Franco Nero was one of Italy’s great male stars through the 50s and 60s, appearing in spaghetti Westerns (notably as the titular Django), gialli, science fiction, World War II films, and all of the other genres that saw brief explosions of popularity in that cinephile country. He also had a fairly significant career in British and American productions, but of interest for now is three Italian films he made with director Damiano Damiani between 1968 and 1975, in each of which his character winds up involved with Mafia dealings, now collected into the box set Cosa Nostra.
The first of these is 1968’s The Day of the Owl, aka Il giorno della civetta, aka Mafia, in which Nero’s nonchalant charisma makes an odd match for his character, an out-of-town policeman unversed in how things go down in Mafia country, Sicily; so determined is he to put a dent in the local code of silence that he ends up very nearly as bad as those he’s pursuing, making arrests without cause, writing up false statements, and intimidating suspects and witnesses. The script, which was nominated for the Golden Bear, is lean, fairly intelligent and, to its credit, gives real dramatic weight to its only prominent female rôle, the noble, guarded, fiercely independent and ambiguously promiscuous widow of the man whose murder kicks off the whole chain of events. Claudia Cardinale, rightly lauded for her performance in Sergio Leone’s Once Upon a Time in the West, brings a similar understated intensity to this performance, easily outshining the film’s nominal star and ultimately proving the best reason to watch – certainly the only reason to rewatch.
Nero is on the other side of the law in the prison film The Case is Closed – Forget It (L’istruttoria è chiusa: dimentichi), though just barely: he’s a respectable architect, sent to prison due to a minor traffic violation and a Kafkaesque mix-up of names. The film balances its absurdist reading of justice and corruption with the all-pervading Catholicism of Italy, providing a resigned, yet wickedly satirical examination of prison life and the various characters encountered behind bars. Prison movies are at their best when they’re simply depicting the realities of incarcerated life but, film being what it is, they usually find some kind of point or end goal in their second half to give them shape; it might be a daring escape (Escape from Alcatraz, The Shawshank Redemption), supernatural shenanigans (The Green Mile) or even, simply, the endless escalation of meaningless violence (Bronson). But there’s always something, and in Case is Closed it’s a particularly dark moral quandary. This is introduced and handled with some skill, so it would be a shame to give away its details here, but it really lends persuasive force to the film’s almost-total cynicism. The Case is Closed – Forget It is less recognised than the other two films in the box set; however, it stands out as the strongest and most unusual of the set, and is, as so many Italian films of the 60s and 70s, aided immensely by its Ennio Morricone score.
How to Kill a Judge (Perché si uccide un magistrato) finishes the set on a strange note. Here, Nero is a filmmaker – one suspects, a filmmaker not dissimilar from Damiani – whose latest film, a Mafia thriller involving a murdered judge, evidently hits a little too close to home, for soon enough a real magistrate turns up murdered in the same fashion. The slowest and most self-reflective of the films in the box set, How to Kill a Judge mostly proceeds in the fashion of the then-voguish “poliziotteschi” genre, yet the film’s real goal is to explore the relationship between the fanciful, high-impact violence of the Italian cinema and its real-life counterpart, which is often subtler – often, in fact, unnecessary; How to Kill a Judge depicts an Italy in which the Mafia hold an effortless and almost unquestioned monopoly on the courts and the lawmakers. Corruption is routine, especially for the delightfully odious Senator played by a scene-stealing Giancarlo Badessi. The most cynical in a set of three hardly optimistic films, How to Kill a Judge rounds things out on a nicely thoughtful, downbeat note despite sometimes going too far in indulging the contrivances of the poliziotteschi genre.