Mafia! Movies! Death!Super solid self aware political thriller with Nero staring as the director of a film portraying the shady dealings of a judge and his murder. Naturally life imitates art and the judge he portrayed fictionally gets murdered... that’s when this thing really starts shifting gears and people start getting offed left and right. Loved the score, the locations, and just how intriguing this little ditty was, plus I’m a Nero guy so any chance to gush over him and you bet your ass I’m in.I’d pay good money to watch the fake movie within this movie.
Another politically charged thriller from Damiano Damiani, this time fusing a story of corruption and mafia influence with a meta analysis of the crime film itself. Franco Nero stars as a director who has made a film about the killing of a fictional judge; apparently based on a real life judge that he suspects of being corrupt. However, when the real judge turns up dead, the director feels duty bound to investigate. How to Kill a Judge is a real slow burning and convoluted affair, but also supremely captivating. There's so much going on this one. The film within a film becomes the centrepiece of the action; fact prophecised by fiction, with the author's influence now an accessory to the crime. The mafia element is always bubbling under the surface, not least in the subconscious of our hero. A paranoia that overlays the action. There's a real beautiful irony in the way that the whole thing plays out, with the ending itself making the film a nice companion to Damiani's earlier mafia movie The Day of the Owl. Also, in opposition to Damiani's The Case is Closed; Forget It, the truth in this film is absolutely paramount....whatever that truth may be. A message that is simultaneously downbeat and uplifting all at once.
At its most successful as a further exposé on how authority scoffs at its own guilt, laughs and cries at art just like we do, but it’s all built on lies, their implicitness a shield and a pretense for chuckles and tears—all phony—and if by chance a sliver of humanity does slip out you can bet that it was by mistake, merely an oversight. I didn’t really care for the melodrama involving the widow, and the unlikable Damiani stand-in (played by a perhaps tanner-than-ever Franco Nero) was a smug dick through and through. Damiani may be aware of his ethical qualms and personal shortcomings, which is good I guess, but I really couldn’t care less (see: 8 1/2 for my further lack of regard for artists reflecting [but unchanging] upon their questionable behavior and myriad modes of operation both personally and artistically).Still, How to Kill a Judge, despite my qualms with it, remains engaging for the most part, is—as one would expect from Damiani—superbly crafted as always, and shows, amidst all the meta-, also the fickleness of the political boyscouts that plague most parties left, right, and center. Come back when you’re clean. Except that is not what they really mean is it; they mean come back when you are no longer soiled enough to be trouble. There will always be dirt and grime in the streets waiting to be swept up, but it is never the people usually associated with that such a turn of phrase, in fact those who hold brooms in hand are usually first to be forced to take a fall, which is a big part of why the melodramatic/gialloish kind of angle doesn’t really work for me here. I much prefer Damiani when he’s less reflexive and more incendiary.If your film gets a fascist killed, who cares. Make another just like it. You cannot have humanity for the inherently inhumane.
