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The English title comes from a wry jibe following a Palermo car explosion, one local notes that the city these days is beginning to look like Chicago and another assures him that criminal tradition still thrives in the provinces. Elio Petri's spiraling aerial shots lend the seaside Sicilian village a Kokoschka view, his camera bobs and weaves to introduce characters at an outdoors café before zooming to reveal the contents of an anonymous envelope ("This letter is your death sentence"). Lothario and doctor are killed during a hunting party (shotgun blasts amid a flurry of birds, a Leonesque flash), the whole thing is dismissed as a cuckold's "honor killing" and scapegoats are summarily produced. Unconvinced, the university professor (Gian Maria Volontè) sets out to investigate and uncovers a tight web of government and crime, church and family. "The age of poets with their heads in the clouds is over." A nation under the rule of gangster politics is at once jungle and desert, sharp contrasts and pungent imagery state the theme: Potted foliage persistently intrudes into the frame in offices and chambers, the buildings outside are ancient rocks against which Irene Papas poses in mourning black. A diary with pages ripped off, a parked car turning its headlights on and off in the dark, the sightless patriarch inside his mansion of a hundred bells—such a network of dread that even Leopoldo Trieste, Fellini's favorite gentle clod, turns up sinister, wizened, and slicked with wormy shoe polish. A fine shot caps Petri's formulation, an entire town attempting to hide its corruption behind celebratory whites only to be gradually backlit into murky silhouettes. (Fulci in Don't Torture a Duckling drags their sins back out into the harshest light.) With Gabriele Ferzetti, Salvo Randone, and Luigi Pistilli.
--- Fernando F. Croce |