March 18, 2020 – Investigation of a Citizen Above Suspicion (1970) Criterion Channel
Dottore kills his mistress on the day he leaves his position as the chief of Homicide to become the head of the Italian police division that investigates political subversive. The killer doesn’t try to hide his crime. In fact, he deliberately leaves clues to his involvement. Dottore is both attracted to and repelled by his impunity, and he is determined to test the limits of his power.
Investigation of a Citizen Above Suspicion is a satiric political thriller by the Italian director Elio Petri. It is fascinating to watch. The character of Dottore is at once compelling, repulsive, and baffling. The score by the great Ennio Morricone gives the movie a lighter touch than you might expect from the subject matter (you can hear the main theme from the movie on my Streaming Festival Playlist on Spotify). Investigation of a Citizen gets energy from its setting in late 1960s Italy, in all its swinging and radical glory, including protestors changing “Mao, Mao Ho Chi Minh. Did they really chant that then? It seems almost inconceivable now.
Though this film is about politics, this film has more of a psychological than a political orientation. The repression of the state is not attributed to the needs of capitalism so much as to the needs of Dottore to compensate for the scorn and infidelities of his mistress. It is his feelings of impotence and threatened masculinity that drive this repressive bureaucrat and murder.
Investigation of a Citizen won an Academy Award and the grand prize at the 1970 Cannes Film Festival. In my view, it is worthy of those awards. I had not heard of Elio Petri before, but I am going to seek out other films by this director.
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