| Closed Circuit | |
|---|---|
| Directed by | Giuliano Montaldo |
| Screenplay by | Nicola Badalucco Mario Gallo Giuliano Montaldo |
| Story by | Nicola Badalucco Mario Gallo |
| Produced by | Mario Gallo |
| Starring | Flavio Bucci Aurore Clément Tony Kendall Ettore Manni Brizio Montinaro Loris Bazzocchi Giuliano Gemma William Berger |
| Cinematography | Giuseppe Pinori |
| Edited by | Olga Pedrini |
| Music by | Egisto Macchi |
Production company | Filmalpha |
| Distributed by | RAI |
Release date |
|
Running time | 88 minutes |
| Country | Italy |
| Language | Italian |
Closed Circuit (Italian: Circuito chiuso) is a 1978 Italian made-for-television social science fiction giallo film directed by Giuliano Montaldo. It was entered into the 28th Berlin International Film Festival.[1]
The film concerns the police investigation of the murder of a cinema attendee who is shot dead during a matinée showing of a Spaghetti Western starring Giuliano Gemma.
The film begins with various people attending a movie screening and the staff getting ready. Some audience members exhibit unusual behavior, such as the secret lovers in a back row or the man who uses the restroom for a suspiciously long time. There are men, women and children in the movie theater. A western is being shown. The movie is not age-restricted, as the lady at the box office explains to visitors.
During the screening, a man who had sat down next to a young couple is shot dead. The incident occurs at the end of the western, when two gunslingers fight a duel and shots are fired. It is unclear who shot the man in the movie theater.
A panic follows. The movie theater is quickly closed so that no one can leave. The police arrive; the inspector is assured that the murderer and the murder weapon must still be in the movie theater.
The inspector interrogates the individual visitors. He can understand the suspicious behavior of some of them: For example, he learns that the two lovers are married to other people and have been meeting secretly in the movie theater. Two crooks who want to leave the movie theater in secret are caught. But the inspector can't prove anything about them either.
The detective learns that the victim was a single pensioner who was fascinated by cinema and photography. This does not lead him any further either. Finally, the Ministry of Defense gets involved, as the murdered man had worked there, albeit only as an accountant. Time is of the essence, because the visitors trapped in the movie theater want to go home.
The inspector has the incident reconstructed twice. To do this, the visitors have to sit on the same chairs as when they first saw the western. In the first reconstruction, a popular usher from the movie theater sits in the seat of the murdered man, who is also mysteriously shot at the end of the western. In the second reconstruction, one of the commissioner's superiors is sitting in the seat in question. He stands up and runs through the movie theater, filled with fear, because a gunslinger on the screen is aiming at him and chasing him with a revolver. In the end, the gunslinger shoots this victim too.
The movie could not be switched off and disappears from the projector at the end. The police experts have, in the meanwhile, discovered what kind of firearm was used to shoot the previous victims: a Colt from 1863.
The case remains officially unsolved. At the end of the movie, the inspector and one of the visitors, a sociologist, have a philosophical conversation. In it, the sociologist quotes from science fiction novels and points out that people kill each other with the machines they create. Moreover, according to the sociologist, images are more powerful than reality.
