WE STILL KILL THE OLD WAY (1967) • Frame Rated

We Still Kill the Old Way / A ciascuno il suo is a disappointment if you’re expecting a satisfying, meticulously crafted crime thriller. However, if you want an unusual slab of suspense wrapped around a complex social commentary, there’s plenty to appreciate. It certainly looks like a murder mystery, but don’t expect to be spoon-fed a solution. There are plenty of clues, but identifying the culprit or culprits is left to the viewer, who, excluded by the fourth wall, remains powerless to do anything about it.

As would be expected from Italian maverick director Elio Petri, this is a stylistically experimental film that employs all the trappings of a detective story but subverts them to make a statement about Sicilian life in the 1960s, with its café culture good life, wild spaces with abundant game, tight-knit community, family secrets, political corruption, adultery, murder, and the oppressive moral pretence of the Roman Catholic Church.

This 2K restoration by Movietime, in association with Museo Nazionale del Cinema Torino, constitutes the film’s UK Blu-ray premiere, and Radiance is releasing it back-to-back with Elio Petri’s A Quiet Place in the Country (1968). A sensible decision as that’s how the films were made, and both are very much products of their time. Although they differ greatly in terms of style and genre, they also have a lot in common. Both are visually adventurous and subversive and exploit genre conventions to propel their narratives. Both tell the stories of disempowered and misguided men who, nevertheless, attempt to do something worthwhile believing they can benefit the society around them. And in each case, those central characters are embodied by bravura performances from uncommonly talented actors. In this case, Gian Maria Volontè in his first significant leading role.

In the opening shots, we fly over the austere terrain of Sicily and zoom in to a coastal town with its sun-baked facades and piazzas right down to a group of card players. We will soon learn that just because a group of men play cards together, it doesn’t mean they’re friends. Among them is the pharmacist, Manno (Luigi Pistilli), who hands round a death-threat letter he just received. So far, Manno has taken comfort that he’s still alive despite receiving several, dismissing them as from a disgruntled ex-lover or one of their husbands. Among others at the table are the town doctor, Roscio (Franco Tranchina), and a top lawyer called Rosello (Gabriele Ferzetti), but the only one to show any serious interest in the note is Professor Paolo Laurana (Gian Maria Volontè), who peels off the cut-out word morir—Italian for ‘die’—examining its reverse. Only later will we realise how weighted their dialogue and seemingly insignificant gestures have been.

Elio Petri’s use of hand-held cameras and zoom lenses, expertly handled by his collaborative cinematographer Luigi Kuveille, really pull us into the action from impersonal wide shot to claustrophobic close-up. From a street scene to the tight framing of a clandestine conversation. At the time, the zoom had all but disappeared from the visual vocabulary of cinema and was avoided by so-called serious directors. Petri’s abundant use of zooms wasn’t solely a stylistic choice but a logistical decision to expedite shooting by avoiding lens and lighting changes. This placed great demands on the actors as well as requiring meticulous planning and editing but is an indelible feature of the movie’s distinctive visual identity that lends the gravitas of vérité reportage or newsreel footage… and who doesn’t love a good zoom shot?

Dr Roscio takes Manno pigeon shooting to his ‘secret place’ on the coastal plains. Real footage is used here of birds being shot in flight, which adds a certain visceral authenticity when Manno is also shot. Roscio first believes it to be a hunting accident until a second shot finishes off his companion, and he’s then killed by a third. It’s not long before local police round up three local farmers, the father and two brothers of a teenage girl, recently a mistress of the late Manno.

The lawyer Rosello takes up the case, and it looks like the trial will be fast-tracked until Professor Laurana astutely points out that all three scapegoats were illiterate and wouldn’t be able to scour a newspaper to cut out the text used in the death threats. Teaming up with Roscio’s widow, Louisa (Irene Papas), he turns amateur sleuth and decides to uncover the real reasons for the murders of her husband and Manno.

The first clue they have is that the words of the death threats were clipped from L’Osservatore Romano, the Vatican daily newspaper, and there are only two local subscribers, both priests. Secondly, Laurana learns from a politician friend (Leopoldo Trieste) that Dr Roscio had recently told him that he had documents that could scandalise a local person of note, or as he had put it, “a crook with the whole province under his thumb.” So, perhaps the threats had been diversions, and Roscio was the target all along…

Digging deeper in their search for the missing documents, they begin to uncover what appears to be some sort of cover-up with implications reaching as high as parliament. As the intrigue deepens, Petri evokes a real atmosphere of mounting menace as Laurana realises that he’s crossed a line and is in mortal danger. However, as the plot unravels, it also becomes clearer that it’s not going to play out like a traditional mystery thriller. Instead, Petri is viewing the wider socio-political malaise of post-war Italy through the lens of a rather provincial Sicilian story. Also, like A Quiet Place in the Country, it’s a character study of an outsider dealing with a daunting turn of events that they cannot fully grasp.

In A Quiet Place in the Country, it’s a troubled artist (Franco Nero) with a slippery grip on reality, but in We Still Kill the Old Way, it’s a romantic intellectual who is set apart from his community. He’s an observer of life, still lives with his mother, and is obsessed with details but unable to see ‘the big picture’. Using today’s terminology, we would probably say that he’s ‘on the spectrum’.

It must be said that although the entire cast is excellent, Gian Maria Volontè carries the movie and is the best reason to keep watching till the bitter end. At the time, it would’ve been Irene Papas who was considered the star after taking the female lead in two internationally successful movies, The Guns of Navarone (1961) and Zorba the Greek (1964). Here, she begins by overplaying the grieving widow but transitions to a more cool and inscrutable character as she becomes more involved with Laurana’s conspiracy theories.

He’s our avatar, yet we see more than he does, and this only thickens the overall pall of dread. We also begin to question whether he’s motivated to solve the crime for the sake of justice or simply to get closer to Louisa. Are his intentions pure, or is he driven by suppressed lust for the woman he has long harboured unrequited feelings for? Laurana is a flawed but generally good man lacking in some basic social intelligence. This naivety leaves him open to cruel manipulation and betrayals.

It was the character of Professor Laurana who Elio Petri identified with in Leonardo Sciascia’s original 1966 novel, A ciascuno il suo / To Each His Own. The novel was inspired by events leading up to the assassination of Cataldo Tandoy in 1960. He was a Sicilian policeman who investigated several murders tied to the activities of the Cosa nostra, the notorious Sicilian mafia. However, nearly all the suspects he arrested were acquitted and released before he could submit his evidence.

This was the fifth screenplay that Petri co-wrote with Ugo Pirro, and they would become repeat collaborators. During the intensive writing process at Petri’s own ‘quiet place in the country’, they corresponded with Sciascia to clarify several factors. He made no direct contribution to the adaptation and is thought to have been generally dissatisfied with it, especially since Petri told him he would not make it into a political film.

Sciascia maintained that his fiction was inherently political, and one of the reasons he agreed to Petri adapting it was their shared political views, both having been members of the Italian Communist Party. Despite his claim, however, the result is a highly politicised movie that avoids delivering an explicit polemic. Instead of preaching, it simply provokes. Petri would adapt another of Sciascia’s political novels as Todo Modo (1976), which would be the fourth and final film he directed starring Gian Maria Volontè, after Investigation of a Citizen Above Suspicion (1970) and The Working Class Goes to Heaven (1971).

We Still Kill the Old Way met with mixed reviews on its initial theatrical run, but screenings were well-attended by people who saw themselves and their way of life represented in a raw and honest way. Although there is no explicit reference to the mafia in the script, this was one of the earliest unglossed portrayals of their influence across all levels of Italian society—rural farming communities, politicians, the legal system, and the ever-present clergy. It seems Petri was a brave man, though he has downplayed his interest in mafia stories and explained that the mafia is simply an extended family structure where a group of people, for better or for worse, cooperate in the understanding of what their responsibilities and obligations are—hence, he noted, a film crew is a kind of mafia.

We Still Kill the Old Way went on to win the ‘Best Screenplay Award’ at Cannes and three prestigious Silver Ribbons, awarded by the Italian National Syndicate of Film Journalists: Best Director for Elio Petri, ‘Best Actor’ went to Gian Maria Volontè, and Gabriele Ferzetti won ‘Best Supporting Actor’.

ITALY | 1967 | 94 MINUTES | 1.85:1 | COLOUR | ITALIAN

Limited Edition Blu-ray Special Features:

• 2K restoration of the film by Movietime in association with Museo Nazionale del Cinema Torino, on Blu-ray for the first time in the UK.
• Alternate presentation with English language title sequence and audio.
• Original uncompressed mono PCM audio.
• Archival documentary featuring interviews with writer Ugo Pirro, composer Luis Bacalov and Paola Petri (32 mins.) An excellent overview of the director and his work in general, with particular attention to We Still Kill the Old Way. Ugo Perri recounts meeting Petri when they both worked with the influential director Giuseppe De Santis. He goes on to discuss their collaboration and tracks production from initial concept to production. Luis Bacalov is entertaining and erudite, and the way he talks about his compositions for the film is an education for those interested in how films are scored and what music can convey and communicate when applied intelligently and sensitively. And who better than the director’s wife, Paola Petri, to provide biographical details and insight into his opinions and way of thinking?
• Interview with make-up artist Pier Antonio Mecacci (2021, 29 mins.) He gives an overview of his career from his early days in automobile advertising but appropriately talked mainly about his work for Petri and shared anecdotes about key cast members. He recalled how Gian Maria Volonté really understood screen make-up, which was a challenge for scenes that zoomed between medium shots to close-ups. Apparently, the actor would remain in character on set, arriving and leaving in costume and avoiding any off-set contact with the rest of the cast and crew.
• Interview with Roberto Curti, author of Elio Petri: Investigation of a Filmmaker (2021, 23 mins.) He begins by outlining the stringent censorship laws enforced in Italy at the time by the Christian Democrat party, which insisted on scripts being passed before production was allowed to begin. He discusses several failed projects that Petri was involved with. He then highlights the opposition that We Still Kill the Old Way met with. For example, it was given a higher certificate than expected, intended to restrict audiences, and the promotional poster was banned as an ‘offence to public decency’, with all copies confiscated. He then provides a commentary on some stylistic aspects of the movie and how it challenged the established structure of the mystery thriller.
• Interview with Fabrizio Catalano, grandson of author Leonardo Sciascia (2021, 31 mins.) In which he shares insight into the author’s recurring themes and compares the novel with the film, describing the story as an unconventional thriller with a foregone conclusion. He points out that the intellectual central character is educated to a high level, and this already separates him from the masses. He becomes an outsider looking in on society, with insight gained through an understanding of the history of how people often follow similar patterns to those that have succeeded or failed in the past. He posits that the intellectual is removed from common circles and their influence on everyday life is therefore diminished. Also, as governments veer further to the right, they tend to marginalise, if not actively suppress, intellectuals and ‘experts’.
• Trailer.
• Newly translated English subtitles for Italian audio and English SDH for English audio.
• Reversible sleeve featuring artwork based on original posters.
• Limited edition booklet featuring new writing on the film by scholar David Melville and a statement by Petri. Not available at the time of review.
• Limited edition of 3000 copies, presented in full-height Scanavo packaging with removable OBI strip leaving packaging free of certificates and markings.

Cast & Crew

director: Elio Petri.
writers: Elio Petri & Ugo Perri (based on the novel ‘To Each His Own’ by Leonardo Sciascia).
starring: Gian Maria Volonté, Irene Papas, Gabriele Ferzetti, Mario Scaccia, Leopoldo Trieste, Laura Nucci, Luigi Pistilli & Salvo Randone.