Todo modo

Petri’s magnum opus is an ill-fated film. The disarming audacity the filmmaker mustered to create his shocking portrait of the ruling establishment resulted in the relegation of this absurdly delirious treatise on corruption and power to oblivion. Loosely based on the novella of the same name by Leonardo Sciascia, Petri suggestively portrayed a spiritual retreat organized by Jesuit cleric Don Gaetano (Marcello Mastroianni) for the Christian Democratic elite, including their hardened leader (Gian Maria Volonté). The detective plot – during the course of which highly-placed politicians are eliminated under mysterious circumstances – enhances the most uncompromising example of a political film ever made, a sophisticated indictment of events that took place in a country convulsed by the Years of Lead: politicians’ desperate efforts to maintain wealth and power gained through clientelistic practices, the fear of a neofascist coup d’état, terrorist attacks, a murky system (for state representatives themselves) of secret services, and CIA activities motivated by a strengthening communist movement. Through all this, ordinary people were somehow forgotten, their worthy lives having long weighed heavy on Petri’s heart. So the outraged moviemaker sent the cynical political hirelings to hell, even the leader himself, whom Volonté befittingly modeled on politicians Aldo Moro and Giulio Andreotti. Then the film’s accursed fate was sealed when Moro was murdered by the Red Brigades, an event it had sadly presaged.