Illustrious Corpses 01/06/26

Watergate prompted Hollywood to launch a wave of paranoid thrillers about vast conspiracies, but Italian filmmakers long before presented the status quo as corrupt from the inside out. Director Francesco Rosi’s adaptation of a fiction novel skips the escapist thrills. Incorruptible detective Lino Ventura intuits that his superiors don’t want him to solve a series of killings of high-level judges. Impeccably directed for a kind of nagging, uneasy suspense, Rosi’s picture draws Ventura’s dogged hero into a bigger, more sinister frame. With Charles Vanel, Max von Sydow and Fernando Rey, and music by Piero Piccioni. The original Italian title is not reassuring: Cadaveri eccelenti. On Blu-ray from Radiance Films.
01/06/26