One Way or Another
1976 · Elio Petri
For when you want a film to chew on for days — an angry, brainy political nightmare. Firmly a challenge, not comfort; bring your appetite for venom.
What it's about
The entire ruling class of Italy's Christian Democrats descends into an underground hermitage for a retreat of spiritual exercises — praying, confessing, and conniving under a merciless party chief and a spider-like priest. Then the politicians begin to die, one by one, and the retreat becomes a locked-room mystery about power itself.
The experience
Claustrophobic, sardonic, and increasingly nightmarish — less a whodunit than a slow suffocation, with black comedy hissing through the concrete. It leaves you uneasy, and it means to.
Performances
Gian Maria Volonté delivers a merciless impersonation of real party chief Aldo Moro, and Marcello Mastroianni is unnervingly cast against type as the priest running the exercises.
The craft
Elio Petri abandons realism entirely for a subterranean purgatory of catacombs and fluorescent penance — corruption rendered as architecture, with the production design doing as much arguing as the script. Adapted from Leonardo Sciascia's novel Todo Modo, it turns a familiar mystery structure into an autopsy of a ruling class.
Why it matters
Reviled on release in 1976, then made to look chillingly prophetic two years later when Aldo Moro was kidnapped and murdered — after which the film all but vanished from circulation, to be rediscovered as one of the fiercest works of Italian political cinema.
Reception & legacy: how One Way or Another was received, argued over, and remembered →
Elio Petri's final political fury, adapted from Leonardo Sciascia's novel Todo Modo: the entire ruling class of Italy's Christian Democrats descends into a concrete bunker-hermitage for spiritual exercises, led by a party chief ('M.', a merciless Gian Maria Volonté impersonation of Aldo Moro) and a spider-like priest played by Marcello Mastroianni. As the politicians pray, confess, and connive, they begin to die, one by one — a locked-room mystery reimagined as an autopsy of power itself. Petri, who had dissected authority in Investigation of a Citizen Above Suspicion, here abandons realism entirely for a subterranean purgatory of catacombs and fluorescent penance, corruption rendered as architecture. The film was reviled on release in 1976; two years later Moro was kidnapped and murdered by the Red Brigades, and the film — suddenly unbearable prophecy — effectively vanished from circulation for decades, ending Petri's career in the process. Its rediscovery restored the missing terminus of Italy's great cinema of paranoia: the moment the genre stopped predicting the catastrophe and simply preceded it.
Lines of influence
- We Still Kill the Old Way (A ciascuno il suo) (1967) — Petri's first Sciascia adaptation, which fixed his method of treating a Sicilian conspiracy as a sealed logical system the amateur investigator solves too late — the closed-set structure Todo modo inherits.
- Investigation of a Citizen Above Suspicion (1970) — The direct companion 'autopsy of power': Volonté plays authority as a preening neurotic while Morricone's needling ostinato scores institutional guilt as grotesque farce.
- The Working Class Goes to Heaven (1971) — Same Petri–Volonté engine pushing performance into caricatured physical tics and sweat as social diagnosis, the allegorical-body acting Volonté brings to the retreat.
- Illustrious Corpses (Cadaveri eccellenti) (1976) — A parallel Sciascia adaptation released the same year, using baroque interiors and deep-focus corridors so that architecture itself becomes the visual grammar of institutional conspiracy — corruption-as-architecture.
- The Mattei Affair (1972) — Volonté-fronted investigative reconstruction that builds the paranoid dossier form — power reconstructed forensically from fragments — feeding Petri's cinema-of-paranoia mode.
- Hands Over the City (1963) — Literalizes corruption-as-architecture: real-estate speculation and civic space as the physical body of political rot, documentary-inflected staging of institutions Petri later abstracts.
- The Exterminating Angel (1962) — The locked-room surrealist allegory where the bourgeoisie inexplicably cannot leave a room — the hermetic-chamber-as-power-trap structure Petri fuses with religious ritual.
- Salò, or the 120 Days of Sodom (1975) — An enclosed villa as sadistic power laboratory, with ritualized degradation staged in liturgical, rule-bound formality — the same year's sibling in staging power as closed ceremonial rite.
- The Conformist (1970) — Storaro's fascist monumentalism and cold, oversized interiors frame moral cowardice architecturally — the visual thesis that power's spaces embody its corruption.
- Z (1969) — The template European political-thriller autopsy of a state crime, dissecting institutional complicity as procedure — the genre Petri bends toward anti-realist allegory.
- The Parallax View (1974) — Cinema-of-paranoia visual scheme dwarfing the individual inside vast architectural voids, the conspiracy rendered as oppressive built space rather than exposition.
- The Conversation (1974) — Fuses Catholic guilt with surveillance paranoia in sound-designed claustrophobia — the confessional-religious anxiety braided into political dread that Petri's fluorescent penance shares.
- Il Divo (2008) — Baroque caricature of Giulio Andreotti — the very Christian-Democrat archetype Todo modo lampooned — staging power as liturgical spectacle with grotesque, ritualized bodily performance direct from Petri.
- Good Morning, Night (Buongiorno, notte) (2003) — The locked-room political allegory (Moro's captivity apartment) as national autopsy, intertwining prayer and politics in a sealed hermitage exactly as Petri's bunker retreat does.
- Vincere (2009) — Operatic anti-realist staging of Italian power through expressionist lighting and hallucinatory formality, extending Petri's rejection of realism as the proper register for depicting the state.
- Loro (2018) — Berlusconi rendered as decadent allegorical set-piece, power dissected through excess and ritual spectacle — Petri's grotesque autopsy-of-power carried into the media era.