Investigation at The Crossroad: Citizens above Suspicion from Turin to Hollywood

Abstract

The contribution intends to recover the importance of the Italian crime film production of the 1950s for the future authorial developments of the genre, analyzing the "discordant concordances" of the character of the police detective above suspicion, a mask already present in Il bivio (The Crossroad, 1951) by Fernando Cerchio and subsequently developed by Elio Petri and Ugo Pirro in Investigation of a citizen above suspicion (1972). Research within the Ugo Pirro Collection also demonstrates the Italian screenwriter's involvement in the never-realized American remake project of Investigation, whose screenplay by Paul Schrader takes as its model an Italian film in a genre usually considered foreign to Italian cinema. Together with this script, other subjects and treatments preserved in the Pirro Collection highlight an attempt to serialize the character of the Assassin.