# Investigation of a Citizen Above Suspicion
**Investigation of a Citizen Above Suspicion** (*Indagine su un cittadino al di sopra di ogni sospetto*) is a 1970 Italian satirical political thriller directed by Elio Petri, in which the head of the criminal police in Rome murders his mistress, deliberately leaves evidence pointing to himself, and then watches his own department refuse to suspect him. It won the Jury's Special Grand Prix and the FIPRESCI International Critics' Prize at the 1970 Cannes Film Festival and the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film.[1](https://www.festival-cannes.com/en/f/indagine-su-un-cittadino-al-di-sopra-di-ogni-sospetto/) • [2](https://www.ifi.ie/wp-content/uploads/2018/04/May-Prog-18.pdf)
| Key fact | Detail |
|---|---|
| Original title / director | *Indagine su un cittadino al di sopra di ogni sospetto*, directed by Elio Petri[3](https://cineuropa.org/it/film/401172/) |
| Screenplay | Elio Petri and Ugo Pirro[3](https://cineuropa.org/it/film/401172/) |
| Principal cast | Gian Maria Volonté (the chief inspector, "il dottore"), Florinda Bolkan (Augusta Terzi), Gianni Santuccio, Orazio Orlando, Sergio Tramonti, Salvo Randone[4](https://www.criterion.com/films/27911-investigation-of-a-citizen-above-suspicion) |
| Technical credits | Cinematography Luigi Kuveiller, editing Ruggero Mastroianni, music Ennio Morricone, scene design Carlo Egidi, costumes Angela Sammaciccia[5](https://www.archiviodelcinemaitaliano.it/index.php/scheda.html?codice=AG2845) |
| Production | Vera Film and Euro International Films; producers Marina Cicogna and Daniele Senatore[5](https://www.archiviodelcinemaitaliano.it/index.php/scheda.html?codice=AG2845) |
| Release | Italy 12 February 1970; 115 minutes, color, Italian language[3](https://cineuropa.org/it/film/401172/) • [4](https://www.criterion.com/films/27911-investigation-of-a-citizen-above-suspicion) |
| Awards | Jury's Special Grand Prix and FIPRESCI prize at Cannes 1970; Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film at the 1971 ceremony[1](https://www.festival-cannes.com/en/f/indagine-su-un-cittadino-al-di-sopra-di-ogni-sospetto/) • [2](https://www.ifi.ie/wp-content/uploads/2018/04/May-Prog-18.pdf) |
## Spoilers
### Plot
The film opens with the murder that the rest of the story investigates. The head of the criminal police, known only as "il dottore", visits his mistress Augusta Terzi in her apartment, and during lovemaking he cuts her throat with a razor.[6](https://www.treccani.it/enciclopedia/indagine-su-un-cittadino-al-di-sopra-di-ogni-sospetto_%28Enciclopedia-del-Cinema%29/) Convinced that his position places him above suspicion, he makes no attempt to hide the crime. On the contrary, he plants traces of his own guilt, including shoe prints, a thread from his tie, and fingerprints throughout the apartment, and makes an anonymous call reporting the killing.[5](https://www.archiviodelcinemaitaliano.it/index.php/scheda.html?codice=AG2845) • [7](https://www.sonypictures.com/movies/investigationofacitizenabovesuspicion)
Back at headquarters he celebrates his promotion to head of the political police, and while awaiting the new post he is assigned to direct the investigation into Terzi's death, returning to the crime scene alongside the detectives.[6](https://www.treccani.it/enciclopedia/indagine-su-un-cittadino-al-di-sopra-di-ogni-sospetto_%28Enciclopedia-del-Cinema%29/) The inquiry stumbles in the dark; Augusta's husband is clearly innocent, and the clues the detectives unearth point at the chief but are ignored because of his stature.[5](https://www.archiviodelcinemaitaliano.it/index.php/scheda.html?codice=AG2845) • [7](https://www.sonypictures.com/movies/investigationofacitizenabovesuspicion) In his new office he intensifies telephone surveillance, aimed above all at Antonio Pace, the young student with whom Augusta was unfaithful and whose discovery of the affair pushed the inspector to kill her.[6](https://www.treccani.it/enciclopedia/indagine-su-un-cittadino-al-di-sopra-di-ogni-sospetto_%28Enciclopedia-del-Cinema%29/)
**The inspector's purpose.** As the film presents it, his goal is not to escape but to be accused: he wants to demonstrate to himself, his colleagues, and his superiors that a representative of power cannot be incriminated, and he must be accused in order to prove that the accusation will not matter.[3](https://cineuropa.org/it/film/401172/) • [8](https://www.criterion.com/current/posts/2979-investigation-of-a-citizen-above-suspicion-the-long-harm-of-the-law) He writes out a confession and delivers it to his colleagues, then imagines a visit in which the police hierarchy, preferring to avoid scandal, forces him to deny his own guilt. The imagined scene becomes real: the commissioner arrives with a squad of agents determined to clear him.[6](https://www.treccani.it/enciclopedia/indagine-su-un-cittadino-al-di-sopra-di-ogni-sospetto_%28Enciclopedia-del-Cinema%29/) After a bomb explodes at police headquarters, several protesters are detained, among them Antonio, who shouts to the inspector's face that he is the murderer.[5](https://www.archiviodelcinemaitaliano.it/index.php/scheda.html?codice=AG2845) • [3](https://cineuropa.org/it/film/401172/)
## Style and genre
Petri described the film himself as a "grottesco", and critics have placed it between Brechtian estrangement and the grotesque: it borrows the frame of the crime thriller and the police procedural, then distorts them through expressionist spaces, such as a room crowded with gigantic enlargements of fingerprints, and through rack focusing, a technique in which the camera's range of focus shifts without a cut so that clear objects become blurry stains.[8](https://www.criterion.com/current/posts/2979-investigation-of-a-citizen-above-suspicion-the-long-harm-of-the-law) Volonté's performance follows the same logic: the inspector is permanently playing himself, practicing his confession speech by imitating his own recorded voice and enacting the same gestures and abrupt volume changes he uses on others.[8](https://www.criterion.com/current/posts/2979-investigation-of-a-citizen-above-suspicion-the-long-harm-of-the-law) [Ennio Morricone](https://www.edgepedia.org/ennio-morricone)'s score, at once jarring and jovial, runs under the whole.[8](https://www.criterion.com/current/posts/2979-investigation-of-a-citizen-above-suspicion-the-long-harm-of-the-law)
Treccani's encyclopedia notes that where other political filmmakers took a didactic road, Petri drew on Brechtian invention, the resources of the grotesque, and the teachings of Marx, Freud, and Reich, moving toward the oneiric and disorienting readers with Kafkaesque descents into the mechanisms of power.[6](https://www.treccani.it/enciclopedia/indagine-su-un-cittadino-al-di-sopra-di-ogni-sospetto_%28Enciclopedia-del-Cinema%29/) MYmovies observes that the film resists a single genre label, working at once as a police story, a psychoanalytic thriller, a reverse whodunit, a black comedy, and a satirical pamphlet.[9](https://www.mymovies.it/film/1970/indaginesuuncittadinoaldisopradiognisospetto/)
## Political context
The film was made as Italy entered the years of political violence later called the "years of lead" (*anni di piombo*), a period from the end of the 1960s to the early 1980s marked by student and worker protest, terrorist attacks, and harsh state repression.[10](https://cris.unibo.it/handle/11585/924170) Between the end of filming and the film's release, a bomb exploded in Milan's Piazza Fontana on 12 December 1969, killing seventeen and wounding eighty-eight; anarchists were falsely accused, and one of them, Giuseppe Pinelli, died in highly suspicious circumstances after falling from a fourth-floor window of a police station.[8](https://www.criterion.com/current/posts/2979-investigation-of-a-citizen-above-suspicion-the-long-harm-of-the-law) Although made before the bombing, the film was read by audiences as a response to it.[8](https://www.criterion.com/current/posts/2979-investigation-of-a-citizen-above-suspicion-the-long-harm-of-the-law)
Petri stated his aim directly: he wanted to describe the mechanism that guarantees immunity to the servants of power, and, in his words, to make a film against the police "in my own way".[6](https://www.treccani.it/enciclopedia/indagine-su-un-cittadino-al-di-sopra-di-ogni-sospetto_%28Enciclopedia-del-Cinema%29/) Screenwriter Ugo Pirro recalled that the film's release in Italy caused a shock, with enormous crowds at the box office and queues long enough in some cases to halt traffic; he credited the political moment, a government crisis and the Christian Democrats' will to reach an accord with the Socialists after the Milan bombings, for the fact that censorship did not block the film.[6](https://www.treccani.it/enciclopedia/indagine-su-un-cittadino-al-di-sopra-di-ogni-sospetto_%28Enciclopedia-del-Cinema%29/) The film received its censorship visa, number 55475, on 6 February 1970.[5](https://www.archiviodelcinemaitaliano.it/index.php/scheda.html?codice=AG2845)
## Reception and awards
At the 1970 Cannes Film Festival, where it competed in the official selection, the film won the Jury's Special Grand Prix and the International Critics' Prize of FIPRESCI.[1](https://www.festival-cannes.com/en/f/indagine-su-un-cittadino-al-di-sopra-di-ogni-sospetto/) It was named Best Foreign Language Film at the 1971 Academy Awards.[2](https://www.ifi.ie/wp-content/uploads/2018/04/May-Prog-18.pdf) Italian industry honors followed: a David di [Donatello](https://www.edgepedia.org/donatello) in 1970 for the production and for Volonté as best actor, and Nastri d'Argento in 1971 for best original story, for direction, and again for Volonté.[11](https://www.apav.it/mat/tempolibero/cinemaematematica/societaitalianaproblematiche/Indaginesuuncittadinoaldisopradiognisospetto.pdf) The Mystery Writers of America gave it an Edgar Award for Best Mystery Screenplay.[12](https://www.criminalelement.com/investigation-of-a-citizen-scott-adlerberg/)
Critics have kept the film in high regard. A 2012 re-release scored 89 on Metacritic, with reviews describing it as a paranoid police procedural and a perverse parable about the corrupting elements of power; Roger Ebert wrote that the film works because it is absolutely fascinated with the nature of the inspector.[13](https://www.metacritic.com/movie/investigation-of-a-citizen-above-suspicion-re-release/critic-reviews/) On Rotten Tomatoes it holds a 100 percent critics' rating from 14 reviews.[14](https://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/investigation_of_a_citizen_above_suspicion)
## Legacy
MYmovies identifies the film as the first chapter of Petri's so-called "trilogy on power", followed by *The Working Class Goes to Heaven* (1971) and *Property Is No Longer a Theft* (1973).[9](https://www.mymovies.it/film/1970/indaginesuuncittadinoaldisopradiognisospetto/) A 2024 study in *Cinergie* by Luca Prono, a PhD researcher in cinema at the [University of Bologna](https://www.edgepedia.org/university-of-bologna), traces the figure of the police detective above suspicion back to Fernando Cerchio's *Il bivio* (1951) and documents, in the Ugo Pirro Collection, a never-realized American remake for which [Paul Schrader](https://www.edgepedia.org/paul-schrader) wrote a screenplay, along with other treatments attempting to serialize the character of the assassin.[15](https://cinergie.unibo.it/article/view/18923) A chapter in a scholarly volume on the European political thriller calls the film the most celebrated work of Petri's career and a significant entry into the genre.[16](https://www.jstor.org/stable/jj.21996449.14) [The Criterion Collection](https://www.edgepedia.org/the-criterion-collection) released a 4K restoration on Blu-ray as spine #682, with an essay by the film scholar Evan Calder Williams.[4](https://www.criterion.com/films/27911-investigation-of-a-citizen-above-suspicion) Petri, born in Rome in 1929, died there on 10 November 1982.[17](https://www.treccani.it/enciclopedia/elio-petri_%28Enciclopedia-del-Cinema%29/)
## References
1. [Indagine su un cittadino al di sopra di ogni sospetto, Festival de Cannes](https://www.festival-cannes.com/en/f/indagine-su-un-cittadino-al-di-sopra-di-ogni-sospetto/)
2. [Investigation of a Citizen Above Suspicion, Irish Film Institute program notes](https://www.ifi.ie/wp-content/uploads/2018/04/May-Prog-18.pdf)
3. [Indagine su un cittadino al di sopra di ogni sospetto, Cineuropa](https://cineuropa.org/it/film/401172/)
4. [Investigation of a Citizen Above Suspicion, The Criterion Collection](https://www.criterion.com/films/27911-investigation-of-a-citizen-above-suspicion)
5. [Indagine su un cittadino al di sopra di ogni sospetto (1970), Archivio del Cinema Italiano](https://www.archiviodelcinemaitaliano.it/index.php/scheda.html?codice=AG2845)
6. [Indagine su un cittadino al di sopra di ogni sospetto, Jean A. Gili, Enciclopedia del Cinema, Treccani](https://www.treccani.it/enciclopedia/indagine-su-un-cittadino-al-di-sopra-di-ogni-sospetto_%28Enciclopedia-del-Cinema%29/)
7. [Investigation of a Citizen Above Suspicion, Sony Pictures Entertainment](https://www.sonypictures.com/movies/investigationofacitizenabovesuspicion)
8. [Investigation of a Citizen Above Suspicion: The Long Harm of the Law, Evan Calder Williams, Criterion Current](https://www.criterion.com/current/posts/2979-investigation-of-a-citizen-above-suspicion-the-long-harm-of-the-law)
9. [Indagine su un cittadino al di sopra di ogni sospetto (1970), MYmovies.it](https://www.mymovies.it/film/1970/indaginesuuncittadinoaldisopradiognisospetto/)
10. [The Trails of a Counter-Narrative: the Representation of the Years of Lead in Loriano Macchiavelli's Sarti Antonio Series, Silvia Baroni, CRIS University of Bologna](https://cris.unibo.it/handle/11585/924170)
11. [Indagine su un cittadino al di sopra di ogni sospetto, APAV film sheet](https://www.apav.it/mat/tempolibero/cinemaematematica/societaitalianaproblematiche/Indaginesuuncittadinoaldisopradiognisospetto.pdf)
12. [Investigation of a Citizen, Scott Adlerberg, Criminal Element](https://www.criminalelement.com/investigation-of-a-citizen-scott-adlerberg/)
13. [Investigation of a Citizen Above Suspicion [re-release] critic reviews, Metacritic](https://www.metacritic.com/movie/investigation-of-a-citizen-above-suspicion-re-release/critic-reviews/)
14. [Investigation of a Citizen Above Suspicion, Rotten Tomatoes](https://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/investigation_of_a_citizen_above_suspicion)
15. [Investigation at The Crossroad: Citizens above Suspicion from Turin to Hollywood, Luca Prono, Cinergie 13(25), 2024](https://cinergie.unibo.it/article/view/18923)
16. [Investigation of a Citizen above Suspicion, in States of Danger and Deceit: The European Political Thriller in the 1970s, JSTOR](https://www.jstor.org/stable/jj.21996449.14)
17. [Petri, Elio, Enciclopedia del Cinema, Treccani](https://www.treccani.it/enciclopedia/elio-petri_%28Enciclopedia-del-Cinema%29/)
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*Topic: Encyclopedia › Arts and culture › Screen and stage › Film and television › Films and standalone screen works › Individual films by title and year › Crime, thriller, and mystery films (individual works) › 1970s films*
*Initially written Oct 3, 2026 · Reviewed: Oct 25, 2026 · Edited: Oct 15, 2026; Oct 25, 2026; Nov 1, 2026 · Last review: Oct 25, 2026*
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License: Edgepedia Community License 1.0, https://www.edgepedia.org/edgepedia/license