Double Murder (1977)

Original title: Doppio delitto

Police inspector Baldassare (Marcello Mastroianni) has been banished into some particularly boring part of the police archives some years ago, following a monumental screw-up that has become somewhat legendary among his colleagues. He seems to have made his peace with the boring life and spends his free time reading old detective fiction and wandering through his Roman neighbourhood, looking melancholic. Baldassare’s old instincts awaken when he stumbles upon a very curious accidental death by lightning strike that manages – those old metal handrails are dangerous! – to kill two people in the same building, an old palazzo: the prince who owned it, as well as a guy doing some repairs on the building.

Baldassare decides this is a bit too much random chance to be believable and begins poking around the case a little. It turns out the deaths were indeed murders, and they will not be the only ones. Given the number of mildly eccentric suspects, thinning these numbers a little in that way just might be of help to our not always intrepid hero. Among the suspects are a political activist (Agostina Belli) with a side-line in flirting with aging cops, the prince’s wife, a former Hollywood actress (Ursula Andress), their friend, a scriptwriter (Peter Ustinov) writing about the time when the prince was helping to finagle the “Reichskonkordat” between the Nazis and the Vatican, an eccentric bookseller, an artist (Jean-Claude Brialy) of dubious merit, and so on and so forth.

This comedic mystery directed by Steno (apparently a man with little use for a proper name) is a small delight. Unlike a lot of Italian comedies I’ve seen, this doesn’t typically aim for slapstick and broad jokes, though the couple of times it does use them, these land as well. Instead, the film’s humour is character-based, often a thing of wry asides, played with small gestures often more meant to make you smile than to induce belly laughs.

Which does befit Double Murder’s sense of middle-aged melancholia. Most of the characters here have come down in the world in one way or another, and are now stranded in a place that’s also past its prime, making plans for futures they don’t themselves believe will come to fruition, and finding a degree of humour in their own, minor humiliations. While it does seek and find the humour in these situations, the film never looks down on its characters; there’s a sense of compassion intertwined with that of the ridiculous that makes some of this surprisingly touching. But then, that may be my own middle-aged ennui speaking here.

The cast – the international stars as well as the Italian character actors – do very well with this material, but then, I suspect particularly Mastroianni, Andress and Ustinov would have had a certain understanding of their characters’ places in the world taken from their own experiences.

Speaking of their world, Steno manages to create a sense of place as well as one of companionable ridiculousness, so the film takes place in a fully realized quarter of an aging Rome, a place where old bohemians might go to lick their wounds, still beautiful, perhaps because it is losing to time.

That Double Murder is also a decent whodunnit seems to be nearly beside the point, but there’s that, too.