L'assassino

Alfredo Martelli, young antique dealer, is arrested by the police while he is coming back home. They take him to the police station where they make him wait for a long time before telling him that his ex lover was murdered. The night before, he went to see her, to ask her for an extension of the date for a payment. He is accused of murder and thinks about his “decent” middle-class past. What comes out is the way he made his fortune: he scammed his friends by buying ancient items at a very cheap price and selling them at very expensive ones; he was seduced by the wife of one of them and he let her do it, because he saw financial benefits; he played the waitress, Rosa, “offering her” to a customer.
The anxiety for his situation and the increasing feeling of guilt lead him to promise he would change his life. During the interrogations, the police find out the real responsible. Alfredo is released. A few days are enough to make regrets and contrition go away, and he will go on with the life he led until he was arrested.
Traduzione in inglese Francesca Sala – English translation Francesca Sala

L’assassino is the trial of a man to his past, because he is scared that the Justice would find clues to drag him to the dock. All of us, if we really go through our memories, could remember that we bought a smuggled bottle of whisky, or that we mistreated our lover of lied to our brother. And if we could find the strength to dig even deeper, we would also realise that we sometimes didn’t get to kill someone only because of a series of lucky chances, on which we had no credit. The truth is that we are scared of looking back to our past, because we would discover that we bowed to a compromise, to cowardice too many times. (...)
What scares me the most are the labels that they already applied to this movie. I heard about “thriller”, of “psychological film”, of “nouvelle vague film”. For me, it is nothing but a bitter story, seen through a glass of irony. I don’t have the claim to be a revolutionary director: I’m a writer who was tired of writing screenplays and decided to be a director. I realised that in order to have an excuse for just staying at home writing, you need to write a novel. Otherwise it is better trying and writing with a camera.

Mr Petri, don’t you think that the aim of a challenging kind of cinema would be to propose a solution to certain problems, rather than showing them resignedly, without any way out?
I don’t think so. A challenging cinema has to show a certain kind of problems: in my film, there is a psychological issue mixed with a more civil topic, legal proceedings. (...) The air is no more the same we used to breathe when we were younger, the characters of Neorealism are not the same, there is a coming back to those middle-class myths, money, sex, a waste of energy without a real deep spiritual effort, you know? A situation that causes corruption. In the old days, there were more serious problems, there was a republic to build, you know?

Why did you choose a “thriller” as your first work?
Because I believe in the “thriller” genre as an expression of daily reality: today our society goes left, it is necrophiliac. The police genre helps leading very vivid investigations on society: but here, a certain kind of literature is influenced by the news, it arrived as a reflection from Anglo-Saxon countries, which had already had a complex social development way before us, and an older literary tradition “of terror” (as a result of Protestantism), only after the Thirties and our first local tale inspired to a news event is Quer pasticciaccio brutto de via Merulana...

And why did you choose Marcello Mastroianni as the protagonist of your psychological “thriller”, as many other directors already did in presenting a typical character of our days?
Not for a lack of Italian actors, that’s for sure: Ferzetti, for example, Ferrari, they are all excellent actors, but Mastroianni has got a feebleness that belongs to certain negative characters, he has a human charm that makes the protagonist more real, warmer. An actor from the streets could be useful for a gesture, for a cameo, but when you need a mental contribution, a psychology, I prefer an actor who comes from the theatre; the other kind of actors belongs to the characters of yesterday’s neorealism. I am looking for a connection not with reality in general, but with the reality of the character, with his conscience.

Traduzione in inglese Francesca Sala – English translation Francesca Sala

Director: Elio Petri.
Director assistant: Giuliano Montaldo.
Plot: Tonino Guerra, Elio Petri.
Screenplay: Pasquale Festa Campanile, Massimo Franciosa, Tonino Guerra, Elio Petri.
Director of photography: Carlo Di Palma.
Art director: Lorenzo Vespignani (altre fonti Carlo Egidi).
Costume designer: Graziella Urbinati.
Editor: Ruggero Mastroianni.
Music: Piero Piccioni.
Cast and characters: Marcello Mastroianni (Alfredo), Micheline Presle (Adalgisa De Matteis), Cristina Gaioni (Nicoletta Nogara), Salvo Randone (commissario Palumbo), Marco Mariani (commissario Margiotta), Franco Ressel (dott. Francesconi), Giovanna Gagliardo (Rosetta), Paolo Panelli (il detenuto Paolo), Toni Ucci (il detenuto Toni), Franco Freda (il barbone), Carlo Egidi (l'amico di Alfredo), Francesco Grandjaquet (il vecchio signore), Max Cartier (il valletto Bruno), Andrea Checchi (Morello, il marito di Adalgisa), Mac Roney (il suicida).
Production company: Franco Cristaldi per la Vides - Titanus, S.G.C. Parigi.
Italian distribution: Titanus.