Illustrious Corpses Blu-ray Review

Radiance Films

Blu-ray Release: January 26, 2026

Video: 1.85:1/1080p/Color

Audio: Italian LPCM 2.0 Mono

Subtitles: English

Run Time: 121:49

Director: Francesco Rosi

When a series of supreme court judges are murdered, Inspector Rogas (Lino Ventura) is sent to find the truth, but discovers a labyrinthine conspiracy of corruption and institutional power. (From Radiance’s official synopsis)

For the most part, the giallo and poliziottescho booms were populist fads, cranked out quickly for low budgets and released in other countries as straight exploitation market fodder. But there were exceptions – films with arthouse aspirations that played with genre, ignored clichés, and gained international prestige. The best examples (as far as I’m concerned) would be Elio Petri’s savvy satirical thriller Investigation of a Citizen Above Suspicion (Italian: Indagine su un cittadino al di sopra di ogni sospetto, 1970), Damiano Damiani’s mafia drama The Day of the Owl (Italian: Il giorno della civetta, 1968), and Francesco Rosi’s Illustrious Corpses (Italian: Cadaveri eccellenti, 1976)*.

Investigation of a Citizen Above Suspicion won the 1970 Cannes Grand Prix and Best Foreign Film Academy Award, while Day of the Owl and Illustrious Corpses both won the David di Donatello Award for Best Film and Direction. All three films are framed by political themes and focus on procedural murder cases from the point-of-view of investigating officers, though the three leads represent varying degrees of morality, professionalism, and competence. Illustrious Corpses’ Inspector Rogas, portrayed by Italian-born, French film star Lino Ventura, represents a classic veteran archetype, cynical and burdened by the system.

Working from Leonardo Sciascia’s 1971 novel Equal Danger (Italian: Il contesto), Rosi and co-screenwriters Tonino Guerra and Lino Jannuzzi removed the book’s dark sense of humor (reportedly, I haven’t read it), opting instead to lean into the moody hyperrealism. Stylistically, it bridges the gaps between Jean-Pierre Melville’s melancholic crime epics, the paranoid, Melville- flavored New Hollywood films of the 1970s, and Gothic horror, trapping its protagonist in an oppressive maze of austere architecture. This bleak imagery and contemplative pacing work in concert with Rosi’s surrealistic touches to turn a standard political thriller into a supremely paranoid, borderline Kafkaesque nightmare.

Illustrious Corpses doesn’t disguise its social/political meaning, but also isn’t as literal as Rosi’s cinema verité-styled revolutionary bio-pic Salvatore Giuliano (1962). Its revolutionary backdrop, depicting strife between left wing demonstrators and right wing government officials, is definitely representative of Italy (including actual newsreel footage) – to the point that any viewer unaware of Italy’s specific political strifes at the time might find themselves a bit lost – yet it takes place in an unnamed fictional country, implying that its conspiracies and crimes are a universal problem.

Rosi is among Italy’s most celebrated filmmakers. His multi-award-winning filmography included Lucky Luciano (1973), which featured Investigation of a Citizen Above Suspicion’s Gian Maria Volonté as the title character, the Oscar nominated Three Brothers (Italian: Tre Fratelli, 1981), Golden Lion winners The Mattei Affair (Italian: Il Caso Mattei, also starring Volonté, 1972), and Hands over the City (Italian: Le mani sulla città), and BAFTA winner Christ Stopped at Eboli (Italian: Cristo si è fermato a Eboli, 1983). Perhaps his most enduring feature was revolutionary bio-pic Salvatore Giuliano, which, along with Hands Over the City and Illustrious Corpses, was included in the Italian Ministry of Cultural Heritage’s 100 films that “changed the collective memory of Italy between 1942 & 1978” (sort of the Italian equivalent to the Library of Congress).

Ventura is joined by an all-star cast from across Europe, including fellow Frenchman Charles Vanel of Henri-Georges Clouzot’s Wages of Fear (French: Le Salaire de la peur, 1953), Tino Carraro of Dario Argento’s The Cat O’ Nine Tails (Italian: Il gatto a nove code, 1971), giallo and spaghetti western regular Luigi Pistilli, Modesty Blaise herself, Tina Aumont (also seen in Sergio Martino’s Torso [Italian: Corpi Pesentano Tracce di Violenza Carnale, 1973]), and Swedish actor Max Von Sydow, hot off of William Friedkin’s The Exorcist (1973) and Sydney Pollack’s Three Days of the Condor (1975). Speaking of Friedkin, Illustrious Corpses also borrows two supporting players from The French Connection (1971) in Fernando Rey and Marcel Bozzuffi, both of whom were big players in the greater poliziottescho arena.

* Michelangelo Antonioni’s Blowup (1966) might also fit this collection of films, but it was made in the mid-‘60s, before giallo, poliziottescho, or even mafia thrillers really took off, which arguably puts it in a different category. That said, Blowup inspired Francis Ford Coppola’s The Conversation (1974) and I see a lot of that film in the final act of Illustrious Corpses. 

Bibliography

• Cinema Italiano: The Complete Guide from Classics to Cult by Howard Hughes (I.B. Tauris, 2011)

• Italian Crime Filmography, 1968-1980 by Roberto Curti (McFarland & Company, 2013)

Video

Illustrious Corpses first hit US DVD and Blu-ray from Kino Lorber in 2021. I’m actually a little surprised that a different boutique label, Radiance Films, has already re-released it under their own banner only five years later, but, hey, if you don’t already own it, here’s your chance. Radiance’s 1.85:1, 1080p transfer is derived from the same 2019 L’Immagine Ritrovata 4K restoration that Kino used. Fortunately, Ritrovata didn’t go ham on yellows during the color timing process, so the image has all the advantages of the company’s giallo and spaghetti western transfers without the major weaknesses.

This is a very dark film and the transfer does its best to strike a balance between murkiness and clarity. Sometimes, this leads to pooling blacks, grainy wide-shots, and hazy backdrops, but elements are separated and lines are discernible when necessary, all without undoing the mood with oversharpening effects. Colors are muted, but lively, (outside of the extra grainy black & white flashback inserts) including rich earth tones, warm, natural skin tones, and delicate greens and blues.

Audio

Illustrious Corpses is presented in its original Italian mono and uncompressed LPCM sound. This is a generally quiet and contemplative film with long silent stretches and low music mixes, so don’t expect demo disc material from the mix and you should be very happy. While most Italian films from the era were shot without sound and dubbed entirely in post, it appears that some of Illustrious Corpses was shot with live sound. For the most part, lip sync and tone is off in the typical manner (Max von Sydow, for example, seems to be acting in English). Though generally quiet, Piero Piccioni’s sparingly utilized score offers needed depth throughout.

Extras

• Commentary by filmmaker Alex Cox (2021) – This commentary with the director of Repo Man (1984) and general Italian genre expert is the only holdover from the Kino Lorber release. Cox is typically well-composed and informative, especially when it comes to contextualizing Rosi’s work and the politics of the time, but there’s also a lot of silent space and narration of on-screen events (also typical of one of Cox’s commentary). 

• 1976 interview with Francesco Rosi (3:40, SD) – In this brief French television clip, the director discusses Illustrious Corpses.

• 1976 interview with Francesco Rosi and Lino Ventura (4:46, SD) – A second French TV interview featuring the director and his star talking about their relationship.

• 2025 interview with Gaetana Marrone (28:53, HD) – The author of The Cinema of Francesco Rosi (Oxford University Press, 2020) explores Sciascia’s original novel, the film updating the book’s story to account for actual judicial murderers, the fictional location, the larger political and criminal context of the story, Rosi’s stylistic change from ‘documentary-realism’ to noir, and the structure of the film.

• Theatrical trailer

• Image gallery

The images on this page are taken from the BDs and sized for the page. Larger versions can be viewed by clicking the images. Note that there will be some JPG compression.