This Season's World Cinema Classic is a 1970 Italian satirical crime thriller directed by Elio Petri, starring Gian Maria Volonté and Florinda Bolkan.

It is a psychological, black-humoured satire on corruption in high office, telling the story of a top police officer who kills his mistress and then tests whether the police would charge him for this crime. He begins manipulating the investigation by planting obvious clues while the other police officers ignore them, either intentionally or not. 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.

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The film was released in Italy on 9 February 1970 to widespread acclaim from critics. It won the

Jury Prize at the 1970 Cannes Film Festival and

the David di Donatello Awards for Best Film and Best Actor (Gian Maria Volonté). In the United States, it won the Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film. Petri and his co-writer Ugo Pirro were nominated for Best Original Screenplay. 

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In 2008, the film was included on the Italian Ministry of Cultural Heritages’ 100 Italian films to be saved, a list of 100 films that "have changed the collective memory of the country between 1942 and 1978." 

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Sara Steinke