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The early and late sequences filmed within Italy are some of the best Pasolini has filmed. His confident and measured pace as well as his eye for composition and love of such basics as trees and sky and grass are a joy to behold. As for the rest, it can be very taxing. The Moroccan desert and mountain scenery is wondrous and the placing and movement of large numbers of peoples impressive but there is a lot of ponderous and somewhat languorous adherence to this titular tale. The associated screaming and passionate pondering as to the ins and outs of past events and just who did what with whom and for why become rather wearing.

Pier Paolo Pasolini's Oedipus Rex is a relatively faithful adaptation of Sophocles' Greek tragedy Oedipus the King. Beginning in 1920's Italy, a baby boy is born and is instantly envied by the displaced father. The setting then changes to ancient times, where a baby boy is being carried out into the desert by a servant to be left out to die from exposure. He is eventually picked up by a shepherd, who takes him back to the King and Queen of Corinth, who adopt the youngster and love him like one of their own. The child grows up to be Edipo (Pasolini's frequent collaborator Franco Citti), an arrogant youth who wishes to see the world for himself. And so he set out on the road to Thebes, the place of his birth.

Plagued by a prophecy that dictates he is destined to murder his father and marry his mother, Edipo is a tortured but intuitive soul. He murders a rich man and his guards after they demand he clear a path for them on the road, and later frees a town from the clutches of a Sphinx by solving its riddle. Staying true to his own recognisable style, Pasolini tells the story of Oedipus not with a sweeping narrative, but through a collection of comedic, violent and often surreal vignettes, the most bizarre and ultimately thrilling being the scene in which Edipo murders the guards. He runs away from them as they chase him, before charging at them one by one and cutting them down. It's a moment without any real motivational insight, offering but a glimpse into Edipo's damaged psyche.

Post-Freud, the story of Oedipus cannot be experienced without reading into the incestuous and patricidal undertones. But these themes are less explored by Pasolini than the idea of Edipo being ultimately responsible for his own downfall. Rather than the inevitability of fate, Edipo creates his own path, committing murder on a whim and marrying while blinded by ambition. For a bulk of the film, Pasolini keeps the audience at arm's length, favouring his own brushes of surrealism over a traditional narrative. While this may be occasionally frustrating - the pre-war scenes than book-end the film seem out of place and confusing - Citti's wide-eyed performance is a fantastic distraction, and the Moroccan scenery helps provide a ghostly, Biblical atmosphere as well as a beautiful backdrop.

Pasolini tells the drama of a man who knows his destiny from the beginning but does not accept the awareness of evil, tries to escape an atrocious future, but is inevitably entangled in it. The director uses Oedipus, of a classic archetype, to tell the human condition, the inadequacy of those who know they must die, but are unable to accept it.

The Moroccan setting that hides a fantasy Greece, between desert and villages of shepherds, mountains, cities built with clay and destroyed by plagues, is wonderful. A film written in images, dialogues reduced to the essentials, use of captions as in the silent era, intense photography and - for the first time in a Pasolini film - use of color that renders the ocher chromatism of the desert well.

The film have some substantial flaws, especially the storytelling. But the great Pasolini-style shine's brightly throughout the film and Franco Citti is just amazing as Edipo himself.

Another marvelous film by Pasolini.

No one is as cinematically intense as this man, but it's not an ordinary intensity he affects. It does not result from the withholding of narrative or visual information, it is not primarily a dramatic intensity; Lean, Hitchcock, Kurosawa, all did some terrific work in that external mode where we see the struggling human being in the cleanly revealed world of choices and fates.

Pasolini works his way around all that, starting with one of the most archetypal stories. Here we have anticipation, foreknowledge as fate. And of course there is some dramatic intensity in this and others of his films, but that's not what makes him special. He can create heightened worlds that we experience with a real intensity. It goes back to that film movement called Neorealism which thrived in postwar Italy, where the utmost goal was to soak up a more human, more universal conflict as we staggered through broken pieces of the world.

Looking back now it seems stale, we have a much more refined sense of what is real, we can see the conceit of the camera. But two filmmakers emerged from out of this movement who did work in a more radical direction, moving the images closer to perception.

Antonioni is one of the greatest adventures in film. Pasolini is the other. The larger point with him is to have an intensely spiritual experience of a whole new storyworld, to that effect he selects myths that we have more or less fixed notions about how they should be (this, Medea, his Gospel film) and films them to have invigorating presence in the now.

Every artistic choice in the film reflects that; the dresses, the swords, the landscapes, the faces, it's all intensely unusual to what you'd expect from Greek myth, seemingly handcarved to be from a preconscious world outside maps and time. The camera also reflects that; he could have plainly asked of a fixed camera and smooth, fixed traveling shots from his crew, but evidently he wants that warm lull of the human hand. It's a different sort of beauty, not in some painted image but in our placement in evocative space.

When Oedipus visits the oracle at Delphii, we do not have sweeping shots of some ornate marble structure as you'd expect in a Hollywood film. A congregation of dustcaked villagers is gathered in a clearing before a group of trees, the oracle is a frightening old crone attended by slender boys in masks. The roads are dusty, interminable ribbons dropped by absent-minded gods. A Berber village in Morocco stands for ancient Thebes. Sudden dances. Silvana Mangano. And those headgear! It's all about extraordinariness in the sense of moving beyond inherited limits of truth.

It works. This is a world of divinity, causal belief, and blind seeing into truth that even though it was fated, we discover anew in the sands.

The sequence where a feverish Oedipus confronts his father at the crossroads will stay with me for a long time, the running, the sun, the distance where tethers are pulled taut.

This tale of Oedipus starts off and ends in the twentieth century, though for the most part is set in a primitive version of ancient Greece. There is not much rational connection between the stories, but Pasolini manages to forge himself a free pass on that one. Whilst the Oedipus Complex theme of the first story is meant to be taken quite literally, and is basically autobiographical, the middle story, recognisably Sophoclean, is more, in my opinion, meant to be about an angry confused man who cannot stomach his fate nor confront truths about his identity. As both sections do genuinely feel autobiographical they knit together just fine.

The first section of the film set in the 1920s is the best piece of filming I have seen from Pasolini and made me really excited. There's a wide open scene of children running off around a playing field on a hot piercing day, one of those thick childhood days when the emotions battened down the hatches on squire intellect. I was reminded very much of an Edith Sitwell poem (Green Flows the River of Lethe - O):

"I stood near the Cities of the Plains / And the young girls were chasing their hearts like the gay butterflies / Over the fields of summer - / O evanescent velvets fluttering your wings / Like winds and butterflies on the Road from Nothing to Nowhere!"

The sentiment all the more surprisingly apt given that the second part of the film is shot in what could be the ruins of Sodom and Gomorrah (the Cities of the Plains) for all we know.

The rage of Oedipus, which occurs frequently in the movie could be liked to another part of the poem:

"But in the summer drought / I fled, for I was a Pillar of Fire, I was destruction / Unquenched, incarnate and incarnadine // I was Annihilation / Yet white as the Dead Sea, white as the Cities of the Plains / For I listened to the noontide and my veins / That threatened thunder and the heart of roses."

Part of Pasolini's drive for shooting the films seems to be to continue his fascination with ancient buildings and ruins which he demonstrated three years earlier in his superb 1964 documentary The Walls of Sana'a for which he travelled to Yemen.

The end of the playing field scene features Jocasta suckling Oedipus. She gazes directly at the camera and thus the audience for a long period, in which she goes through a range of emotions, including what could be arousal, followed by disquiet, which ultimately turns into a distanced understanding. For me this is cinematically equivalent to the Mona Lisa, which is also a gay man's meditation on his mother, greatly cryptic yet provocative, set in against a natural backdrop.

Silvana Mangano, who plays the mother in both parts of the movie (and would star in Pasolini's Teorema the following year), carries a lot of it. Her beauty, her alabaster skin and wispy eyebrows, her perfectly tangled plaits (which would send Fuseli to his knees), are commanding. She has an artistic skill that eclipses that of Franco Citti (Oedipus) and Ninetto Davoli (Thebes' crier) quite totally. Franco Citti's lack of skill, whilst occasionally infuriating in the context of the story (his is not the demeanour of a king) do however lend the film a level of authenticity, given the primary motive of this sequence, which was to demonstrate a pained adolescent fury and denial, which was ignorant at its base.

There's an unusual device of writing characters' thoughts in black lettering on a white background, which doesn't quite work but which would be far better than the presumable alternative of camera-faced soliloquies.

Some of the locations in the movie felt truly dream-like to me, for instance the unkempt walled piazza-garden of Jocasta, the crumbled ruin where Oedipus meets a naked adolescent girl on his peregrinations, the mountainous areas between cities.

The props in the movie are cheap and fantastical but quite brilliant, the wind-blown hands on the milestones to Thebes, the quite bizarre head gear of the Pythoness, the soldiers, and King Laius. Modern producers who delight in throwing money at movies, please note how Pasolini achieves far better results with great economy.

Cultural references abound, my favourite being the Japanese music, which doesn't seem to have been referenced anywhere (there are no closing credits in the movie), but sounded very much like the Toru Takemitsu scores of Ansatsu (Assasination), Woman in the Dunes, and Harakiri.

The story in a strict narrative sense has problems, Citti doesn't convince as any type of king or warrior, giving the appearance of not understanding his lines at some points, and the suicide of Jocasta makes no sense in the wake of her discussions with her son. It is a movie where feeling rather than thinking brings greater rewards.

Gosh...Pier Paolo Pasolini really hated his father. He would call this his most autobiographical film, but unless he seriously dealt with an Oedipal Complex regarding his mother (which seems doubtful considering his homosexuality, but I'm not a psychologist steeped in the nonsense writings of Sigmund Freud), that autobiographical content seems relegated to the anachronistic bookends of this story of Ancient Greece. Essentially, Pasolini's Oedipus Rex ends up being two films in one: the bookends which directly deal with Pasolini's tumultuous inner life, and the large center, which is a straightforward telling of the story, largely as laid out by Sophocles (though not limited by the Greek rules of drama around place and time).

The opening is set in 1920s Italy with Laius (Luciano Bartoli) as a young Italian military officer whose wife, Jocasta (Silvana Mangano), has given birth to the baby Oedipus. None of these characters are named in the opening, by the way. The antagonism between Laius and Oedipus in this opening isn't about a prophecy of future patricide but out of jealousy over the lost love that Laius feels that Jocasta now directs towards the infant son. When he sends Oedipus off to die, it's done without Jocasta's knowledge, and that's when the film switches time to Ancient Greece (really filmed in Northern Africa) as the King of Thebes' servant takes the young prince into the mountains to die, saved by a servant of King Polybus (Ahmed Blehachmi) whose queen, Merope (Alida Valli), takes him willingly into her home as her own son. Grown up, Oedipus (now played by Franco Citti), is beset by dreams and goes to see the Oracle of Delphi who tells him the prophecy of murdering his father and bedding his mother. Thinking that Polybus and Merope are his real parents, he refuses to go back to Corinth, heading towards Thebes where he meets Laius on the road, killing him and his party, and making it to Thebes where he kills the Sphinx plaguing the city, gaining the right to marry Jocasta.

It's really a straightforward telling of the background of the Oedipal story. The play by Sophocles was limited by the rules of time and place (also action) as laid out by Plato in Poetics, and it's really limited to the twenty-four hour period where Oedipus has to deal with the curse on Thebes, only able to be lifted by the death or exile of the man who killed Laius. It's an investigation done through witness testimony that leads Oedipus to realize his own guilt that seems to obvious on its face but he was unwilling to see because it meant that he would have to give up everything, that he was living a terrible lie, and that the prophecy that he had tried to avoid he had fulfilled in that attempt.

All of that is captured here by Pasolini, though he stretches time and action to happen longer than a mere day with events occurring outside of the immediate vicinity of the court. One of the things that I've grown to really appreciate about Pasolini is his propensity to simply filming outside. It's amazing how much better things can look when you film in front of a thousand year old stone structure rather than stretching a miniscule budget to try and build something approximating it. It's amazing how great a frame can look when one goes outside to take in the countryside with one's subject at the center of it all. It was obvious in The Gospel According to Matthew that Pasolini knew that if he was going to film outside in the country, he was going to take full advantage of it visually, but it's been clear from his first film, Accattone, limited to the confines of Roman streets, that he wanted to bring in more than just his actors into focus. Here, using color for the first time, Pasolini's frame is bursting with detail in pleasing compositions in exotic locales. It's a great looking film.

The investigation plays out without much variation from Sophocles' play. Witnesses are brought in who reveal little bits of information about the murder of Laius on the road, Oedipus refuses to make the logical connections himself, requiring more detail from more witnesses before he can come to accept it himself. Jocasta figures it along with him, taking extreme measures to clear herself of the incestuous situation she's been in for more than a decade, and Oedipus takes his famous last measure to rob himself of sight for what he'd done.

And then the film jumps time again to contemporary Rome where a blind Oedipus (no longer with gouged out eyes, simply blinded some other way) is led around to play his flute by Angelo (Ninetto Davoli), the modern version of the messenger who greeted Oedipus to Thebes. Pasolini repeats something he did in The Hawks and the Sparrows by including some real-world footage, this time of striking workers in Italy, a sight that, while Oedipus can't see it, frightens him.

If we take Pasolini's word that the film is autobiographical, then I think I have to take this final section in a similar way as the finale to The Hawks and the Sparrows, meaning that it's a reflection of a Marxist thinker who sees the world he had wanted to change changing in ways that he didn't expect, leaving his ideology behind (to paraphrase the crow in the previous film). How this actually relates to the story of Oedipus Rex, though, is beyond me, making me feel like the bookends and the actual meat of the film are essentially two different works sandwiched together, Pasolini taking a story with passing direct relation to his own life and using the bookends to make it more self-reflective than the actual story of Oedipus.

I think that contrast is my central issue with the film. I think it's overall a good film, it's just that these three sections clash against each other. The story of Oedipus is well-told with beautiful cinematography. The bookends are interesting regarding the biography of Pasolini (though the opening works better than the ending), but they seem only tangentially related to the actual tale of Oedipus.

So, it's a good film that Pasolini bent towards himself in a way that doesn't mess with the actual story, leaving that largely alone, but framing in a way that's intensely personal, even if it doesn't quite fit. Well, it's certainly better than a bad take.

We do ourselves no favour by fixating on how well a film uses every little detail and line in an original text. Certainly, by those standards this is a mediocre, and possibly lazy, film at best. But at the same time there is the problem of being so liberal in one's adaptation that every goes sour, the latest attempt at "Vanity Fair" is a perfect example. But this film, along with Bresson's "Pickpocket," should stand as the rules of adaptation for every young director. Both films are very interpretative, but the directors aren't so naive as to think that mere plot details can constitute a film. So what pushes this film beyond a mere surface-level adaptation? In this case, it takes a deep insight into the nature of Greek tragedy itself. Tragedy's dualism (the representational and the chaotic) is prevalent in all Pasolini's works, it was especially essential in his "Gospel," and I was excited to see how it played out in its own source, and the results are absolutely fantastic. Visually imaginative and so intellectually superior to its contemporaries it seems out of place in film.

5 out of 5 - Essential

I was very impressed, I really do think that this is a masterpiece! Pasolini used the original text of Sophocles' tragedy, so the story is tightly knotted, which gives the whole film a tangible urgency. There are, apart from the at times stunning amounts of extra's, only two main actors. Silvana Mangano as Giocasta only appears halfway through the movie and has hardly any lines, but she plays her part impressively by her facial expressions and her stature. Franco Citti as Oedipus is the absolute core of the movie, he dominates the screen with his rugged and fascinating face, he laughs and cries and screams, and all the time stays totally convincing as the self-assured ego-tripping hero, who gradually slips into the awareness that his whole life is based on unspeakable crimes and that he is toyed with by the gods and fate. Some reviewers opinioned he acted way over the top, but I assume it was all deliberately so orchestrated by Pasolini, emphasizing the origin of a Greek tragedy that had to be delivered from an open-air rostrum to a distant audience.

The locations are dazzlingly beautiful, Morocco in fact, not Greece, but it works wonderfully well, as do the weird costumes which look like they were sowed and tinkered by the crew or the many locals themselves, but with the amazing effect of something out of a dream (or nightmare). The musical score is extremely subtle, at many times just the soft bleak rhythmic blows of a single drumstick, with an almost haunting effect.

Strangely enough the prologue and epilogue are set in modern times, this doesn't add anything as far as I'm concerned, but as it was it gives us yet some other beautiful images, with the same vast green lawns and waving tree-tops in the opening and closing scene, completing a perfect circle.

Franco Citti blindly wanders the streets and alleys and fields of Bologna and Romagna. We then move to Thebes -- actually Morocco -- where the story originally written by an uncredited Sophocles in enacted. It's opened up in time and space; the unities noted by Aristotle may have been taken as rules by generations after the original play was first performed, but they were habits of a living religious ritual at the time. Certainly, writer-director Pier Paolo Pasolini was not bound by them, nor by the impulses that make this obscure to modern audiences. G*d here is singular, and Heaven's motives are obscured, with the events prophecied caused by efforts to thwart them, along with what one wit has noted as the earliest incident of road rage in literature.

Pasolini seems to be saying something more than "This is the story" with this version, linking it with modern events. Perhaps he is proclaiming that man is the plague which doubly afflicts Thebes. We are still bound by what is possible, despite people insisting we do what is neither in the universe's nature or our own.

With Silvana Mangano, Alida Valli, and Pasolini himself playing the High Priest.

This film is possibly the most brilliant - color - film AS ART that I I have ever seen. It combines beautiful and fascinating poetic color visuals, unusual landscapes and locations with the classic story of Oedipus.

The story is told with very little dialog, (subtitles for the dialog where present) and this enhances the internal, primal feeling of the piece. Pasolini was often compared to Fellini, but I feel he is much better, because he uses his visuals always to advance and to the purpose of the story. To me Fellini's visuals were often purposeless antic oddity. Here, any ambiguity is not in the story, but in character motivation, which lends modern reality and immediacy to the whole.

The acting style combines the classic Greek use of stylized mannerisms and mask work seamlessly with smaller modern film acting. The setting transitions from 1960s Italy to a primitive/tribal landscape which lends itself beautifully to the timeless/ancient feeling of the Greek story. An example of detail: tribal body painting is used to represent both a ritual queen in shades of Elizabeth R, to the whiteness of a plague death; the costume designs are a combination of rustic and Egyptian/Papal religious.

Cast mainly with little known actors, the big name actor in this film was international star Alida Valli, who has only two or three brief scenes. Her talent is fairly wasted here, but her presence is riveting as the aging, childless queen. (Valli: A brilliant Italian actress who had a brief career here in the 40s-50s, then returned to Italy/Europe, and balanced her commercial work in slashers with more oddball artistically challenging work. Her work often embodies "excess within control," the dichotomy of superficial clam with seething internal emotion. PARADINE CASE, THE THIRD MAN, THE MIRACLE OF THE BELLS, CASSANDRA CROSSING, EYES WITHOUT A FACE, SENSO, WALK SOFTLY STRANGER.) This film is the kind of work I would hope to be a part of as an actress and artist. This film could easily be in theatres today and be even more appreciated now than it was at the time of its making.

Theatrically literate, visually stunning, gutsy, and intelligent. Enjoy!

During his whole career Pier Paolo Pasolini has had a fascination with ancient stories. He adapted a Biblical story ("The gospel according to Sint Matthew", 1964), two stories from the Middle ages ("The Decameron", 1971 and "The Canterbury tales", 1972), an Arabian story ("A thousend and one nights", 1974) and last but not least two stories from Greek mythology ("Oedipus Rex", 1967 and "Medea", 1969).

This review is about "Oedipus Rex".

The name of Oedipus is not only linked to a Greek play written by Sophocles but also to a psychological complex described by Sigmund Freud. The movie contains both of them.

The story opens in pre war Italy with a baby suckling on the breasts of his mother. Because of this the father becomes jealous on his son. This sequence clearly has a Freudian background, although to my (little) knowledge of the Oedipus complex it is the son becoming jealous on his father's lovemaking with his mother and not the other way round.

After this relatively short sequence the film jumps to ancient times. In the middle part (which covers the vast majority of the film) the story of Sophocles is told in a rather faithful way. The style of "Oedipus Rex" (and some other films of Pasolini situated in ancient times) reminds me very much of the style of Sergei Parajanov.

At the end, the film returns to 20th century Italy. I have struggled with the interpretation of this last sequence, but did not find a satisfactory answer yet. Also many other reviews remained silent on this part of the movie.

The connection between the modern and the ancient story is in my opinion that in neither one the main character is master of his own destiny. In the ancient story he (and other human beings) are defenseless against the whims of fate. They are merely puppets in the puppet theater of the Gods.

In the modern story characters are also defenseless, but this time against their sexual urges.

Bookended by the modern world, Pasolini then transplants classical drama to North Africa. The Sphinx and the Oracle at Delphi are portrayed as slightly ridiculous primitive figures and Oedipus, instead of being an upright individual who commits horrendous acts unknowingly, is a rather unsympathetic character. Sophocles' syuzhet is replaced with a more manageable chronological fabula yet the subtlety of the ancient drama is lost. Must-see bits of gore and sex are amplified yet in one interview Pasolini even admitted that he didn't understand what some of the original text was about - text which he leaves unattributed even if he helps himself to it once Oedipus gets to Thebes. Superficially arty and impressive, this is sadly a major disappointment from the hands of a great director.

The most famous of tragedies from Sophocles, nearly 2500 years old, is brought to life with mastery by Pasolini. This is one of the most beautiful films I've ever seen, with its rugged landscapes and pops of color perfect for the lean tale, so you can forgive him for shooting in Morocco and blending together various cultures. A part of that emphasizes its universality, as does the framing of the ancient story with scenes from the present which bookend it. Pasolini also takes other liberties, perhaps most notably updating the form of the Sphinx considerably, and doing away with its riddle. No matter. The themes of fate, free will, and tyranny come through, and there is such power in the eyes of Oedipus (Franco Citti) and his birth mother Jocasta (Silvana Mangano) as they grapple with it all. This is one that had me hooked from beginning to end.

Through his setting and how he filmed this, Pasolini captures how small people are in the scheme of things, even authoritarian rulers, which to me mirrors Sophocles' story. How little we know of the scheming of the universe through the Gods should make us hesitant to be cruel to further our own ends, as it may boomerang on us, as it does to both Oedipus and his birth father. In the same vein, wielding absolute authority and screaming can only work for so long, as eventually, the truth must be accepted, and in any event, will come out. Perhaps wisest of all is his brother-in-law Creon, who says:

"I have no desire to be king. I'm happy to live like a king, it is much wiser. From you, I have what I want without effort or worries. If I were king, how many trials I'd have! A life of anxiety and responsibilities..."

Uno dei migliori film di Pasolini. Il mito è ricomposto al meglio, con il solito grande naturalismo, con la consueta attenzione alla scenografia, alle musiche (entrambi molto impregnati di significati aggiuntivi), alla dimensione del dramma profondo del protagonista.

Il prologo e l'epilogo sono due pezzi del mosaico incastonati alla perfezione. Poi ci sono ovviamente anche la bravura elevata di Franco Citti e la bellezza tagliente di Silvana Mangano.

Qui Pasolini raggiunge un punto molto alto nella sua ricerca dell'arcaico facendoci toccare direttamente con mano un dramma che dovrebbe essere mitico, quindi irraggiungibile.

Oedipus Rex: Oedipus Rex is a haunting experience. The final scene on the city streets is enchanting. The scene in which Oedipus kills three Roman guards is one of the finest tapestries of tension and viscera in cinema. The acting isn't worth mentioning; this film is Pasolini's triumph. It is mainly a triumph of striking and occasionally nauseating imagery. The shifts in time periods are rather tacky and simplistic in retrospect; they are done so gracefully though. The conclusion is pulled together with beautifully written dialogue that only Paolo Pasolini could deliver. The film is not one that is easily forgotten and is sure to be remembered for a long time.

This film has many flaws. Its storytelling is problematic and confusing, unless you know the original tale and then would be able to pinpoint certain parts of the story in the film to understand. Pasolini decides to connect this ancient story to the modern society; at least that is what it seems. I'm not sure exactly what beginning and ending scenes accomplish.

Pasolini's direction feels so lazy and basic that you could probably film this whole movie yourself with your phone. It's blurry, the shots are easy to do, and the camera is shaky at times. Its production is laughably bad. The helmets, the sphinx, the crowns...you are going to laugh. The sphinx especially. You are going to ask how the hell it's that easy to kill the sphinx, a monster that fell dead after a single slash of a sword, without even trying to defend itself. The fight is so quick and haste you'll hardly believe it. What, nobody in the village could stab this monster? What about the riddle?

The scenes where Oedipus kills the guards is somewhat interesting, though again very bad. Of course, some of its scenes are sort of interesting, but Christ, did anyone who watched the preview of the film have the guts to tell Pasolini it stinks?

Sophocles' Oedipus Rex is adapted well for the foreign screen. Pasolini, better known for the controversial Salo; 120 Days of Sodom, has kept the intensity level to a minimum while still presenting the perverse qualities for which he would be known for. If you don't know the story (like who doesn't) read the play before seeing the movie - there tends to be a shortage on literature freaks these days. Beautifully filmed, Oedipus Rex begins in modern times, continues sometime BC, and finally ends back in the 20th century; thus presenting a sociological thesis for the viewer. The acting is a bit hammy (seeing Oedipus with a mad streak can be over the top) although the characters are developed well and recite their lines as if on stage. My only complaint is the subtitles seem to blend in with the scenery --- white subtitles against a white background. Therefore, this flaw makes it difficult to enjoy some scenes, and Pasolini's poetry is usually superb. Nevertheless, it's still a great film and is worth a look, especially by people with preconceived hatred for Pasolini's later work -and there's definitely a lot out there.

one of films who remands. the rules of Greek tragedy. the limits of interpretation. the manner to use the myth as contemporary mirror. the art of Piero della Francesca. the conflict between past and present. a film of actors. because each trace of acting defines not the vision of Pasolini about the fate of king from Thebes but its search of truth. the truth - basis of all. Edipo re impress. for atmosphere, for costumes and the use of myth.the eyes of Franco Citti. the presence of Silvana Mangano. the first scenes who are parts from a possible Visconti. the end as warning about the price of fight against yourself. Edipo re is support for reflection. not a new version of well known myth because the important details of myth are insignificant. not example of high art. because it is far to be a show. it is only exploration of meanings. and the sketch about different forms of pride and sacrifice. looking for authenticity. precise definition of life.