72-73 We Still Kill the Old Way & A Quiet Place in the Country

[Finch]

After two men are killed on a hunting trip a lonely professor (Gian Maria Volonté, The Working Class Goes to Heaven), takes it upon himself to investigate what he believes was not a simple honour killing. As his search intensifies, politics and the Church become implicated in a complex conspiracy orchestrated by a powerful criminal organisation. Elio Petri’s We Still Kill the Old Way, based on the novel by Leonardo Sciascia (The Day of the Owl), is a tense paranoid thriller that features Volonté in one of his finest performances and a superb score by Luis Bacalov (Django). Winner of awards for Best Screenplay at the Cannes Film Festival and Best Actor at the Italian Golden Globes, the film is made available on home video for the first time in the UK.

LIMITED EDITION BLU-RAY SPECIAL FEATURES

2K restoration of the film by Movietime in association with Museo Nazionale del Cinema Torino, on Blu-ray for the first time in the UK
Original uncompressed mono PCM audio
Archival documentary featuring interviews with writer Ugo Pirro, composer Luis Bacalov and Paola Petri
Interview with make-up artist Pierantonio Mecacci
Interview with Roberto Curti, author of Elio Petri: Investigation of a Filmmaker
Interview with Fabrizio Catalano, grandson of author Leonardo Sciascia
Trailer
Newly translated English subtitles
Reversible sleeve featuring artwork based on original posters
Limited edition booklet featuring new writing on the film by scholar David Wingrove
Limited edition of 3000 copies, presented in full-height Scanavo packaging with removable OBI strip leaving packaging free of certificates and markings




Leonardo (Franco Nero, The Day of the Owl) is a celebrated artist plagued by nightmares which stop him from completing his work. His agent and sometime lover, Flavia (Vanessa Redgrave, The Devils), encourages him to relax, so he buys a country villa. Once there he begins tracing the story of the previous owner while Flavia’s presence in the house seems to awaken something as she encounters one mysterious accident after another. Part ghost story, part meditation on the creative process told through the excesses of the 1960s. Elio Petri (The Working Class Goes to Heaven) brilliantly fuses these ideas in ways that are at times shocking, yet thought-provoking in their investigation of art, sex and madness, set to an eerie score by Ennio Morricone.

LIMITED EDITION BLU-RAY SPECIAL FEATURES

High-Definition digital transfer, presented with optional English and Italian audio tracks, on Blu-ray for the first time in the UK

Uncompressed mono PCM audio

New interview on the film by author Stephen Thrower (2024)

Archival interview with actor Franco Nero

Interview with make-up artist Pierantonio Mecacci

Visual essay by critic and filmmaker Kat Ellinger on the theme of masculinity in the film and Petri’s work (2024)

Trailer

New and improved English subtitle translation for Italian audio and English SDH for English audio

Reversible sleeve featuring artwork based on original posters

Limited edition booklet featuring new writing on the film by Simon Abrams

Limited edition of 3000 copies, presented in full-height Scanavo packaging with removable OBI strip leaving packaging free of certificates and markings

[M Sanderson]

I'll definitely support more Elio Petri releases.

[ellipsis7]

Nice composite trailer for short Elio Petri retrospective @ Cinémathèque Française currently....

La Cinémathèque Française - Rétrospective Elio Petri

[ellipsis7]

Limited edition CD of Ennio Morricone's original soundtrack to A Quiet Place in the Country just released by Quartet Records...

[zedz]

A Quiet Place in the Country is a fascinatingly terrible film. It starts with everything dialed up to 11, and has nowhere to go from there, so the rest of the film is just desperate flailing about to hold your attention, which desperation manifests in various ridiculous ways.

The film ricochets between erotic thriller, art film, ghost story, psychodrama, slasher and art-world satire (I guess, though since Nero's wretched canvases are such of a muchness with the film's trashy style I'm uncertain whether it's deliberate). None of those genres are a good fit for the film's particular lurid style, and none of them end up sticking. They're just stations of the crass in what the filmmakers hope will somehow end up as a mind-blowing puzzle film. It doesn't. There's so much "is this real or is this a fantasy?" from the first shot to the last that the only valid response is "who cares?" Franco Nero is a nutjob at the beginning, and he's a nutjob at the end: he just spends the movie rearranging deckchairs, most of which are probably imaginary.

Poor Nero delivers an execrably hammy performance, but it's totally in line with the film's aesthetic, and I can only imagine it's the result of Petri screaming "More! More!" throughout the shooting. Pleasingly, several of the gurning bit players also got the memo.

Likewise, the film's style is overloaded with every gimmick and provocation Petri can imagine, which proves to be useful R&D into the limits of Petri's imagination (e.g. some vanilla B&D and a two-way mirror stands in for Sexual Depravity) and the reasons why certain cinematographic effects have never entered the grammar (spoiler: because they suck.)

It's a car crash I couldn't take my eyes off, a triumph on untethered art direction. The Surgeon General has issued a warning about drinking games involving symbolic vaginas.

[feihong]

I'm going to have to watch this again. I remember thinking of it as a pretty good movie I mostly enjoyed––not quite in the category of the Petri films I really liked, but not too far from it. I planned to resell my disc, but at the last minute I decided to save it, magically anticipating this second encounter, I guess.