Bernardo Bertolucci's debut film "The Grim Reaper" is based on a story by one of Italian cinema's greatest personalities-Pier Paolo Pasolini. However, his influence might be felt only in some scenes of the film including a detailed description of Roman lowlifes. In remaining parts of the film, one gets to see a good creation of atmosphere especially of nocturnal times which are crucial for steering the story forward. Although this film can be summarized as the tale of a theft which backfired, Bertolucci makes good use of his film's characters to reveal that it is through lies that one gets to ascertain the truth. The apparent comparisons with Akira Kurosawa's masterpiece "Rashomon" are unjustified as Bernardo Bertolucci's film appears more as a piece of 'investigative journalism' with a diligent cop determined to break the criminals through his incessant questioning. As a film which can be considered as a brutally honest example of incredible cruelty from a woman character, The Grim Reaper truthfully represents the mood of Rome in 1960s, a period where dance, love, music and sex flourished in abundance.

Bertolucci's director debut has a quite distinctive Neo-Italian modus operandi, utilizing a multi- narrative structure of portraying different groups of people's idle life, who have been involved into a prostitute murder case. The raw-texture of the film is magnificently preserved and the primitive settings are bold enough to impose an intimate analysis upon various Italian people's mind-state at that particular time. At the age of 22, it was a great opportunity for Bertolucci to be granted the permission to work on his master Pasolini's script for his own career inception. Also it's a gutsy manoeuvre for Pasolini to trust his young disciple to fully excavate his talent, which is regretfully a rare case now in the cinema business. During the park scenes, the film has a distinctively poignant tableaux scenery, but elsewhere the nonchalant idleness of each segmental piece is astonishingly fragmentary and unable to relate it to the core murder case in any rate, the film sacrifices its more audience arresting detective fodder to pursue a random characterization of Bertolucci's own mark although may at odds with his later more prestigious work. The film's semblance of Akira Kurosawa's Rasho-Mon (1950) is just a bluff, apart from structure-wise design, the film seldom emits a certain commitment of story-telling, nevertheless it has its own charm once it suits to some specific cinema devotees' appetites, but with a horizontal parallel comparison with other 1960s elite peers, Bertolucci is still in his rookie mode and no one should demand too much for a 22-year-old novice to create a groundbreaking director debut, so after all, it is a thin-on-the-ground treasure and deserves a great thumb-up.

The mysterious murder of a prostitute happened near a park. The police are looking out for the truth and the murderer by the interrogation of the persons who were in the park that night."La Commare secca" is the first feature film directed by Bernardo Bertolucci and definitely marks the beginning of a wonderful career. It is the third film that I have seen of Bertolucci and for me is just another little gem of the Italian Cinema. The film begins with the classic interrogations of the authorities and we see how the things really happened and how different are the facts from the words that the suspects are giving to the authorities. The first three suspects are three very strange men and their routine of the day of the murder are strangely funny, basically because they are lying in their confessions. The first one said that he was looking out for a job but he actually was bothering and trying to steal the couples of lovers in the park. The second said that he was spending a lovely day with his girlfriend but he was really having many problems with the mother of the woman who support him and finally having problems with that woman too. The third is the funnier because he spend all the day flirting with all the women that he saw instead of going to the cinema as he confess. So the story of the film looks like it has the murder mystery just as a pretext to show "a day in the life" of common people because is true that the first three suspects were in that park but is also true that they weren't involve in the murder and is until the fourth person interrogated that we can relate something with the dead prostitute. The last suspects are like the main characters in all the film; they are a couple of teenage boys looking out for the love of a couple of girls. I said that they are the main characters because we can see more details of their day and the reason of their own crime and why only one is interrogated. Finally the mystery of the dead prostitute is solve but that wasn't the main point of the film because it was just a perfect pretext to can show the same day in different minds.Well I really like this film that is just a great beginning of Bertolucci . It's easy to watch and easy to enjoy with a short story (88 minutes) so this is the most accessible film of Bertolucci that I have seen. The cast is great with actors and actress who only appear in this film, that marks the beginning but also the end of their acting career. The music is, like in the other two films that I have seen of BB, really important for the meaning of some sequences and I really like that. Here the last dance scene is memorable and was where the police arrest the murderer.Conclusion: "La Commare secca" is a simple but great film. The fact that Pier Paolo Pasolini write the story is another pretext to check this Italian gem that is really important not only for the Italian Cinema history but for the entire Cinema history.

I bought this movie from Criterion thinking a film accepted by them couldn't lead me astray (only later did I learn Armgageddon and The Rock were part of their collection), and boy was I wrong.This is really one of the most pointless films I've ever seen. It took a big risk trying with it's innovative non linear structure (ala Rashamon) and gambles like this are usually hit or miss; Rashamon was a hit, this was a miss.The plot is quite similar to Rashamon in that it's told by four separate accounts of the same event, a murder of a prostitute by a soldier, a pimp and wife, a devious night club worker, and a punk kid who were all near the scene and interrogated as suspects. One of the chief problems though is it is missing characters who actually care or discuss what happened, making it hard for a viewer to relate to what he just saw.In Rashamon the character's discussion at the beginning and end of the trial as it be validated the themes of that movie, not to mention the hollowed out building they sat in to avoid the rain was the chief visual metaphor of the film. There were constant cuts back to that structure throughout the length of the film.The Grim Reaper really doesn't have that basis so the cinematography and editing just wander around aimlessly, and I use the word wander because the camera is quite free moving about in this film, apparently thats supposed to be one of the virtues of this film.Overall the central problem of this film is that it's non linear structure and subjective accounts of the same event generally just don't work unless there are common themes and setting throughout or any way for the audience to relate to what just happened. Normally if a film tells a good linear story with beginning to end plot it doesn't have to be particularly meaningful; this film put itself at risk by trying to be innovative and suffered the consequence.