“How are you going to kill me this time?” she asks teasingly, as she takes her lover into her arms.

“I’m going to slash your throat,” he answers his mistress, welcoming the embrace.

As they undress and slide under the silk sheets, he makes good on his playful threat. That the man actually kills her is one shock. That he is also the chief of the police’s homicide division is another.

Never named, the inspector (Gian Maria Volonté, A Fistful of Dollars) is worshipped by the officers below him, whereas they view the deceased Miss Terzi (Floridan Bolkan, A Lizard in a Woman’s Skin) as “a libertine” for owning no undergarments. Then again, Investigation of a Citizen Above Suspicion takes place in an era when Italy kept secret files on homosexuals and communists alike, which the inspector lords over as potential blackmail material, so the authorities are all about snap judgments.

Preaching precision and repression, he embarks on the investigation of Terzi’s murder despite being the crime’s perpetrator. He even leaves a slew of clues at the scene that point directly to him. Why? He feels he is so above the law, he never could be taken seriously as a suspect. He even informs his superior of his affair with the woman.

Investigation is not your ordinary Italian thriller, and not just because it won the Academy Award that year for Best Foreign Language Film. It is built with a heavy streak of political satire, some of which may be lost on American viewers, but hardly to a point of indifference; the mystery of the inspector’s mental state is too great a pull, and director Elio Petri (The 10th Victim) parcels out explanatory bits during many flashbacks.

Technically, the movie is imperfect — the camera shakes in the pivotal moments right after the crime, and later, the crew clearly is reflected in our antihero’s sunglasses — but all that can be overlooked with ease because its plot is so unique, even several decades after the fact. Sporting the bounce of a plucked rubber band, Ennio Morricone’s equally first-rate theme strongly hints at Petri’s playful intent, dark though it may be, dark it should be. —Rod Lott

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Adapted from one of his own short stories — this particular one featuring his comic-book creation of Ms. Tree, who does not appear in the film — Real Time: Siege at Lucas Street Market finds prolific author Max Allan Collins (Road to Perdition) transferring his criminal mind to feature films for the third time, moving from killer-Mommy thrillers to the corner store. Viewers will end up with more than a pack of cigs and a Dr Pepper Icee.

The same year that Fox’s 24 series made split-screen vogue again, writer/director Collins took the concept further by filling his frame with as many as four screens at once, each displaying a different angle of the same scene. Presented as an unbroken story, Real Time depicts a January robbery of an Iowa convenience store by two drug-hungry lowlifes, and Collins tells his tale almost entirely through the shop’s security-camera footage, with snippets of amateur video as supplemental material. Such a structure allows the story to thrive on the lowest of budgets; so does a running time as tight the knots of a veteran yachtsman. This is a case of turning a project’s challenges into attributes.

With pop radio piped through the store’s P.A. system providing stark contrast to the deadly situation, our felonious duo takes everyone inside hostage. This includes a cop plagued by Montezuma’s revenge, a jailbait shoplifter, a mother and her ballerina child, a douche of a businessman and a very pregnant woman; the latter is played by ’80s scream queen Brinke Stevens (Slave Girls from Beyond Infinity), and it’s nice to see her in a down-to-earth role where she isn’t present strictly to disrobe.

At the time of this Siege, sales of DVD players had yet to hit their peak, and Collins makes creative use of the technology by allowing viewers to go nuts with the multiangle feature. Jumping around is hardly required to enjoy the movie, however; as I did, you may as well forget about the remote and just let the hostage drama unfold as the filmmakers intended. At once realistic and yet just pulpy enough to let you know Real is fiction, the movie boasts a uniqueness that makes up for deficiencies in the overbaked performances of the robbers (Tom Keane and Chad Hoch), who seem seconds away from screaming, “Attica! Attica! Attica!” —Rod Lott

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