Illustrious Corpses

Original title: Cadaveri eccellenti

1976
PG
2h

IMDb RATING

YOUR RATING

An investigation of the judges' assassinations reveals a political background.An investigation of the judges' assassinations reveals a political background.An investigation of the judges' assassinations reveals a political background.

See production info at IMDbPro

IMDb RATING

7.3/10

2.9K

YOUR RATING

See production info at IMDbPro

Awards
- 5 wins & 6 nominations total

Trivia
The title refers to a party game, Cadavres Exquis (Exquisite Corpses) invented by the French Surrealists. Each person in turn would be handed a piece of paper folded accordion fashion so that only one narrow horizontal strip showed at a time. The person would draw a section of a human body but would not know what other people had previously drawn. At the end the paper would be unfolded to show the entire body, which would be a mixture of fat and thin, young and old, male and female, etc. The title therefore means that one is not able to use what happens as any guide to what will happen next.

Connections
Edited into Lo schermo a tre punte (1995)

Soundtracks
Jeanne y Paul
Written and performed by Astor Piazzolla
Courtesy of Paganmusic S.r.l.

User reviews25

Review

Featured review

Hidden monsters.

Director Francesco Rosi calls ILLUSTRIOUS CORPSES "a trip through the monsters and monstrosities of power." It is a detective thriller with the format of a political expose and deals with an unseen killer whose victims are judges, public prosecutors and magistrates. Viewers who have seen Rosi's THREE BROTHERS remember that one of the episodes in that film deals with a magistrate has a nightmare in which he envisions his own murder my terrorists. In ILLUSTRIOUS CORPSES Rosi elevates the crime of assassination to a cataclysmic dimension within which a modern industrial society is dragged to the brink of collapse. It is a structurally elliptical but harrowing picture of the weaknesses in social foundations and the fragility of all government. The country the movie is set in is unspecified although it clearly seems to be Italy. Yet the film is unspecific enough to represent any nation portrayed as being on the brink of anarchy. The eerie opening is set in Palermo's Convento dei Cappuccini with its crypt of 8000 bodies, some mummified, some rotting in subterranean corridors. Rosi turns those images into a horrific metaphor of political and social transience that are the themes of this movie. In the final sequence, oceans of banner-waving Communists are cut with noisily revving tanks being readied for a rightist takeover of power. One should observe that Rosi's left-wing political biases admit only of right-wing coups as being ominous. Nevertheless, it is an unsettling finale to a remarkable and unsettling film.