Smiling Maniacs (1975)

Name: Smiling Maniacs
Genre: Crime, Thriller
Released: 1975-01-16
Duration: 100 min
Rating: 7
Cast: Franco Nero, Fernando Rey, Umberto Orsini, Mara Danaud, Giovanna Benedetto

Smiling Maniacs (1975), directed by Marcello Aliprandi, starring Franco Nero and Fernando Rey.

01/16/1975 BR Crime and Thriller 1h 40m

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Quiz about this movie

Women are their playthings...Violence is their game!

Synopsis

During an inquest, an ambitious judge finds out that a lot of high-rank politicians are corrupt to the core.

Gastone Di GiovanniCinematography
Marcello AliprandiDirector, Screenplay
Pino DonaggioOriginal music
Fernando ImbertScreenplay

About the film

Smiling Maniacs (Italian: Corruzione al palazzo di giustizia) is a 1975 Italian drama crime film. It stars actor Franco Nero.

It is an adaptation of the 1949 play by Ugo Betti. The film is sometimes referred to as Bribery in High Places.

Read the full article (2k characters)

Smiling Maniacs (Italian: Corruzione al palazzo di giustizia) is a 1975 Italian drama crime film. It stars actor Franco Nero.

It is an adaptation of the 1949 play by Ugo Betti. The film is sometimes referred to as Bribery in High Places.

Cast

Franco Nero as Judge Dani

Fernando Rey as Judge Vanini

Martin Balsam as Carlo Goja

Gabriele Ferzetti as Prandó

Umberto Orsini as Erzi

Mara Danaud as Flavia

Giovanna Benedetto as Elena Vanini

Umberto D'Orsi as Excellence

Reception

In a contemporary review, Maurizio Porro described the film as "a work full of good intentions, but torn by a contradiction" which makes it lose its effectiveness, as everything that in the original play was "enblemic, Kafkaesque, not situated in a specific place, in the film becomes concrete denunciation of the current problematics of our [Italian] institutions." Similarly, a La Stampa review noted how the film was "not able to adapt [the original play] in terms of pure symbolism" and turned to be "a bit uncertain in tone (between Betti and a legal giallo, with mandatory elements such as smoke fog, drugs and killers)."

According to film historian Roberto Curti, the film was "rooted in the paranoid atmosphere of the period", an "attempt at making something closer to Elio Petri and Francesco Rosi's political allegories based on Leonardo Sciascia novels", but with Aliprandi "not always able to keep all these elements in focus."

The film grossed about 700 million lire, and was Aliprandi's highest-grossing film in his career.

References

External links

Smiling Maniacs at IMDb

Text from Smiling Maniacs on Wikipedia, licensed CC BY-SA 4.0. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smiling_Maniacs

Trivia

It premiered on January 16, 1975, a Thursday.
It runs 1h40 — a typical feature length.
Its original title is "Corruzione al palazzo di giustizia".
This film's quiz has 13 questions — enough to play more than once without repeats.