The Assassin

An antiques dealer in his thirties comes home to his smart Rome apartment near dawn and is taken away by the police shortly afterwards. Nobody tells him what the charge is. He works out gradually that it concerns Adalgisa, his former mistress, found dead in a hotel by the sea. This was Elio Petri's first feature and the target is already clear. The question is never who killed her but what interrogation itself does to a person. The man in custody starts to believe in his own guilt, partly because the flashbacks show us someone genuinely unpleasant: a man who used older wealthy women as rungs, sold out his friends and lived off everyone within reach. Marcello Mastroianni plays him without a single move toward sympathy. Its flaw is that the precision of Petri's later work is not fully formed yet. The middle stretch wanders and some secondary figures are left unfinished. Who it is for: viewers who like the political vein of Italian cinema. Who it is not for: anyone waiting for suspense and a solution.