Investigation of a Citizen Above Suspicion (1970)

Elio Petri's 1970 parable opens with a murder performed with the tidiness of a man filing his own taxes. A senior Roman police inspector, known to everyone as Il Dottore, kills his mistress, then plants evidence against himself with such diligence that the gesture becomes a philosophical experiment. His colleagues decline to notice. The film's contempt for authority is total, and it is not subtle about the fact, which is the point. Gian Maria Volonté plays the inspector as a man hollowed out by his own immunity, and the performance carries the picture wherever the argument falters.

The film is a lecture, and it lectures well. A Kafka quotation arrives at the end to confirm what the preceding ninety minutes had already announced. This is an older strain of sermonizing, antic and sour, aimed squarely at the state and its self-protecting instincts. Audiences arriving in search of contemporary markers will find the cupboard bare. The victim's gay husband passes through the suspect list as a piece of plot furniture. Nobody interrogates the economics of the title's phrase. The inspector's collapse is the psychology of unchecked power, not a study of neurodivergence, and the women in the film exist to be murdered or dismissed.

The result is a nasty, efficient machine of a movie. It took the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film and a Jury Prize at Cannes, which tells us something about 1970 taste. The cultural awareness on display is aimed at police impunity, a subject with no expiration date and no modern branding. The cast is Italian, the Rome is Rome, and the indictment is of the police. The film is angry, unfashionable, and correct about its target. We classify it accordingly and move on to the next specimen.

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