Excellent
Cadavers, opening this week in limited release and also available on DVD. Based
on Alexander Stille’s 1996 book of the same name — which also was the source
for a 1999 narrative feature starring Chazz Palminteri — the movie is certainly
not part of the Italian National Tourism Board’s welcoming care package, that’s
for sure.
In the beginning of 1982, there was a Mob killing “only” every
three days in
of the year, more than a 1,000 corpses had been stacked up. Excellent Cadavers focuses on hardnosed prosecutors
Giovanni Falcone and Paolo Borsellino, who led the city’s famed mid-decade
Maxi-Trials, where, from an underground bunker, more than 300 Sicilian Mob defendants
were eventually convicted in December 1987, including 19 life sentences for
mid- and high-level bosses. The resultant price, of course, was high — in 1992
Cosa Nostra struck back with hits on Falcone, Borsellino and others, after many
of the investigatory and legal innovations they had passionately argued for
were repealed or otherwise blunted, freeing hundreds.
Turco uses photojournalist interview subject Letizia Battaglia’s memories as a
child (she speaks eerily about the scent of blood) as well as a series of
extremely graphic black-and-white stills (apparently the Italians let as many
inquisitive people gather around bodies as a given sidewalk will allow) to
illuminate the ebb and flow of public acquiescence and outage. This is
eventually intercut with fascinating footage from the aforementioned trial,
interviews with current and former Italian magistrates (which is what they call
federal prosecutors) and a wide-ranging overview of the knotted and bought-off
Italian political scene.
Turco cedes too much of his movie’s pace and plotting to others (especially
early on), but makes up ground in a home stretch that includes revelations about
seven-time Prime Minister Giulio Andreotti’s wink-wink acquittal of criminal Mafia
ties due to statutory limitations and recently ousted former Prime
Minister/billionaire businessman Silvio Berlusconi’s connections to organized
crime as well.
defeat or the recent arrest of Bernardo Provenzano, a Mob boss who for more
than four decades lived in quiet “open secrecy” before recently being reeled
in, Excellent Cadavers highlights the
incentivized nature of the long-term relationship between dirty business and
equally imbedded politicos. The film opens in Los Angeles at the Laemmle Grande 4-Plex on Friday, October 27, and while it isn’t yet available for sell-through commercial release on DVD, more information can be accessed on the title through this web site.
