‘Illustrious Corpses’ or — Excellent, Indeed?
With the possible exception of Elio Petri, I’m not sure there’s another Italian filmmaker I love as much as Francesco Rosi. In fact, I adore Rosi to such an extent that watching one of his movies frequently leaves me wondering what all the bloody fuss about Fellini is (what’s the point of all that solipsistic naval-gazing when Rosi’s frantically imploring us to notice what’s happening outside our front door?!). He is, in short, fully engaged with the external world, and that’s certainly the case with ‘Illustrious Corpses’ (1976), or ‘Cadaveri Eccellenti’.
Inspector Rogas (an always amazing Lino Ventura) is assigned to investigate the apparently unconnected murders of three judges. His superiors suggest that either a crazed individual with a grudge or a far-left organisation are responsible. Both explanations appear credible, although all the evidence Rogas unearths points towards political corruption.
The deeper Rogas digs, and the more the bodies pile up, the more the Inspector’s concern gradually shifts from which judge might be the next to whether or not the next corpse could be his own.
Being a Francesco Rosi thriller based on a novel by Leonardo Sciascia (Day of the Owl, Todo Modo, To Each His Own) it’s not a surprise to discover the focus is less on any kind of propulsive, action-packed plot but rather an examination of Italian society and the forces controlling it, and the film is all the more gripping for it.
Rosi shoots in a “realistic” style using real world locations, but this seemingly unflashy approach belies the extraordinarily artistic images Rosi and his cinematographer Pasqualino De Santis create through nothing more than the framing and composition of what’s there and the juxtaposition of these images (legendary Ruggero Mastroianni was the editor and his work here is as remarkable as ever). The effect is of a recognisable everyday world that’s shot through with a churning unease, creeping fear and inescapable tension that’s as impossible to locate as the concealed powers dominating it.
As astonishing example of this is the cocktail party Rogas crashes where he spies a man he suspects is the missing chemist, Cres. Rogas can only view the mysterious man through a glass partition, yet although his body is fully observable to Rogas the bevelled edges of the partition distort the unknown man’s facial features into an elongated smeared smudge of a blank death mask. It’s a simple shot that could, and does, occur at any social gathering — somebody looking at another through a glass door — but the impression this allows Rosi to conjure up is as unsettlingly impactful as anything by Francis Bacon.
Unlike some of his previous films ‘Illustrious Corpses’ isn’t bursting at the seams with Rosi’s almost newsreel clamour. It’s certainly there although any explosive energy lurks more on the periphery. Instead, this is a film with a more sombre, almost funereal, centre, which is appropriate as what we’re mourning isn’t just the passing of individual human beings but the death of truth in Italian society.
This is a film with something to say and the fact it does so in such an artistically and intellectually stimulating fashion is utterly captivating.
‘Illustrious Corpses’ is another excellent example of Rosi at his best and why he not only deserves to be mentioned in the same breath as some of his more internationally recognised contemporaries but why, on occasion, he could frequently blow them out of the fucking water.
