This murder mystery by Francesco Rosi is pure make-believe, but it is like a skeletal version of the director's based-on-fact investigations (Salvatore Giuliano, The Mattei Affair, Lucky Luciano) -- the bare bones without the distinguishing features. The abundance of detail that Rosi unearths when he is excavating an actual case is missing here; and it seems fractionally less disturbing, and considerably more self-indulging, for Rosi to document his Leftist paranoia with a piece of detective fiction that obeys his every wish and whim (one of the Establishment figures, showing his true colors, blurts out a loathing for, all in one breath, Voltaire, Sartre, and Marcuse). Yet the abstract terms in which this Kafkaesque thriller is conceived tend to give Rosi's paranoia a metaphysical dimension it hasn't had before. And Lino Ventura's police investigator, a slow-paced pacer and brooder, his hands clasped behind his back in a pose of handcuffed helplessness, is an upstanding example of the existential hero. As duty spurs him further and further in search of the solution to a rash of V.I.P. killings, he comes to realize that he, inevitably, has entered into the pattern of crime himself, that he has stepped into the line of logic and the line of fire. He doesn't duck out, even then. By the time he has his first chance to draw his gun, Dirty Harry-style, he has already felt the bullet that brings him down. This is a shudderingly bleak movie, completely without consolation, except, of course, for the Leftists' satisfaction of having their worst fears corroborated. (In case Rosi's customary audience should feel ill-at-ease with a policeman as a hero, Rosi is careful to show him hobnobbing, on the sly, with an old friend inside the Italian C.P., and then, to eliminate all confusion, being gunned down shoulder-to-shoulder with the Party leader.) (1976) — Duncan Shepherd
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