Some movies fall through the cracks and then are rediscovered years later by movie geeks who are amazed that such formerly “lost films” even exist. Such is the case with Corrupt (1983), which was also released in some markets as Copkiller and Order of Death, the title of the psychological thriller by novelist Hugh Fleetwood which was adapted for this film. An international production with Italian and French financing, the movie marked the dramatic film debut of John Lydon aka Johnny Rotten of The Sex Pistols fame (he had previously played a version of himself in Julien Temple’s The Great Rock ‘n’ Roll Swindle [1980], which was a semi-autobiographical/fantasy account of Malcolm McLaren and his promotion/management of The Sex Pistols). Corrupt also featured Harvey Keitel in the other major role and the music score was composed by Ennio Morricone. Due to poor distribution and marketing (those alternate titles didn’t help), the film quickly vanished from theaters but it holds up today as a fascinating precursor to Abel Ferrara’s Bad Lieutenant (1992) while channeling some of the yin-yang duality of Donald Cammel & Nicolas Roeg’s Performance (1976).
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Pietro Germi’s Sicilian Marriage Farce
One doesn’t usually expect a film about infidelity, divorce and murder to be a comedy but that’s one reason Divorzio all’italiana (English title: Divorce, Italian Style, 1961) directed by Pietro Germi, became an unexpected international hit. A caustic satire about the Italian male – or more specifically, Sicily’s male dominated culture – the film also poked fun at Italy’s hypocritical judicial system which can forgive crimes of passion but not legally recognize divorce as a solution for failed marriages. Another factor in the movie’s success was Marcello Mastroianni’s beautifully rendered portrayal of the preening, self-absorbed protagonist, a performance which not only won him an Oscar nomination for Best Actor (the first time in Academy Award history that the lead in a foreign language film received that honor) but still ranks as one of the actor’s key films, following closely on the heels of Fellini’s La Dolce Vita (1960) and Antonioni’s La Notte (1961).
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