man) this film is a confident tour-de-force of very young film maker as virtuoso.

A spectacular must see.

Bertolucci's director debut has a quite distinctive Neo-Italian modus operandi, utilizing a multi- narrative structure of portraying different groups of people's idle life, who have been involved into a prostitute murder case. The raw-texture of the film is magnificently preserved and the primitive settings are bold enough to impose an intimate analysis upon various Italian people's mind-state at that particular time. At the age of 22, it was a great opportunity for Bertolucci to be granted the permission to work on his master Pasolini's script for his own career inception. Also it's a gutsy manoeuvre for Pasolini to trust his young disciple to fully excavate his talent, which is regretfully a rare case now in the cinema business.

During the park scenes, the film has a distinctively poignant tableaux scenery, but elsewhere the nonchalant idleness of each segmental piece is astonishingly fragmentary and unable to relate it to the core murder case in any rate, the film sacrifices its more audience arresting detective fodder to pursue a random characterization of Bertolucci's own mark although may at odds with his later more prestigious work.

The film's semblance of Akira Kurosawa's Rasho-Mon (1950) is just a bluff, apart from structure-wise design, the film seldom emits a certain commitment of story-telling, nevertheless it has its own charm once it suits to some specific cinema devotees' appetites, but with a horizontal parallel comparison with other 1960s elite peers, Bertolucci is still in his rookie mode and no one should demand too much for a 22-year-old novice to create a groundbreaking director debut, so after all, it is a thin-on-the-ground treasure and deserves a great thumb-up.

In the spirit of Rashomon, we have the idea of multiple versions of a tragedy, the beating death of a prostitute in Rome. Bertolucci fell into this directing opportunity and makes the most of it. While it has rough edges, it is an engaging tale. Those present at or near the murder scene are brought in for questioning. There are three young, aimless men who are petty thieves. There is a man who is almost expressionless. There is a strange looking soldier who seems utterly lost and without social skills. There is a man with a history who can be heard because he wears clogs and clicks on the cobblestones. There are others, but each offers his account of an evening in a park near where the murder was committed. Everything is subtle and visual and we can see the beginnings of some pretty impressive camera-eye technique. There are wonderful shots like the opening where the wind blows papers in the air off a bridge. It is seen from below and at first it looks like birds flying. The acting is quite good. A down side would be a lack of clues. All we have are eye-witness accounts which could contain lies. Nevertheless, this is a sound beginning.

A prostitute lies dead along the shore in a remote area of a Rome park. Half a dozen edgy suspects are rousted and interrogated, with each given the opportunity to voice their alibi.

Bernardo Bertolucci's stunning directorial debut at the age of 22 displays the work of a seasoned master that will reach peak fruition in the years ahead from The Conformist to the Last Emperor. Displaying some dazzling camera work and editing he presents a punks gallery of surly deadbeats along with a feral conscript in one audacious act of scene stealing, making all likely suspects. The list of suspects runs a little long, slowing the pace, with the denouement a touch of a disappointment in the face of all the razzle dazzle style leading up to the murderer's capture the film's thunder dominated by Bertolucci's precocious talent..

This movie occurs mostly the interrogation scenes, which makes viewers a bit interesting to watch throughout their real or unreal statements. The movie style have been influenced in lots of movies, before and present days. Again, its slow paced movie which needs to be watched patiently. But, if the debutant director, 21 yrs. did such impacts. Encouragement is must. Worth to watch it.

Buona struttura narrativa, con evidente tocco pasoliniano. Ancora qui c'è il Bertolucci assistente di Pasolini, quello che deve trovare la propria voce. In ogni caso il film rimane godibile scegliendo la strana avvincente del pluriprospettivismo. Non mancano interessanti scelte registiche con long take e riprese da angolazioni particolari.

It feels,throughout this movie,the influence of Pasolini's mordant realism.This concept had its limitations (the listlessness towards an interior life highly differentiated,the uprearing of a messy and base life,etc.;also,the inherent,indispensable epic conventions, solutions and patterns),but also its obvious efficacy.(Later,Pasolini changed course and modus,heading towards a more elaborated aesthetics,both visually and intellectually;but then so did his pupil Bertolucci also.)

"La Commare ..." is Bertolucci's first film,released when the director was 21 years.It is a plain,articulated social anecdote,interested in depicting some characters:an unemployed bum;an oxygenated loan shark;a redneck soldier (a simpleton);an weirdo in sabots;two adolescents.The movie consists of five relations during the interrogatories following a mysterious crime.So,we have five different short incursions in the suspects' environments.This is done in an equable prosaic realistic note;the result is an objective,straight,efficacious cinema.

The subject belongs to Pasolini,and the script is Bertolucci's.

Rashamon style set in the slums of Italy. Each suspect tells a tale that intertwines around each other's life before, during and after the death of a prostitute. Has a lot to comment on the social status of poverty in Italy.

We are gripped immediately by the astonishing visual imagination of Bernardo Bertolucci in this first feature film, made from a story by Pier Paolo Pasolini, his employer on "Accattone" (1961). Both were fascinated by the marginalized world of prostitutes and petty criminals and, here, an investigation into a woman's death leads us on a tour of Rome's fringes. The staging and performances, many by amateur actors in their only appearance, are extraordinary. Especially memorable is Santina Lisio as "Esperia's mother," for her disarranged teeth and vigor. Also, Allen Midgette of Camden, New Jersey, who, at age 22, got himself cast in a film in Rome, from which he went on to The Factory, acting for Andy Warhol and fame as a Warhol impersonator in real life and movies. All the amateurs give energetic and convincing performances. Bertolucci's impressive staging is a precursor to his subsequent masterpieces.

It seems cruel to be excessively harsh on the writing / directing debut of a 20-year-old (!!), especially when you are just an armchair amateur critic (like all of us here are). With that said, "La Commare Secca" would probably not have seen the light of day, much less be restored and released on DVD as part of the Criterion Collection, if the name of Bernardo Bertolucci wasn't attached to it. In all fairness, Bertolucci already shows that he is a visually gifted director here. But in terms of telling a story, or even stringing two sequences together coherently, he had absolutely no idea what he was doing, to put it bluntly; the film alienates the viewer in the first 5 minutes and never really wins them back. * out of 4.

Not very solid, yet coherent work for a directorial debut. Better actors would probably have made a major difference in this Italian Rashomon. The story (Bertolucci and Pasolini) is about what's the truth and what is subjective perception. Who tells what story and why? More important: who hides what and why? Of course this film has nothing to do with the much more enthusiastic 'Rashomon' (Kurosawa, 1950) apart from the matter, but it may at least have been inspired by that masterpiece. If you like the subject you'll like the 'I saw the whole thing'-episode (1962!) from the series 'The Alfred Hitchcock Hour' too. Finally, this also slightly reminded me of 'Les Mistons' (Truffaut, 1957, short), probably because we are shown some street and environmental scenes of the place where a crime was committed.

Besides Pasolini (Salo, Medea) for the story, I think cinematographer Giovanni Narzisi did the most interesting work on this film. A worthy Bertolucci film and definitely worth seeing on the big screen.

8/10

One of the most assured debuts in all of cinema, Bertolucci was only twenty-one when he made "The Grim Reaper" from a story by Pier Paolo Pasolini. It's definitely a young man's film, a police procedural in which the police remain off-screen. A prostitute has been murdered and we see the events leading up to her death through the eyes of the various suspects, all of whom have reason to lie, but what interests Bertolucci and Pasolini isn't so much the crime itself but the lives of these young men and the conditions in which they live.

Using a mix of professional and non-professional actors Bertolucci aims for a new kind of realism but one that is closer to early Rosselleni than the more polished films Fellini was turning out at the time. The Grim Reaper of the title isn't so much the one that robs the prostitute of her life as the one who steals away the will to live from everyone else. Each 'chapter' is filmed in a distinctive style that signalled Bertolucci as a director of considerable originaliy and made us aware a new wunderkind had arrived.

Bernardo Bertolucci's debut film "The Grim Reaper" is based on a story by one of Italian cinema's greatest personalities-Pier Paolo Pasolini. However, his influence might be felt only in some scenes of the film including a detailed description of Roman lowlifes. In remaining parts of the film, one gets to see a good creation of atmosphere especially of nocturnal times which are crucial for steering the story forward. Although this film can be summarized as the tale of a theft which backfired, Bertolucci makes good use of his film's characters to reveal that it is through lies that one gets to ascertain the truth. The apparent comparisons with Akira Kurosawa's masterpiece "Rashomon" are unjustified as Bernardo Bertolucci's film appears more as a piece of 'investigative journalism' with a diligent cop determined to break the criminals through his incessant questioning. As a film which can be considered as a brutally honest example of incredible cruelty from a woman character, The Grim Reaper truthfully represents the mood of Rome in 1960s, a period where dance, love, music and sex flourished in abundance.