The provocative Italian filmmaker Elio Petri’s most internationally acclaimed work is this remarkable, visceral, Oscar-winning thriller. Petri maintains a tricky balance between absurdity and realism in telling the Kafkaesque tale of a Roman police inspector (a commanding Gian Maria Volontè) investigating a heinous crime—which he himself committed. Both a compelling character study and a disturbing commentary on the draconian government crackdowns in Italy in the late 1960s and early ’70s, Petri’s kinetic portrait of surreal bureaucracy is a perversely pleasurable rendering of controlled chaos.

1970
115 minutes
Color
1.85:1
Italian

SPECIAL FEATURES

New 4K digital film restoration, with uncompressed monaural soundtrack on the Blu-ray
Archival interview with director Elio Petri, conducted by critic and filmmaker Alexandre Astruc
Elio Petri: Notes About a Filmmaker (2005), a ninety-minute documentary on the director’s career, featuring interviews with friends, collaborators, and filmmakers
New interview with film scholar Camilla Zamboni
Investigation of a Citizen Named Volontè (2008), a fifty-minute documentary about actor Gian Maria Volontè
Music in His Blood, an interview with composer Ennio Morricone from 2010, conducted by film critic Fabio Ferzetti
Trailers
New English subtitle translation
PLUS: An essay by film scholar Evan Calder Williams and excerpts from a 2001 book by screenwriter Ugo Pirro