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Power Games: Francesco Rosi’s Illustrious Corpses and Lucky Luciano

The discursive nature of the Surrealist parlor game exquisite corpse mirrors the way that power flows in Francesco Rosi’s films.

Illustrious Corses
Photo: Les Productions Artistes Associés

The title of Francesco Rosi’s 1976 thriller Illustrious Corpses refers to the bodies of the judges assassinated throughout the film, as well as the powerful men from Italy’s past whose corpses are on display in the Palermo Catacombs. But it’s also an indirect reference to the Surrealist parlor game exquisite corpse. The discursive nature of that game mirrors the way that power flows in Rosi’s films, with major players frequently being left in the dark as to when and why certain political moves are being made.

As depicted in Illustrious Corpses and 1973’s Lucky Luciano, the Italian government has deep ties to organized crime and the Catholic Church. All three forces operate in shadows, both as a means of protecting their interests and bemusing any attempts to discern their patterns of corruption. Fittingly, the films often elide simple cause and effect for a more impressionistic portrait of the lies and betrayals that defined Italy’s political climate in the ’70s.

While ostensibly a biopic, Lucky Luciano avoids the clear-eyed, paint-by-numbers approach we’ve come to expect from modern entries in the genre. Rosi displays little to no interest in the rise-and-fall narrative that could certainly be applied to the godfather of the American mafia or any oversimplified psychological analysis about the famed mobster. Luciano, played with stoic immutability by Gian Maria Volontè, is instead presented as something of a cipher, whose main function is as the primary link between America and Italy in the immediate aftermath of WWI, helping both sides to exploit black markets in mutually beneficial ways.

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Throughout, the film drifts between time periods and countries without clear signifiers, preventing us from making clear connections between men in positions of power or discerning where the schemes are being hatched. This strategy, while occasionally frustrating, effectively presents power as something that operates without borders or limitations.

At one point, a man tells Lucky, “One must always be on the side of power, because it’s the only way one can achieve balance.” This unwavering belief in the infallibility of the ruling class is a recurring theme throughout Illustrious Corpses, which centers on a man on the other side of the law, Inspector Rogas (Lino Ventura), who’s investigating the recent assassinations of several prominent judges. At the funeral of the first murdered judge, the Security Minister (Fernando Rey) says, “The mafia killed him,” to which a small but vocal crowd of leftist protestors scream back, “He was the mafia!” It’s a brief confrontation, but it speaks to the film’s interrogation of how the three dominant institutions (Italy’s true Holy Trinity in Rosi’s eyes) survive by accusing others of the very nefarious acts that they routinely commit.

As such, Rogas’s own pursuit of the truth is, unsurprisingly, fruitless. Not only is his main suspect, a chemist named Cres, never seen nor heard from throughout the film, but the politicians, police, and judges always have the final say when it comes to narratives concerning their own power and those who seek to dismantle it. In a show-stopping scene, Max von Sydow delivers a searing monologue, reminiscent of Ned Beatty’s in Network, about the impossibility of judicial error. It reflects an arrogance so extreme that it almost plays like parody. But within the framework of Rosi’s film, it conveys the extremist mentality embedded in all fascistic thought, notably the belief in absolute legal and political authority.

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Rogas assumed that as an officer of the law, he was on the inside, but Illustrious Corpses reveals the terrifying ways that those in high positions of power shield themselves, surreptitiously ejecting the detective from their inner circle and sending him toward his own destruction even as he seemingly comes closer to learning the truth. The film’s ending is as haunting and cynical as any from the paranoid thrillers that dominated the 1970s. It posits the notion that real, lasting change is all but impossible because the most powerful men ultimately have control of both the message and messengers of the supposed truth. Their fortress isn’t only impenetrable, but contains the unbridled power to instantaneously transform those in pursuit of justice into direct enemies of the state.

Illustrious Corpses and Lucky Luciano are now available on Blu-ray from KL Studio Classics.

Derek Smith

Derek Smith's writing has appeared in Tiny Mix Tapes, Apollo Guide, and Cinematic Reflections.

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