We Still Kill the Old Way

In a Sicilian town a pharmacist and his friend the doctor are shot while out hunting. The town treats it as a matter of honour and closes the subject. Paolo Laurana, a schoolteacher, notices which newspaper the threatening letter to the pharmacist was cut from and starts investigating on his own. What he finds is not honour but land, inheritance and politics. The film is not interested in the murder. It is interested in the loneliness of an intellectual: Laurana finds the truth and can tell nobody, because everyone already knows and nobody speaks. The line at the end says that in a single stroke. The form is Sicilian realism: the town square, the church, the café, yellow light. The camera keeps watching who is looking at whom in a crowd. Elio Petri directed, from Leonardo Sciascia's novel. It is the first collaboration between Petri, the writer Ugo Pirro and the actor Gian Maria Volontè, who would go on to make the hardest films of Italian political cinema together. It shared the Best Screenplay award at Cannes in 1967; Volontè won Best Actor at the Nastri d'Argento and Gabriele Ferzetti Best Supporting Actor. Irene Papas plays the widow. Who it is for: viewers who like Italian political cinema and want mafia narrative without cliché. Who it is not for: anyone expecting a detective's resolution. The film gives the solution and withholds justice, and does so deliberately.