Cadaveri eccelenti [1976]

The seventies in Italy, as elsewhere, were an uneasy time: social dissent, controversial legislation, industrial action, possible revolution, civic corruption, organised crime, the collapse of the post-war power elite, feelings of formless paranoia. While America's similar national mood yielded an entire genre of neurotic conspiracy thriller [Alan J. Pakula's The Parallax View, Francis Ford Coppola's The Conversation, Arthur Penn's Night Moves], the Italian cinema produced just one specialist in unease, Francesco Rosi.

A Neapolitan who worked as an assistant to Luchino Visconti, Rosi made his first feature [La sfida / The Challenge] in 1958 and made his reputation with a series of films examining the myth and reality of the mafia [Salvatore Giuliano, Lucky Luciano, Il caso Mattei / The Mattei Affair] before [arguably] turning away from simple crime to politics with Cadaveri eccelenti, his masterpiece, and Cristo si fermato a Eboli / Christ Stopped at Eboli [1979]. In the past two decades, he has not been prolific, his most notable credit being Cronaca di una morte annunciata / Chronicle of a Death Foretold [1988]. If anything, his films seem stronger even now than they did on their first release, but Rosi's reputation has [unjustly] not been sustained. In 1977, Films and Filming rated Cadaveri the best film released in Britain that year; now, few lists of great Italian films or directors would find a place for it.

As with most great conspiracy movies, Cadaveri features a detective figure who somehow digs deeper than his employers want him to, uncovering the answers behind the answers, then recognising that he is powerless to change anything. A series of judges are murdered, and Inspector Rogas [Ventura], a raincoated plodder in the Columbo tradition, comes to the conclusion that the culprit must be a perhaps-innocent man condemned by a tribunal upon which all the murdered men sat. However, with the death toll rising, the case ceases to be a criminal concern - though Rogas has figured out that Cres, a mysterious tango-loving pharmacist who has cut his face out of all photographs of himself and disappeared, is the killer - and becomes a political matter. Rogas is ordered to concentrate on dissidents, comes to believe that he is under constant surveillance, and figures that shadowy conspirators have co-opted the lone madman's crusade and are murdering more and more judges as an excuse to repress various revolutionary and anarchic elements which are on the rise. Finally, as he meets with a communist leader, Rogas is felled by another assassin's bullet, and takes the blame for murders himself. Even the extreme left collaborate in the cover-up, reasoning that 'sometimes, the truth is not revolutionary'.

The complex, elliptical plot takes a few viewings to work out, and Rogas makes a couple of paranoid leaps that are hard to follow, but the film is never unconvincing. Rather than exposing the entrenched corruption of an apparently benevolent system, Rosi begins from the assumption that everyone in the Establishment is monstrous. In the unnerving opening, a wizened judge [Charles Vanel] enjoys his daily conversation with the finely-robed mummies of long-dead dignitaries before he is shot down in the street. Vanel is the first of the brilliantly-cast Euro-actors whose craggy, characterful, untrustworthy faces are held in close-up by Pasqualino De Santis's cinematography, and the mausoleum he visits is echoed by the marbled, tasteful, classically-decorated public buildings and private residences through which Rogas has to plod. Far more pertinently than any zombie epic, this shows a world run by the living dead from their catacombs.

Rosi opts for a thriller that is fascinating rather than exciting, never staging his murders in sensationalist fashion: some take place offscreen, allowing for remarkable 'reveal' shots of dead judges, and others rely on sudden shots that shatter hitherto-unsuspected windows to strike down characters. There is no flashy editing, no unsourced suspense music and everything takes place in neutral long shots. Though Max Von Sydow's sinister judge has a wonderful rant about the inviolability of an unquestionable [if sometimes wrong] process of law [he blames Voltaire for the ruinous state of the world], few speeches are made. If Rogas has dissident sympathies, he keeps them to himself, never stooping to editorialising, and Ventura holds everything back. It is a credit to actor and director that several of the most gripping sequences have Rogas at home, making coffee, thinking the case through, making phone calls, gradually succumbing to paranoia. Without fuss, we can understand this man's thoughts and feel the terror he will never let himself show.

Like most American conspiracy movies, Cadaveri is notionally set a few minutes into the future. Minister Fernando Rey admits that after his party has misgoverned alone for thirty years, it will now have to misgovern with the aid of the Communists. The secret police have a dust-free lair where white-coated underlings listen in to everyone's taped telephone indiscretions. Apparently, the novel the script is based on [Il contesto by Leonardo Sciascia] is set in an unnamed country that happens to share with Italy many powerful factions [the Catholic church, the mafia, the Communist party, an intellectual bourgeoisie, politically active armed forces], but the film - though the character names are not typically Italian, and the cast includes French, Swedish and Argentine actors - has a setting that can't be mistaken for an allegorical country.

Using his native Naples, Rosi creates a muted world that is more Italian than Italy, where the garbage men and the ambulance drivers are on strike [a dead judge has to stay where he is because of the latter], lemon groves are being leveled to make room for hideous tower blocks [a city of 'smoke and concrete'] and public political debate [a shouting match between 'a Communist Catholic bourgeois' and a trendy advocate of 'permanent revolution'] are as hollow as the legal or religious rituals that always accompany violent death. When Rogas interviews one suspect [Marcel Bozzuffi] who was unjustly imprisoned for four years, the man wearily claims that he has lived with injustice for fifty-two years and the time he spent in prison was at least an honest face of injustice.

Coming to Cadaveri eccelenti after dozens of gialli makes you realise just how self-absorbed most of them are, with their amoral swingers murdering to get rich or to work off some psychological kink. Hidden inside Rosi's film is a typical giallo murderer in Cres, who never apparently shows his face on screen, but this pulls back from his revenge campaign to examine a rotten world that trumps his individual psychosis with a society-wide sickness no plot resolution will dispel.
KIM NEWMAN

First Published In: Delirium [issue unknown]

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