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Rating: Dino Risi has diluted his great talent in a filmography as long as it is exhausted, half of which is composed of genuinely forgettable works; but if this half served to finance or balance the other, then all the better.
"In nome del popolo italiano" is the ripe and incredibly juicy fruit of an exceptional quintet: Dino Risi himself, directing Gassman and Tognazzi on a pyrotechnic script by Age & Scarpelli. Gassman is Lorenzo Santenocito, a very rich and powerful Roman industrialist, a regular visitor to the upper echelons of ministries, but also a vulgar Roman and womanizer who probably owes all his fortune to his marriage to Lavinia, whose (American?) family helped him in the aftermath of World War II. When a young high-class prostitute is found dead in her bed, with some bruises on her face and a lethal dose of a tranquilizer in her stomach, vague but curiously coincidental clues lead the irreproachable and socialist magistrate Mariano Bonifazi (Tognazzi) to suspect the aforementioned Santenocito. Bonifazi bites into the case file of this trial to the bone and doesn't let go even at the cost of making enemies of the many who work unworthily in the court and would like it to be filed as a "suicide": so great is his anger towards a managerial and entrepreneurial class that is so sloppy and dishonest that it sends his impartiality to hell. And when he finally finds the girl's diary, on which, on the date of death, words are recorded that unequivocally suggest suicide, he destroys it, burns it, thus obtaining the indictment of Lorenzo Santenocito.
A ruthless portrait of a little Italy that thirty-five years ago was not so different from today, "In nome del popolo italiano" is a film sarcastic but also unsettling (the symbolic collapse in the courtroom) with a touch of surrealism in the final sequence.
BRUNO CORTONA HAS RISEN TO POWER (and apparently, they have stayed there)
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