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Excellent Cadavers

2005, Movie, R, 92 mins

Excellent Cadavers: Review

EXCELLENT CADAVERS
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Directed by Marco Turco in collaboration with Alexander Stille, this 90-minute documentary is essentially a quick tour through much of the material covered in Stille's 1995 book, Excellent Cadavers: The Mafia and the Death of the First Italian Republic, a richly detailed and deeply troubling chronicle of the anti-Mafia efforts of Sicilian prosecutors Giovannai Falcone and Paolo Borsellino. Accompanying Stille and Turco for part of this historical journey is famed Palermo photojournalist Letizia Battaglia, whose haunting black-and-white photographs recorded much of the carnage that began inundating Sicily's capital, Palermo, in 1974, when violence once confined to intrafamily disputes began turning those government officials who were sufficiently courageous to take on the Cosa Nostra into "excellent cadavers" — meaning, illustrious targets, rather than slain mafioso and other "ordinary" victims. At the end of WWII, prominent mafioso were given positions of local power by Allied forces anxious to maintain order in postfascist Italy, and Mafia dominance over many Sicilian businesses was assured by the emerging Christian Democrat party, which granted the mafiosi lucrative government contracts in exchange for brutal suppression of the opposing Communist party. By the mid-'70s, the Cosa Nostra was a deeply entrenched fact of Sicilian political and economic life. Many of these deep and longstanding connections to leading Palermo businessmen and corrupt politicians emerged in 1980, when young prosecutor Giovanni Falcone inherited slain chief prosecutor Gaetano Costa's investigation into international heroin trafficking. Falcone used his background in bankruptcy cases to expose paper trails linking Palmero Mafia bosses to some of the city's most powerful figures, and his investigation soon coincided with that of Paolo Borsellino, who was investigating the murder of a policeman. Together they spearheaded Sicily's biggest anti-Mafia effort, one that exposed much of the secretive world of the Cosa Nostra through Mafia witnesses, inflamed the bloody assault on established Palermo crime families by the provincial upstarts of the Corleonese Mafia, and culminated in the so-called Maxi Trial, which attempted to bring hundreds of accused mafioso to justice. It also cost both Falcone and Borsellino their lives. Shots of Stille poking through the archives and libraries are unimaginatively staged, and the digitally re-created spectacle of Falcone's and Borsellino's murders is unnecessary. But anyone whose romantic illusions about the Mafia involve Michael Corleone and Tony Soprano would do well to watch Turco's eye-opening film: It shows the Cosa Nostra as the unstoppable and infinitely adaptable virus it is, and serves as a good entree to Stille's far more thorough book. leave a comment --Ken Fox
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