Cadavres exquis

I managed to see this at a film society showing about 25 (oh, help!) years ago. I have never forgotten the air of menace and foreboding it generates as Lino Ventura (a great performance) doggedly pursues his case among the great and the good. An air of strangeness, too, such as the strange rumbling noises Ventura hears when he moves to his anonymous new apartment complex.

This is a film I would dearly love to see again but for the last quarter of a century (makes a girl think) nothing, nada, zip! I doubt whether the current controller of the Italian media will be interested in releasing a film about political conspiracy for public consumption but I wish someone would. This is a film which deserves to be seen and to be appreciated much more widely.

The good news first: Cadaveri eccellenti is now out on DVD. Which is how we came to see it again last night. - Second, my own two cents since I've just read the negative comments on the discussion boards, where people are actually wondering if this is the worst movie ever. No way! OK, my own approach to it was an uphill journey. First saw it ages ago because Tre fratelli and Cristo si è fermato a Eboli had impressed me. This one is quite different, and I didn't get a thing. Years later, I stumbled over the story it's based on: "The Context. A parody" by Leonardo Sciascia. Even readers only passingly familiar with Sciascia will realize that the baddies are never caught in his books, reflecting the realities of his native Sicily. Of all the books of his I've read, this one was the toughest, because evil is omnipresent and not identified with individuals. A parody perhaps, but a bitter one, and one he took a long time to finish because writing it distressed him. Rosi read it on a long journey and it hit him like lightning. Like Sciascia, he was interested in the ways power corrupts people. So that's what we have here: a relentless gallery of corrupt officials in every walk of life. Not only in the Mafia but also in the realms of politics, justice, the military and religion. Max von Sydow's character is as repellent as anything I've ever seen. The whole caboodle is not meant to be fully understood, and that's where a large part of that all-pervading sense of menace comes from. The locations are gorgeous - wish I knew where that bus stop was where Rogas watches the procession of high-and-mighties drive by. And those catacombs! Someone here said the location wasn't clearly identified, but given that both Sciascia and Rosi were Italian, and that the film features a map of Sicily rather prominently in one shot, I beg to differ. IMHO this is indeed Sicily. And bella Italia. Berlusconi may look more benign than certain of his predecessors but... oh, all right, all right, this ain't the Speaker's Corner. The rest is silence.

What more can be said? This is one of the finest examples of Italian cinema I have seen. Gripping, intense and thought provoking. Not to mention fantastically acted, directed, edited, shot and produced.

The story revolves around Lino Ventura, Italy's No.1 homicide detective. He is called in onto the case of an assassinated judge and has to piece it together. As the movie proceeds more judges are killed by an unknown party....

What makes this movie shine more than anything is the plot, it's thicker than cement. When you think you have your finger pointed in the right direction, something else pops up and leads you in yet another direction... FANTASTIC!!!

Does anyone know why this isn't on DVD?

Rosi always gives good opening sequences (see his "Carmen") and this one is the best.

This is the political thriller that should be listed even above those of Costa Gravas or The Manchurian Candidate, but is virtually unknown in America. When I saw it at an Italian film class in the late 90's not even the professor had actually seen it - ( though I had).

Rescreening this 1976 film in today's political/terror climate gives this film even more resonance.

Lino Ventura is the moral center of this unblinking look at Italian politics. He has the kind of "gravitas" of Bogart at his best. If you have any way of seeing this film, you won't be sorry.

If you enjoy it, check out Rosi's "Tre Fratelli" and Ricky Tognazzi's "L'Escorta" with similar subject matter.

FYI, Rosi (Dir) was an assistant to Visconti.

Director Francesco Rosi calls ILLUSTRIOUS CORPSES "a trip through the monsters and monstrosities of power." It is a detective thriller with the format of a political expose and deals with an unseen killer whose victims are judges, public prosecutors and magistrates. Viewers who have seen Rosi's THREE BROTHERS remember that one of the episodes in that film deals with a magistrate has a nightmare in which he envisions his own murder my terrorists. In ILLUSTRIOUS CORPSES Rosi elevates the crime of assassination to a cataclysmic dimension within which a modern industrial society is dragged to the brink of collapse. It is a structurally elliptical but harrowing picture of the weaknesses in social foundations and the fragility of all government. The country the movie is set in is unspecified although it clearly seems to be Italy. Yet the film is unspecific enough to represent any nation portrayed as being on the brink of anarchy. The eerie opening is set in Palermo's Convento dei Cappuccini with its crypt of 8000 bodies, some mummified, some rotting in subterranean corridors. Rosi turns those images into a horrific metaphor of political and social transience that are the themes of this movie. In the final sequence, oceans of banner-waving Communists are cut with noisily revving tanks being readied for a rightist takeover of power. One should observe that Rosi's left-wing political biases admit only of right-wing coups as being ominous. Nevertheless, it is an unsettling finale to a remarkable and unsettling film.