Word: inspector
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...local inspector (Trevor Howard) is, of course, baffled. Circumstantial evidence convicts Salem's villainous brother-in-law Dr. Anton Jenks (Per Oscarsson). In suspecting Jenks, the inspector may be the most inept member of his profession since Peter Sellers' celebrated Inspector Clouseau, whose left hand never knew what his left hand was doing. For Salem leaves behind acres of fingerprints and miles of footprints in the brittle snow. He is undone at last by a device whose trade name is An Ironic Twist of Fate-but which is, in fact, an arbitrary solution imposed by a fatigued imagination...
...Roman inspector (Gian Maria Volonte) is a remorseless homicide cop who also happens to be a homicidal psychopath. The sexual subcurrents of his sickness are brought out by his mistress (Florinda Bolkan), who is entranced by his bloody profession. The film opens on his last visit to her. "How will you kill me this time?" she coquettishly asks. "I'll cut your throat," he replies. And so he does, as they make love. With deliberate clumsiness, he steals her jewelry (but not her 300,000 lire), leaves his fingerprints in the shower and bloody shoeprints. Then he takes...
Brutal Authority. Inexorably, he is driven to involve himself in the murder investigation. Like Dostoevsky's Raskolnikov, the inspector longs to be discovered. Yet his perverse desire is not born of guilt; he is demonic rather than Christlike. "I left clues everywhere to prove that I am above suspicion," he muses, and the film's terror lies in the department's blind refusal to analyze the obvious clues before it. The inspector himself is obsessed with mutually exclusive notions: that he is above suspicion, and that the forces in power are infallible and must eventually find...
...nearly surrealistic aspects-as in a fantasy in which his inspection-department cronies refuse to allow him to plead guilty-are rather shaky recalls of Bunuel. Indeed, the film's fundamental drawback is that Director Petri is intent on political statement: the terrors of police fascism. The inspector cries: "Repression is civilization," and such crude political commentary detracts from solid psychological drama...
This is only a flaw in an icy gem. Petri's calculating direction is too swift and merciless to allow the clutter to become insuperable. Volonte, meanwhile, invests the role of the cold, internally rent inspector with brutal authority, giving credence to the proposition that if justice is blind, so is its terrible opposite...