The American historian Richard Hofstadter wrote The Paranoid Style in American Politics, but if you want some truly paranoid style – one which gives equal weight to the paranoia and the stylishness – you have to go to Italy. Late twentieth century Italy, in particular, saw a strange collision of two factors that produced some of the most stylish and radical cinema of all time. The first is that the Italian political landscape was riven with conspiracy. The right-wing Masonic lodge Propaganda Due held political influence at the highest levels, terrorist bombings went ahead with the security services’ knowledge, Prime Minister Aldo Moro was kidnapped and murdered, and the original Italian conspiracy – the Mafia – was now backed by NATO and CIA funding thanks to Operation Gladio.
The second is that the generation of film-makers responding to this horror included some of the all-time greats, master stylists who could back their balletic camera movements and luscious cinematography with political sophistication. Outside Italy, Francesco Rosi is more of a cult figure than a canonical one, a step below the universally-acclaimed likes of Fellini, de Sica, Pasolini and Visconti. To his partisans, this is a grave injustice, and Illustrious Corpses – now issued on Blu-Ray by Radiance films – is a perfect place to jump on board. His early films, such as Hands Over the City and Salvatore Giuliano, had taken stock of the legacy of Italian neorealism and brought it into an even more complex, tense political environment. Illustrious Corpses is a genre film based on a best-selling thriller, with a cast including Max von Sydow. It could have been a shameless sell-out, but instead it offers a uniquely accessible showcase for the talents that made Rosi so great.
Despite von Sydow’s striking cameo as the Supreme Court President, the real international star in Rosi’s opinion was Lino Ventura as the film’s lead, Inspector Rogas. Despite being born in Italy, Ventura’s most memorable work was for French directors like Jean-Pierre Melville, Jacques Becker and Louis Malle. Rosi cast him in order to emphasise the degree to which Rogas is an outsider. His investigation into the murder of Charles Vanel’s Judge Vargas is initially obstructed by the insular nature of Vargas’s native Sicily, with the international movie star Ventura facing off against non-professionals with wonderful, weather-beaten faces warning him that he’ll never understand how this region operates. But Rosi’s overarching point is that, by the late ’70s, it is fatally naïve to believe only one part of Italy is tainted by corruption.
Even if you don’t understand all the specifically Italian politics behind it, you recognise from the visuals that this is a film that collapses the distance between hard-boiled genre cinema and the world outside your window.
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Here, it’s worth bringing in a fact from Alex Cox’s commentary. It’s very good, admiring and learned, with some of the spirit of Cox’s famed Moviedrome introductions. He points out that the source novel, Leonardo Sciascia’s Equal Danger, doesn’t name the region or even the nation it takes place in. This is a prudent safety measure when you’re writing a book about organised corruption and criminality in ’70s Italy; as recently as the 2000s, Roberto Saviano had to be placed under 24-hour police protection when his book Gomorrah named slightly too many names. Illustrious Corpses is similarly coy on paper, but in practice it can’t be anywhere other than Sicily. There is still too much of the neorealist spirit in Rosi for him not to go out onto the streets and shoot in recognisable locations. And this is important, because when Rogas discovers the story’s crime networks extending out of this region, we register that change.
Illustrious Corpses is a film about a society struggling to come to terms with the fact that a kind of clandestine, organised corruption once restricted to the poorest parts of the country is now embedded in all government systems from the Palazzo Madama down. It is perched, stylistically speaking, on the borderline between the neorealism Rosi made his name with and the neo-noir genre that its story exists in. This is another way in which the film appeared at a felicitous time;. Ten years later and “neo-noir” would mean dry ice, neon lights and a Tangerine Dream soundtrack, but at this point, with the New Hollywood at its peak in America, it was possible to make something that was both recognisably noir and naturalistic in its look. Even if you don’t understand all the specifically Italian politics behind it, you recognise from the visuals that this is a film that collapses the distance between hard-boiled genre cinema and the world outside your window.
This naturalistic style should not be confused with no style at all. There are actually many bravura stylistic sequences in Illustrious Corpses, from the crisp black-and-white flashbacks to the long, ominous zooms that frequently end with a character being shot. There is also the remarkable opening scene in which Vargas, soon to become a cadaver himself, visits the mummified corpses of the Capuchin Crypt. This is one meaning of Rosi’s title; the growing number of dead judges the story revolves around is another. It also refers to Exquisite Corpse, a game played by the original Surrealist movement, in which participants each draw part of a body without being permitted to look at what the other players have done. In Rosi’s film, Italian society is a nationwide game of Exquisite Corpse, everyone performing their own crimes to suit their own agenda, without any knowledge of the full conspiracy until Rogas unravels it. It’s thrilling, persuasive and intoxicating.
As well as Cox’s commentary, the set also includes a half-hour interview with the critic Gaetana Morrone about the film’s background, inspiration and meanings that may be unclear to non-Italians, as well as a booklet with a new essay by Michael Atkinson. There are also archive interviews with Rosi, including one where he and Ventura are interviewed by a swimming pool in what’s supposed to be a film festival but looks more like a Club 18-30 holiday. The new transfer is very good, and will be a revelation to anyone who’s seen the film on bootleg copies.
Illustrious Corpses is out now on Radiance Films Blu-Ray
