“Above the Law”

Investigation of a Citizen Above Suspicion – Elio Petri

From the opening bars of Ennio Morricone’s whirling and claustrophobic score, Investigation of a Citizen Above Suspicion is a masterwork of political cinema. The film explores the nature of power and the ways in which unchecked authority can lead to moral corruption. It is a film about a police investigator (Gian Maria Volontè) who murders his mistress and purposefully leaves behind a set of clues that hint at his involvement in the crime, but who is nevertheless dismissed as a suspect by his colleagues on the police force.

The investigator commits a crime in plain sight and gets away with it. His transgression represents an opportunity to flaunt a lack of accountability and discipline within the police force and to prove that he is indeed, “a citizen above suspicion.” The police’s reluctance to investigate one of its own suggests a willful obliviousness, an institutionalized practice of ignoring pertinent evidence if that evidence threatens to compromise the reputation of the agency or the authority of its members. Thus the murder must be understood not as the act of a deranged man, but as a political act that demonstrates the social and moral corruption of a state that does not hold all of its citizens accountable to the same standards.

Sweet Smell of Success – Alexander Mackendrick (1957)

Alexander Mackendrick’s Sweet Smell of Success is a film about the cutthroat New York entertainment industry. The screenplay, by Ernest Lehman, is based on a short story that recalls his experience working as an assistant to Irving Hoffman, a prominent New York press agent and columnist. When the short story was first published, Hoffman was so dismayed at his unflattering portrayal that he refused to speak to Lehman for eighteen months. Nevertheless, the pair ultimately reconciled, and Hoffman wrote a column speculating that Lehman would make a good screenwriter. Within weeks, Lehman was invited to Los Angeles to meet with Paramount Pictures and would go on to a celebrated career in Hollywood.

The Hoffman anecdote perfectly encapsulates the nature and influence of the men who populate Sweet Smell of Success, volatile and influential figures with the power to make or break somebody’s career in a single column. The film is an homage to those who wield power through the press, those who steer the course of history, culture, and politics through their words and their audience. Though Sweet Smell of Success is set in an era which predates today’s fractured and densely-populated internet media landscape, the film continues to say pertinent things about the power of media and the threat of its abuse.