Sightlines · how to watch

How to watch Investigation of a Citizen Above Suspicion

1970 · Elio Petri · Investigation of a Citizen Above Suspicion on Sightlines

5 things to watch and listen for on a first viewing, without spoilers, and 3 more once you have seen it. Each names something you can see or hear, the pattern it belongs to, and what noticing it gives you. How these keys work.

On a first viewing

1. Watch how small the Inspector looks against the headquarters architecture. (camera)

   Cinematographer Luigi Kuveiller uses wide-angle framings and long corridors that dwarf the human figures inside them.

   Payoff: The architecture itself starts to feel like a form of power pressing down on everyone in it.

2. Notice how deliberately the Inspector arranges evidence at the scene. (staging)

   Petri stages the aftermath with the same care a director gives blocking a scene, each object and gesture placed with visible intention.

   Payoff: You are watching a man direct his own incrimination like theater.

3. Listen for the score's jaunty, marching little melody. (sound)

   Ennio Morricone's music is plucked and repetitive, comic and sinister at once, recurring throughout the investigation.

   Payoff: The tune makes the machinery of power sound almost cheerful, which is the joke.

4. Notice how the film cuts between the investigation and flashbacks. (cutting)

   Editor Ruggero Mastroianni fractures the timeline so the Inspector's past relationship keeps erupting into and commenting on the present case.

   Payoff: The intercutting lets you compare the man's public role and his private self in real time.

5. Watch how the other officers respond to each confession. (staging)

   Petri stages their deference and disbelief the same way each time, almost like a repeated ritual rather than individual reactions.

   Payoff: Their sameness turns individual colleagues into a single, predictable machine.

Once you have seen it

1. Notice how the flashbacks recontextualize the Inspector's public rectitude. (structure)

   Scenes of his affair with Augusta reveal a private cruelty that keeps ironically framing his law-and-order performance in the present-day scenes.

   Payoff: Once you've seen the flashbacks, his authority reads completely differently on a rewatch.

2. Notice the Kafka quotation the film closes on. (structure)

   The ending places words from The Trial directly over the story, making the parable underneath the procedural explicit.

   Payoff: The film tells you outright, at the very end, what kind of fable you have been watching.

3. Watch Volonte's face right after each unbelieved confession. (performance)

   He plays the Inspector's mounting frustration as something closer to desperation than triumph, a man who wants to be stopped.

   Payoff: The performance suggests his crimes are less about escaping punishment than craving it.

Carry this in: Watch how deliberately he leaves each clue. The film's whole irony is that his competence works against him.

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