Circuito chiuso

A very strange little movie which they describe as a giallo, although I'm not sure. It's more of a murder mystery that focuses almost exclusively on the police procedural investigation of a cinema shooting. Quite low budget, generally taking place in the cinema itself, and lacking the kind of style and incident this genre is known for. Perhaps remarkable for the unsolvable explanation at the climax, in which this turns out to be a very loose adaptation of a Ray Bradbury story.

This one of a handful of Italian gialli that began life as a TV movie (the other two being "Secret of Seagull Island" and "Scorpion with Two Tails"). Like those, it lacks a lot of the sex, violence,and cinematic flourishes of other gialli, but it's a lot tighter (it wasn't condensed down from a mini-series like the other two), and it has a great plot: A large group of people are gathered in a cinema watching a spaghetti Western when one of them is found dead, killed by what by all accounts appears to be a "stray bullet". The police have to hold the increasingly restive crowd in the theater while they look into the victim's past to find out who may have killed him and why. . .

This movie has no really famous actors, but it does have an interesting cast. Flavio Buccio played a thug in both "The Night Train Murders" and Dario Argento's "Suspiria". He really plays against type here as a weird psychologist. Both William Berger and Guliano Gemma appear in the Western movie-within-a-movie. Berger was a pretty famous actor in the 60's and he is the father of both Debra ("Inglorious Bastards") Berger and Katya ("Absurd") Berger (but to my knowledge no relation to Helmut Berger). The teenage girl who first discovers the dead body is Elizabetta Virgili, later semi-famous in Italy as a nude centerfold and showgirl (she was in the erotic drama "Family Scandal" a few years later where she obviously showed a lot more than she does here). Although I don't know her name and I never saw her in anything else, my favorite though was the actress who played the old lady who becomes indignant that the police don't consider her a suspect and want to interrogate her.

Obviously, this is a pretty low-watt giallo, but it is an entertaining one.

"Circuito chiuso," directed by Giuliano Montaldo in 1978, is a suspenseful Italian thriller that delves into themes of surveillance and paranoia. Set within the confines of a university library, the film explores the reactions and dynamics of a group of individuals who find themselves under unexpected scrutiny when a murder occurs, and they realize the entire incident has been recorded on CCTV.

Montaldo's direction effectively builds tension, utilizing the claustrophobic setting to heighten the sense of entrapment and suspicion among the characters. The film's atmosphere is enhanced by its minimalist score and stark cinematography, which work together to create an unsettling and immersive experience. The choice to confine the action to a single location underscores the feeling of being watched and judged, drawing viewers into the same paranoia that grips the characters.

The performances are solid, with standout roles that capture the complexity and fear of individuals caught in an unexpected crisis. The ensemble cast manages to convey a range of emotions, from panic to stoic calm, as the narrative unfolds. However, the film's pacing can be uneven at times, with certain scenes dragging on and losing the tightness that a thriller of this nature demands.

While "Circuito chiuso" is commendable for its innovative concept and its exploration of surveillance culture-a prescient theme for its time-the screenplay occasionally falters in delivering a coherent and compelling storyline. Some plot twists feel forced and the resolution, while thought-provoking, may leave viewers wanting more clarity.

Overall, "Circuito chiuso" is an intriguing film that deserves recognition for its ambitious take on the psychological effects of constant observation. It is a fascinating watch for fans of 1970s cinema and those interested in the darker aspects of human nature.

A film showing is stopped when a mysterious murder seems to be triggered by a gun scene from a movie. Unable to be solved, they try to recreate the film only for another murder triggered from the same scene again and then again.

This is like a Bunuel film meets X-Files. Its much more moodier since it was a murder mystery after all BUT since its from TV, has that finality and lack of ambiguity that a more classical Bunuel film has.

Also, it shows a lot of its TV roots with its lack of strong narrative beneath its main plot. The characters for the most part are never really colored in, so looking back, a lot of it kind of escapes you. It misses in that part of a good Bunuel - whom I found to be a bit clinical BUT always know how to make characters. Here, except for the angry Grandma who stole her scenes, all characters just blends with the screen. Even the sociologist plotline feels so underwritten.

But god, the concept is so good. I wished that it could have been fleshed out better.

Soft Recommendation.

A vanguard movie dealing upon the power of images on our lives. The routine of a small popular cinema in Rome is upset by the irruption of fantastique during a screening. When the spectators are seeing the final duel of the Italian western E per tetto un cielo di stelle, "all of a sudden it's like the mirror breaks", as in an Alice's adventure or an Allen's Purple Rose, and a retired civil servant (Mario Cecchi) is shot dead as the cowboy fires, while the director (Attilio Duse, Solamente Nero) mourns that "he has always yet shown clean films".

Follows a long closed circuit inquiry, the inspector (Brizio Montinaro, Lo Strano Vizio della signora Wardh) restraining on site all the clients and the staff, and this little society stays fixed and analyzed, an intellectual sociologist (Flavio Bucci, L'Ultimo Treno della notte) even being among them. And everyone in these ordinary people seems to have come not only to see the movie and has therefore something to cancel, from the gay man (Enzo Spitaleri, La Bestia uccide a sangue freddo) who meets teenagers in the lavatory, to the duet of drug peddlers who have to talk business (Franco Balducci, Non si sevizia un paperino, and Tony Kendall, Flic ou Voyou), and to the adulterous couple in secret dating (Sergio Dora, L'Iguana dalla lingua di fuoco, and Aurore Clément, Lacombe Lucien).

It appears that the victim, passionate and bulimic cinephile, acting like "a vessel in a medium seance", had prophesied that "today's best films, rather than mirroring the world, seem to infiltrate it". And the reenactment ordered by the deputy chief of police (Luciano Catenacci, Una Vita lunga un giorno), bringing about a second show of the western, can only end with another death, the ticket collector's one (Gabriele Tozzi), urging the confined spectators to order "twelve televisors", one by channel, to kill time in a cacophonous fair. On a program, the western producer (Bruno di Geronimo, writer of Cosa avete fatto a Solange) rejoices that "the morbid curiosity surrounding the cursed film" allows him "to prepare a new cut for first run theaters", offering "a movie that meets the audience's expectations in Hitchcock-style."

Trapped in a never-ending session, spectators have become the real subject of the show, as if cinema has soaked up their life, the frontier between fiction violence and social violence becoming fuzzy. To prove that there is "no magic, witchery or supernatural mystery" and to solve "the agonizing question of the killer identity", the big chief of police (Ettore Manni, A tutte le auto della polizia), called to rescue, is forced to organize a third screening, but things won't go as expected to be. As the sociologist quotes summoning Ray Bradbury and Jules Verne, "there is no reason why the images humanity feeds itself shouldn't do the same with us".