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Released by: Blue Underground
Released on: February 28, 2006.
Director: Damiano Damiani
Cast: Franco Nero, Renzo Palmer, Marco Guglielmi, Francoise Fabian, Mico Cundari
Year: 1975
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The Movie:
In Damiano Damiani's How To Kill A Judge, Franco Nero (hunky star of Django and The Fifth Cord) plays a film director named Giacomo Solaris whose recent movie has become the subject of some controversy as it is based on the story of a judge who happens to be on the take from the mafia. The judge who the film is based on, Magistrate Traini (Marco Guglielmi), has a chance to screen the movie before it hits the mass market thanks to an overzealous assistant who is in an uproar over the whole affair and who insists that he should have Solaris brought in for 'defamation of character.' Traini doesn't seem to get as hot headed about the movie as his employee does, and in fact, he invites Solaris to a dinner party where he is allowed the chance to mingle with the upper class at Traini's own home. When Traini gets the chance to talk to Solaris alone about the film, its here that we learn of his true feelings towards the film, and it seems he is slightly more incensed about it all then he let on. Solaris refuses to back down or re-edit the movie, swearing that he can prove what he states happens in the movie and is willing to risk jail time stating that the scandal around the case would harm Traini far more than it would him.
The day after the party, Magistrate Traini shows up with a bullet in his head, laying dead in his car outside the office. The mafia are the prime suspects in the murder, and it would seem that Solaris' film proved to be uncomfortably prophetic in more ways than one. Antonia Traini (Francoise Fabian), the Magistrate's widow, believes the murderer to be a parking lot employee who her husband had fired out to seek revenge but Solaris himself believes that story to simply be a cover up to hide the mafia ties that she and her late husband had. Solaris sets out to investigate who shot the judge and, just as importantly, why they did it but his ties in the criminal underworld know nothing and it would seem that maybe the mafia isn't as heavily involved here as he first thought. Solaris risks getting himself into hot water not only with the mobsters but also the local police but he won't let that deter him from finding the real killer and bringing him to justice.
Anyone going into this one expecting the bang bang shoot'em up action that is most often associated with the Italian crime genre of the era is bound to be disappointed that How To Kill A Judge is an almost completely dialogue based drama with some mystery/whodunnit elements thrown in to keep things moderately interesting. The cover art might make it look like an action film but it isn't at all, and instead it's a very talky picture that, in all honesty, moves very slowly and suffers from poor pacing. Franco Nero makes for a likeable enough and charismatic lead but it doesn't prove to be quite enough to make this one as good as it could have been despite the fact that he is very good in his role. Thankfully the movie looks great and benefits from some very nice cinematography that captures the city settings well and that manages to build some tension in the final act of the film but that never really manages to help fill the film with any suspense. It looks good, it sounds good, it's well acted and well made, and it's still slow and rather meandering for most of its running time.
The movie has its moments and some of the interaction between Nero and the lovely Fabian is interesting in that it alludes to more than it really shows, but ultimately the movie is decidedly average and really not much more than that.
Video/Audio/Extras:
The anamorphic 1.85.1 widescreen transfer for How To Kill A Judge is very nice indeed with excellent color separation, nice deep black levels and only a minute amount of aliasing present. The image is clean, clear and contains some nice foreground and background detail throughout. Fleshtones look lifelike and natural and while there is some fine grain present, it's never distracting and the transfer looks very natural and very film-like. Very nicely done.
Blue Underground allows fans the option of watching the film in either English or Italian, both tracks coming to DVD in Dolby Digital Mono format. The first thing you'll notice if you chose the English track is that it sounds like Nero did his own dubbing here. The second thing you'll notice is that there's a bit of hiss in some scenes. Aside from that, however, the audio fares well. A few scenes on the English track are presented in Italian with automatically enabled English subtitles as these scenes were omitted from the English langauge version of the movie and therefore never dubbed in the first place.
The main supplement on this release comes in the form of a featurette entitled The Damiani/Nero Connection in which Nero sits down to talk about his work with the director on How To Kill A Judge and a few of the other features they shot together. Damiano Damiani is also featured here, and the two discuss working together, the political climate in which the film was made, and throughout the fifteen minute running time, they manage to fill in a few blanks for us as to the 'hows' and 'whys' of their collaborative efforts. Finishing off the extra features are two trailers for the film.
The Final Word:
A rather slow and frankly uninteresting, though admittadly very well made, political drama, How To Kill A Judge gets a genuinely nice DVD release from Blue Underground.