Perché si uccide un magistrato?
***/**** Image A+ Sound A Extras B+
starring Franco Nero, Françoise Fabian, Marco Guglielmi, Mico Cundari
screenplay by Damiano Damiani, Fulvio Gicca-Palli, Enrico Ribulsi
directed by Damiano Damiani
by Travis Mackenzie Hoover SPOILER WARNING IN EFFECT. There's no way to discuss the thematic failure of How to Kill a Judge without discussing the tacky success that makes it possible. As either a political thriller or a social document, the movie doesn't fare terribly well, priming you for a massive exposé that never arrives and delivering a trickle of an ending that doesn't even begin to compensate. Yet I found myself enjoying the sight of Franco Nero in various clunky '70s outfits, sporting a massive orange caterpillar on his upper lip in a role that allows him to be dashing. The film basically facilitates opportunities for our hero to arrive at the scene of various terrible events looking horrified and then question people while looking swank–and the spectacle turns out to be big, cheesy fun in spite of itself.
Then again, Damiano Damiani will tell you otherwise. He and his scenarists have cooked up a whodunit whereby director Giacomo Solaris (Franco Nero) is responsible for an accusatory (and hilariously stylized) movie damning a Sicilian judge named Traini (Marco Gugliemi) for various acts of mafia corruption. Though the judge takes it all in stride, his wife Antonia (Françoise Fabian) seems quite angry with him–and she's livid when the judge winds up dead, just as Solaris' film prophesied. Strangely, however, Signora Traini always indulges self-made detective Solaris when he shows up to harass her, even while shaking her fist at him for blackening the family name. Of course, he digs away, and people keep turning up dead, and he grows convinced that La Traini has the goods–but what goods, and where are they?
As it turns out, How to Kill a Judge is less about corruption than it is about the Sicilian circumstances that make corruption the first assumption when provided with a corpse–a cultural specificity I would never have gathered had Damiani not cued me to it in one of the DVD supplements. Still, the film has structural problems that hurt this hidden meaning: it cues you for an ending that never arrives, with the replacement seeming more Scooby-Doo whimper than Elio Petri bang. Had things been told from La Traini's POV (and thus that of the person capitalizing on police assumptions), the movie might have had more potency, as this would set out the mechanism by which she manipulates rather than concealing it until the end. As it stands, the movie's considerable body count goes inadequately mourned, as one can't fully appreciate each person's place on the chessboard.
No matter: Franco Nero is here to swagger and stare with his steely gaze. Time has not been kind to the styles of How to Kill a Judge, and everything Nero wears is hilarious in its boxy casual-chic, but this only makes him seem more of a debonair man of leisure. He's taking time out of his busy schedule to find The Truth–what could be more movie-like? The various illogical meetings with Traini/Fabian only add to the schlock factor, rendering artificial what's already an unabashed star vehicle and allowing for melodramatic overtones above and beyond the call of duty. True, the actual machinations of police and mafia are fairly well articulated, but this merely saves the movie from becoming exploitation: One is aware of the cross-purposes outside of the hero's journey from fact-seeker to egg-faced schmuck, which prevents the film from veering off into a Jack Smith fantasy featuring some male Maria Montez with a bug on his face. If just barely.
THE DVD
Blue Underground lives up to its usual high standards with its 1.85:1, 16×9-enhanced DVD transfer of How to Kill a Judge. Colour is absurdly lustrous, crucial for the seventies hues and deeply-saturated film stock, while fine detail is exemplary. The Dolby 2.0 mono sound (in English and Italian options, both dubbed) is perhaps a shade indistinct though generally quite clear and potent. Extras include "The Damiani/Nero Connection" (15 mins.), which intersperses interviews with director and star as they discuss their long-term pairing and the issues that surround the film. Damiani spills the beans on his love affair with Sicily and the Sicily-specific nature of the script. Meanwhile, Nero tells a hair-raising story about a thug who pulled a gun on him in the street. Also on board are the film's English and Italian trailers.
111 minutes; NR; 1.85:1 (16×9-enhanced); English DD 2.0 (Mono), Italian DD 2.0 (Mono); CC; English (optional) subtitles; DVD-9; Region One; Blue Underground
