Investigation Of A Citizen Above Suspicion 1970 ITA SUB ENG 1080p...

Year: 1970
Country: Italy
Director: Elio Petri
Cast: Gian Maria Volontè, Florinda Bolkan, Orazio Orlando, Salvo Randone
IMDB: Link

Language : Italian
Subtitles : English





The seventies, in Italy, started twenty days ahead of time. Milan, December 12, 1969: a bomb blasted inside the Bank of Agriculture in Piazza Fontana, causing 16 dead and 88 injured. It was the bloodiest in a series of terrorist acts that took place in the previous months. On April 25 (the day where Italy celebrates its liberation from Nazi domination by Allied troops) another bomb blasted at the Milan fair, while in August seven more bombs exploded on trains. All of these were immediately labeled as anarchic acts, and however germinated within the far left. It was a political sidetracking, endorsed by most newspapers, which justified in advance a possible authoritarian turn, after the socio-political turbulence that characterized 1968 and 1969, from student protests to factory workers’ strikes in 1969’s “hot autumn.”

To many, the Piazza Fontana bombing—the most infamous of the 140 bombings that took place in the country between 1968 and 1974—signed the beginning of the so-called “strategy of tension.” The President of the Republic, Giuseppe Saragat, announced he would declare the state of emergency in the country, while the Ministry of Interior Franco Restivo claimed that investigations would be conducted “in all directions.” The night after the bombing, the police arrested 84 suspects, among whom there was an anarchist named Giuseppe Pinelli. The suspects were released as soon as their alibis were verified. Three days later, on December 15—in spite of the norm that established that police custody should last not more than two days—Pinelli was in the building of the police station, interrogated by Antonio Allegra and Commissioner Luigi Calabresi, as well as three noncommissioned officers of the police under the Political Bureau, an agent, and an officer of police. That night, Pinelli fell to his death from the window of the office on the fourth floor where the interrogation was taking place.

The first version given by the Chief of Police was of suicide, due to the fact that Pinelli’s alibi was proved to be false (according to some early rumors, Pinelli shouted: “It’s the end of anarchy” before jumping down the window). This version was retracted when the dead man’s alibi turned out to be credible: eventually the (highly debatable, and debated still today) “official” version would then be that Pinelli was the victim of an “active illness” due to stress, cold and insufficient nutrition, and fell accidentally. To many, though, the Anarchic trail was just a camouflage to cover the bombing’s true nature: a fascist attack that was meant to weaken the resistance to an authoritarian right-winged government.

February 1970. Two months after the bomb blast, Investigation of a Citizen Above Suspicion was released. Although the film took shape before the latest dramatic events, Elio Petri and co-writer Ugo Pirro conveyed the mood of the period with an almost shocking precision within a crime story sui generis. The film was a commercial triumph: almost two billion lire grossed at the Italian box office (quite a remarkable feat for a committed film, in a season dominated by They Called Me Trinity, with over three billion lire), the Special Jury Prize at the Cannes Film Festival and the 1971 Academy Award as Best Foreign Language Film.

To renowned Italian film historian Gian Piero Brunetta, the film’s enormous success depended on its ability to unify the audience, inventing “a system of communication that puts in motion emotional and conscious functions which are shared by fathers ad sons. It’s a film that responds to Italy’s middleclass’ need to move left.” 2 Investigation of a Citizen Above Suspicion, in other words, speaks to everyone, young and old alike, and does it by way of the sarcastic and the grotesque.

Dialogue is sharp as a scalpel. Lines such as “Repression is our vaccine. Repression is civilization!” and “Behind each subversive there might be a criminal” are perfectly clear to everyone. These are the same words that are spent in the rooms of power, in police stations, on newspapers, after the rise of the students’ movement and workers’ protests to get new and fair contract laws. Even though the shooting took place before Piazza Fontana, the scene where Volonté questions a student, beating and slapping him, is inevitably charged with grim implications.

If La Dolce Vta challenged sexual taboos, Investigation of a Citizen Above Suspicion violated one even more delicate—a political one. As critic Giovanni Grazzini wrote in Italy’s biggest newspaper, “Il Corriere della Sera,” “like it or not, it’s the first time that Italian cinema throws itself headlong into a portrayal of police environment without displeasing the censors […] it’s hard to deny that Petri’s film is an important step forward to a more adult society, so sure of itself and its democracy that it allows a filmmaker to criticize an institution which once was considered no less than sacred, without having to hide behind the medieval screen represented by the crime of defamation.”

Investigation of a Citizen Above Suspicion would be a powerful influence on the forthcoming poliziotteschi, even though Petri’s film is mainly a sarcastic fable on Power told in the form of what in crime fiction is called “inverted story”: we know from the outset that Gian Maria Volonté’s character is the murderer, and follow the story from his point of view. The police become the Kafkaesque secular arm of an authoritarian Power: the Kafka reference does not just apply to the end quote from The Trial (“Whatever we may think of him, he is a servant of the Law, and therefore belongs to the Law, and that places him beyond human judgment”), or to the way Volonté disseminates clues that prove his own culpability, in a self-destructive impulse which goes hand in hand with the awareness of his own status as untouchable. What’s more, Petri’s film conveys “the elusiveness, the
indefinability, the indisputable arbitrariness of the lord in Kafka’s The Castle or the judge in The Trial: that is, power seen as inaccessible or unimpeachable.”

Curiously enough, one of the films that most influenced the poliziotteschi is in may ways its dark half. Gian Maria Volonté’s nameless Commissioner is a hateful caricature, brilliant in its childish pettiness. A sex addict who’s sexually ridiculed by his mistress, a sadist with the weak and bullying with his subordinates, yet unctuous with the powerful, Volonté’s character is definitely one step aside from the stereotype of cinema detectives as “stoic embodiments of the conscience of the world, the “right ones” as opposed to the decay of morals and the disintegration of moral codes.” 5 As if to get rid of Investigation of a Citizen Above Suspicion’s uncomfortable shadow, the new centurions of Italian crime films would adopt a frugal lifestyle: no love affairs, indifference—if not contempt—for money and career. Such a reversal of perspective would also involve the relationship with authorities: in Petri’s film these are scheming and subservient, whereas in 1970s poliziotteschi they become hostile and unattainable. What remains is the distrust of power, which in Petri has a clear ideological matrix, whereas in the poliziotteschi it is the expression of a centuries-old popular suspicion. (Roberto Curti)

[ About file ]

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Date: Fri, 07 Aug 2026 20:13:29 +0200
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[ Relevant data ]

Resolution: 1920 x 1040
Width: multiple of 32
Height: multiple of 16
Average DRF: 21.433504
Standard deviation: 2.971979
Std. dev. weighted mean: 2.85785

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[ DRF analysis ]

average DRF: 21.433504
standard deviation: 2.971979
max DRF: 34

DRF=1: 20 ( 0.012 %)
DRF=2: 1 ( 0.001 %)
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DRF=21: 26404 ( 15.883 %) ###
DRF=22: 25814 ( 15.529 %) ###
DRF=23: 24240 ( 14.582 %) ###
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DRF=25: 8707 ( 5.238 %) #
DRF=26: 4098 ( 2.465 %)
DRF=27: 2343 ( 1.409 %)
DRF=28: 1274 ( 0.766 %)
DRF=29: 678 ( 0.408 %)
DRF=30: 449 ( 0.270 %)
DRF=31: 221 ( 0.133 %)
DRF=32: 82 ( 0.049 %)
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DRF=34: 2 ( 0.001 %)
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I-slices average DRF: 18.112565
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[ Edition entry ]

UID: 10749078939509515890
Hidden: No
Selected by default: No
Playlist: No
Chapters:
00:00:00,000-00:13:20,550: Chapter 01 {und}
00:13:20,550-00:19:01,724: Chapter 02 {und}
00:19:01,724-00:30:48,221: Chapter 03 {und}
00:30:48,221-00:39:58,062: Chapter 04 {und}
00:39:58,062-00:43:24,936: Chapter 05 {und}
00:43:24,936-00:51:47,229: Chapter 06 {und}
00:51:47,229-01:00:54,359: Chapter 07 {und}
01:00:54,359-01:12:20,920: Chapter 08 {und}
01:12:20,920-01:17:02,034: Chapter 09 {und}
01:17:02,034-01:24:58,051: Chapter 10 {und}
01:24:58,051-01:33:07,332: Chapter 11 {und}
01:33:07,332-01:41:12,441: Chapter 12 {und}
01:41:12,441-01:55:33,430: Chapter 13 {und}

This report was created by AVInaptic (01-11-2020) on 1-09-2026 15:56:48