The Day of the Owl

A small town in Sicily. A contractor is shot at the bus stop in the morning and the bus is full. Nobody saw anything. Captain Bellodi is a carabinieri officer who has come from the north and is running the investigation. Rosa, the dead man's wife, does not speak. Don Mariano, one of the town's notables, gets on with everyone and is courteous with Bellodi too. The further Bellodi goes the further the witnesses draw back, the statements change, and calls come from Rome. Nobody denies the murder; nobody will simply tell it. Damiano Damiani directs. Franco Nero plays Bellodi, Claudia Cardinale plays Rosa and Lee J. Cobb plays Don Mariano. It is an Italian production. The source is Leonardo Sciascia's novel. The matter it treats is silence; the film shows the mafia not as an organisation but as the shared silence of a town. It is counted among the first Italian films to take the mafia as a direct subject and it opened the way for the political crime films that followed. The speech in which Don Mariano sorts people into classes is its best known section. The narrative uses the shape of the detective film but the solution brings no satisfaction. Bellodi's being a northerner is an obstacle inside the narrative; he does not know the town's language. The ending finds the culprit and changes nothing. Its limit is pace; the narrative is slow, the conversations long, and the tension kept low. Who it is for: viewers who like Italian political crime films and mafia narratives. Who it is not for: it is slow, bleak, and the ending hopeless.