The Mattei Affair
On October 27, 1962, a plane crashed in Bascape, Italy, sparking an international intrigue...sabotage...disappearances and murders! These events are all the more bizarre because they are TRUE. The central figure was Enrico Mattei.
Synopsis
"The Mattei Affair" (Il caso Mattei, 1972) is Francesco Rosi's political drama, available to watch online on iFILM, with Gian Maria Volonté in the lead.
Enrico Mattei went from wartime resistance fighter to the most powerful businessman in postwar Italy, turning the state energy firm ENI into a player that stared down the big American oil companies. On the evening of 27 October 1962, his private plane went down on its approach to Milan. The official word was accident. Rosi doesn't buy it, and the film works methodically through the question of who stood to gain from his death.
Instead of a tidy biopic, Rosi assembles newsreel, interviews and reconstruction into something closer to an investigation on film. It shared the top prize at Cannes in 1972. This is hard-edged political cinema for viewers who'd rather a director ask questions than hand over the answers. Stream "The Mattei Affair" online on iFILM.
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