The Re-Release of Ferreri’s “Dillinger is Dead”

The Re-Release of Ferreri’s “Dillinger is Dead”
The Re-Release of Ferreri’s “Dillinger is Dead”

The Re-Release of Ferreri’s “Dillinger is Dead”

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Italian filmmaker Marco Ferreri was known for his cynical observations of the human condition.  They were often bleak.  That’s true of his film “Dillinger is Dead,” first released in 1969.  Still, Worldview film contributor Milos Stehlik of Facets Multimedia, says the re-released movie, shouldn’t be missed.

In the 1950s, French filmmakers picked up on gritty American detective thrillers, dubbed them “film noir” and tried to make the form their own. But they were stood up. While the French noir thriller quickly became intellectualized by adding social or political critique, the Italians did them one better. Their secret weapon was style. This era of Italian thrillers – such amazing films like Francesco Rosi’s “Salvatore Giuliano,” and “The Mattei Affair,” or Elio Petri’s “Investigation of a Citizen Above Suspicion” – is today sadly neglected. This is why the re-discovery and re-issue of Marco Ferreri’s  Dillinger is Dead is an extraordinary event.

Made in 1969 by Ferreri, the film stars Michel Piccoli, as a young but already balding industrial designer. He is an executive at a factory which makes masks for workers to use under toxic conditions. He’s bored. He comes home and finds his wife in bed with a headache. The wife is played by Anita Pallenberg, once married to Rolling Stones’ Keith Richards. She left him dinner, but it’s cold. He decides to make his own gourmet meal. While gathering the ingredients, he rummages through an old suitcase and finds an old revolver which is wrapped in a newspaper with the headline, “Dillinger is dead.”

Glauco cleans the gun and paints it red with white polka dots. He eats the dinner he’s cooked. He watches television and listens to music. He seduces the maid, played by Annie Girardot. The high point of their erotic encounter is his licking honey from the tip of her spine. He plays with the gun. Several times, he fools around with committing suicide. In the morning, as the sun comes up, he shoots his wife in the head three times. Then he goes to the sea, and fnds a yacht on which he gets a job as a chef. The yacht is bound for Tahiti.

Ferreri’s career as a filmmaker was filled with controversy. He was a sharp but cynical observer of human nature and could sometimes be both misanthropic and a mysogynist. His view of the human condition was bleak. In his big commercial success, La Grand Bouffe, four men seclude themselves and, in a series of gourmet meals, eat themselves to death. This cynicism is also present in Dillinger is Dead, but what makes the film such a joy to watch is Ferreri’s endless toying with absurdity.

The film is filled with contradictions, undermining any objective conclusion about his characters or their motivations. What is Glauco’s relationship to his wife? We don’t really know. Even more remarkably, the film’s plot unfolds almost wordlessly.

In an opening monologue, Ferreri establishes Glauco’s alienation from his job as a colleague reads from a collection of notes, “Isolation in a chamber that must be sealed from the outside world because it’s full of deadly gas…strongly evokes the conditions under which man lives.” Glauco interrupts, “I don’t want to design these anymore.” The gas masks he creates, the trophy wife with whom he doesn’t communicate, the chic 60s apartment, the maid who spends more time making herself into a sexual object than working – all these trappings of his well-managed life are absurd and meaningless.

This existential alienation fits well with the film’s modernist feel, its almost lackadaisical self-assurance, its concentration on the small details of an empty life whose greatest threat and defining characteristic is boredom.

Milos Stehlik’s commentaries reflect his own views and not necessarily those of Facets Multimedia, Worldview or 91.5 WBEZ.