Illustrious Corpses
Cadaveri eccellenti
Francesco Rosi (1976)
One of the best known and most memorably titled of Francesco Rosi’s films, Illustrious Corpses is part of the ‘Treasures’ (‘revived and restored from the world’s archives’) strand at this year’s London Film Festival – a good opportunity to see, very belatedly, my first Rosi picture. In the opening sequence, an elderly man walks through a church crypt in Palermo. Rows of mummified remains decorate the walls on either side[1]. The man looks hard at what once were human features and they seem to reciprocate. Rosi’s camera, examining the man’s face more closely, reveals its great age: he looks all set to join the dead. Within a few screen minutes, he’s done so but not through natural causes. He mounts the steps leading out of the crypt and walks into the streets above, where political demonstrations are taking place and the old man is shot dead.
He is Judge Vargas, the first of several members of the Supreme Court to be murdered in the course of the story. Charles Vanel, who plays him, is one of the film’s two most impressive faces. (In his mid-eighties at the time, Vanel wasn’t himself quite ready to give up the ghost: he lived to the grand age of ninety-six.) The other outstanding face belongs to Lino Ventura, as the protagonist Amerigo Rogas, the police detective assigned to investigate the jufdge-slaying. The last two dead bodies to feature in Illustrious Corpses are those of Rogas and the secretary-general of the Communist Party. The two men have met in a museum, where a gunman (unseen, as the assassins are throughout) kills them both. Marble busts, presumably of leaders and statesmen of classical Roman and Italian history, oversee the corpses, rather as the mummies observed Vargas in the crypt. The authorities, in the form of the Christian Democrat-led government of Italy, issue a public statement that the police detective, under increasing strain, had been showing signs of mental instability, killed the communist politician, then took his own life. Lino Ventura combines fine naturalistic acting with star magnetism. He’s also an unarguably sane presence. Spending two hours in his company reinforces our knowledge that the official explanation of Rogas’s death is outrageously untrue.
Rosi includes, by way of a cutting postscript to the action, a brief conversation between the new communist leader and the journalist Cusan (Luigi Pistilli), who writes for a left-wing newspaper and was a friend of Rogas. The politician says the party won’t react to what the government has done. Cusan asks if this means that ‘the people must never know the truth’. The reply, also the film’s closing line, is, ‘The truth is not always revolutionary’ – a sardonic play on Antonio Gramsci’s maxim that ‘To tell the truth is revolutionary’. The screenplay, by Tonino Guerra, Leonardo Sciascia, Lino Iannuzzi and Rosi, is adapted from Sciascia’s novel Equal Danger. This was published in 1971 but Illustrious Corpses was even more up to date with Italian politics. In 1973, the Communist Party leader Enrico Berlinguer sought an accommodation with the Christian Democrats, led by Aldo Moro, in what became known in Italy as the ‘Historic Compromise’. Rosi’s parting shot seems to take aim at contemporary communist politicians’ very qualified interpretation of the meaning of ‘revolution’.
In other words, Illustrious Corpses is an example of the politically engaged Italian cinema of the period, whose leading exponents included, as well as Rosi, Pier Paolo Pasolini and Gillo Pontecorvo. It also calls to mind paranoid thrillers emerging from Hollywood in the light of Vietnam and Watergate – films like Francis Ford Coppola’s The Conversation, Alan J Pakula’s The Parallax View (both 1974) and Sydney Pollack’s Three Days of the Condor (1975). Explicitly political film-making tends nowadays, on both sides of the Atlantic, to take the form of smugly sarcastic biopic – Paolo Sorrentino’s Il Divo (2008) and Loro (2018), Adam McKay’s Vice (2018), and so on. Many people will regret the passing of the more intellectually serious approach that Rosi’s work exemplifies. I suppose I’m one of them in principle but have to admit that I didn’t regret Illustrious Corpses reaching its end.
According to Wikipedia, the film’s title:
‘… refers to the surrealist game, Cadavre Exquis, invented by André Breton, the participants draw consecutive sections of a figure without seeing what the previous person has drawn, leading to unpredictable results, and is meant to describe the meandering nature of the film with its unpredictable foray into the world of political manipulations, as well as the (“illustrous [sic]“) corpses of the murdered judges.’
There’s no doubt Rosi builds up a disorienting web of double-crossing intrigue. He and Lino Ventura show that Rogas is smart enough to fathom what’s going on but ill equipped to subdue it. Each of the assassinations is prepared for in a visually imaginative way and impressively staged (the cinematographer is Pasqualino De Santis). Yet lllustrious Corpses also seems, in some ways, dated in a negative sense. There are an awful lot of thugs cloaked in suavity but whose significant glances instantly give them away. The presence in the cast of the likes of Fernando Rey (as a government security minister) and Max von Sydow (as the president of the Supreme Court) gives proceedings an international-star-cast flavour. Von Sydow is saddled with the script’s most extended (and stagy) philosophical monologue, as he explains to Rogas that, when a judge administers the law, his doing so is, by its very nature, unchallengeable – just as the Catholic priest’s celebration of the Mass is unchallengeable.
This kind of talk gets boring – so is a sequence in which political epigrams get hurled from one side to another of a banquet room. There are a few less de luxe clichés too. Late on in the film, Rogas, making his way through a public park for his latest secret tryst, walks past a blind man sitting with his Alsatian dog. The man isn’t really blind and the dog’s collar contains a bugging device which, when the animal obediently trots off in Rogas’s direction, picks up his private conversation. Any detective who’d seen a few thriller movies would have spotted this pair a mile off.
10 October 2019
[1] These are the Capuchin Catacombs of Palermo, described by Wikipedia as follows: ‘Palermo’s Capuchin monastery outgrew its original cemetery in the 16th century and monks began to excavate crypts below it. In 1599 they mummified one of their number … and placed him into [sic] the catacombs. … The bodies [of other monks] were dehydrated on the racks of ceramic pipes in the catacombs and sometimes later washed with vinegar. Some of the bodies were embalmed and others enclosed in sealed glass cabinets. Monks were preserved with their everyday clothing and sometimes with ropes they had worn as a penance. … [I]n the following centuries it became a status symbol to be entombed into the Capuchin catacombs’.