The Grim Reaper

Near the Tiber river, in a Roman park, a prostitute was killed. The police tracks down people that were inside the park during that night. They are questioned and have to explain why they were there. One of them is the killer.

The brutalized corpse of a Roman prostitute is found along the banks of the Tiber River. The police round up and interrogate a handful of possible suspects. In this his stunning debut feature-based on a story by Pier Paolo Pasolini-Bernardo Bertolucci utilizes a series of interconnected flashbacks to explore the nature of truth and the reliability of narrative. The Criterion Collection is proud to present the first realization of a legendary talent


Overview
A very young Bernardo Bertolucci already shows his talent in this bleak, 94-minute murder mystery, told in an interesting series of flashbacks. A Roman prostitute has been brutally murdered in a park near the Tiber River and in order to forward their investigation, the police corner a handful of people who were in the park at the time. As they separately tell their versions of why they were there and what they did, their narrations do not necessarily match the images on the screen that do reflect the truth. By the time all the flashbacks have been completed, a real picture of the crime emerges, revealing that one of those in custody is the killer.

All Movie Guide - Tom Wiener
Though it has the trappings of a mystery, Bernardo Bertolucci's debut feature, based on a story by his one-time neighbor Pier Paolo Pasolini, is really a probe of the reliability of narrative. Told in a series of interconnected flashbacks by "persons of interest" in the murder of a prostitute, the crime is easily resolved and the identity of the murder is almost irrelevant, because Bertolucci is much more interested in exploring how each suspect frames his own alibi. Intercut among the various narratives are shots of the victim beginning her day by rising from her bed and staring out onto the morning rain, oblivious to her fate. For a 21-year-old filmmaker, this is a remarkably pessimistic work; the film's opening image, of a sheaf of paper tossed from a car on highway overpass and eventually floating down to the corpse of the prostitute on the grass, to the murderer's cries as he's arrested -- "She was only a whore!" -- we get a sense that life, at least in some quarters of society, is easily disposable.