February 11, 2025

FILMHOUNDS Magazine

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Sometimes The Old Ways are Best — We Still Kill the Old Way (Blu-Ray Review)

We Still Kill The Old Way poster

Surely few titles in cinema can be more evocative than We Still Kill the Old Way (1967), somehow raising a dozen questions in half a dozen words. This, the title implies, is a world where honour is of the utmost importance, and long-held traditions of murder and retribution can't be let to lie. Part Italian crime film, part ‘60s paranoid thriller, part sly black comedy, We Still Kill… is an Elio Petri picture through and through, drawing on his staunchly held political beliefs to create a vision of contemporary Italy where everyone's on the take and any hope of justice is dashed against the cliffs.

Fittingly, the picture opens on a soaring helicopter shot looking down on an assembly of craggy rocks, soaking in the lush Italian landscape as we drift along, scored by a romantic, melancholy piano line. The grand grey mountain, dappled with brown foliage and white rocks reflecting the sun brightly, gives way to a picturesque town below, small, tightly-knitted buildings with roofs all the same colour, bordered by the startling blues and greens of the Mediterranean sea. As we finally reach the ground, we meet a man: wearing shaded brown sunglasses, his face covered over with a big bushy moustache, and with a postman's satchel in tow, walking into the local pharmacists. Already, a mystery is afoot.

“I don't like this letter,” he explains to the pharmacist, Manno, (Luigi Pistilli) and it's easy to see why—not only is it anonymous but it's assembled from cut out newspaper clippings. Torn open, it reads: “This letter is your death sentence. You will die for what you did.” That the pharmacist is only lightly phased, explaining to his chums out back that this is one of several unexplained recent letters, does little to shake the feeling of impending doom. And so it is, barely 5 minutes later and two men have been killed—Dr. Roscio, a beloved local doctor with “no enemies”, and Manno, tracked on a hunting trip and shot dead amongst the ferns. It's only when two illiterate farmers are bundled up for the crime, however, that local professor Paolo Laurana (Gian Maria Volonté) begins to suspect this wasn't merely a dispute over some minor infidelity.

Matching the anxious energy of the material, Petri's camerawork is inquisitive and squirrelly, chasing actions and reactions with a real insistence, his eye as taken by the small detail of someone opening a car door as he is by the grand old architecture. The use of long lenses accentuates the pervasive paranoia, each close up taken from a distance twitching in the breeze, the foreground a muddled fog of shaking foliage and unseen shapes. It's far from revelatory, but the craft is well applied, placing the audience firmly in the centre of a conspiracy with no edges.

The frustration is that Petri offers little to differentiate We Still Kill… from other political thrillers of its type, failing to dig into a unique socioeconomic perspective beyond the revelation that—gasp—the Italian elites aren't all on the straight and narrow. This is still a handsome, tense, and often quite sexually provocative thriller, with a deflating final note that sticks at the throat effectively, but it's hard not to see this as a dry run for Petri's stronger subsequent works, such as Investigation of a Citizen Above Suspicion (1971, also starring Volonté). The score by Luis Bacalov might be worth the price of entry alone, however, veering from romantic to slightly goofy to ominous on a dime. Sometimes, the old ways are best.

Special Features

  • Archival documentary featuring interviews with writer Ugo Pirro, composer Luis Bacalov and Paola Petri (32 mins)
  • Interview with make-up artist Pier Antonio Mecacci (2021, 29 mins)
  • Interview with Roberto Curti, author of Elio Petri: Investigation of a Filmmaker (2021, 23 mins)
  • Interview with Fabrizio Catalano, grandson of author Leonardo Sciascia (2021, 31 mins)
  • Trailer
  • Newly translated English subtitles for Italian audio and English SDH for English audio
  • Reversible sleeve featuring artwork based on origial posters
  • Limited edition booklet featuring new writing on the film by scholar David Melville and a statement by Petri

We Still Kill the Old Way releases in the UK courtesy of on September 23rd