Pretty Good

Plot so thin, it passes unnoticed.

Charming and brutal

The film makes a home in your brain and the only cure is to see it again.

Francesco Rosi helms this elegant and wonderfully stylish paranoiac thriller that concerns the investigations of Inspector Rogas(Lino Ventura) as he unearths some dark truths in this particularly confounding case.Various high profile judges are being assassinated by a mysterious sniper; are these the crazed retributions of a lone vengeance-seeking individual with a murderous grudge against these aging magistrates; or is this a vile political conspiracy of far reaching consequence? The labyrinthine plot is handled magnificently by Rossi, and one couldn't ask for a finer protagonist in the enigmatic, crumpled form of the wonderful Lino Ventura; a sterling performer whose magnificent CV boasts some star turns in many of France's finest crime epics, including some of the very best of Jean-Pierre Melville, but his dogged interpretations of Inspector Rogas might be one of his most endearing and robust performances I have ever seen. 'Cadaveri Eccellenti' (1976) is Italian cinema of the highest calibre and alongside Damiani's epic 'How To Kill a Judge' (1974) is one of my favorite conspiracy thrillers to come out of Italy in the 1970's.

There is no doubt that "Illustrious Corpses" is the work of a cinematic master. There are some scenes that can shock you or leave you absolutely breathless. And Pasqualino De Santis' cinematography is stunning. But the film is also snail-like in its pacing (when a character is walking up or down some stairs, the camera will stay on him every step of the way), a little too vague in the "hows and whys" of its conspiracy plot, and it also has an air of self-importance about it, as if it is the first movie to tell us that the System is powerful and corrupt from top to bottom. It is (the System), but the film is not (the first one to tell us that). If technique alone was enough, "Illustrious Corpses" would be a great movie. Now it's just an interesting one. **1/2 out of 4.

Just a couple of additional points - The first assassination victim is Charles Vanel (Tre Fratelli) but also from Wages of Fear (with Montand) as a far younger man.The opening sequence as he emerges from the tombs to the killing in a garden is arguably one of the strongest openings to a film ever. Rosi (an AD to Visconti) is known for this, check out his opening sequence to his "Carmen" (Placido Domingo).On a political note, being a leftist/communist in Italy in the 60s/70s was more accurately being an anti-fascist. Many of the rich claimed to be communists. Lina Wertmuller built a career making fun of this social and political confusion.Wish Illustrious Corpses were available here on DVD!!!

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.