The Facts of Murder

In a Roman apartment block there is first a theft and then a murder. Inspector Ingravallo runs the investigation. He knew the murdered woman, and he is close to another woman in the same building. As the inquiry proceeds everyone in the block turns out to have a lie, and at some point the inspector notices that he is not neutral either. Pietro Germi directs and takes the lead, alongside Claudia Cardinale and Eleonora Rossi Drago. The source is Carlo Emilio Gadda's novel That Awful Mess on the Via Merulana. The book is held to be among the hardest texts in Italian literature: written in a mixture of dialects, and ending without solving the murder. The film sets it into a detective shape while keeping Gadda's actual idea, that a crime never has a single cause. Germi's method is to refuse to reduce the characters to suspects. They are odd, poor and cornered, and the narrative gives each of them a scene of their own. The ending departs from the source and supplies an answer, a choice that was argued over in Italy at the time. Claudia Cardinale was still at the start of her career here, and the part was among the first to draw attention to her. Who it is for: viewers who like Italian crime films and literary adaptation. Who it is not for: there are many characters, the narrative is scattered in the first half, and the tension does not run at the pace of a modern detective film.