Girolimoni, the Monster of Rome

Serial killers exist despite hour of the day or political temperament of a country. However, their sordid crimes do illuminate the underbelly of society. During the Nazi occupation of Paris in the late 1930's and early 40's, Marcel Petiot used the cover of the Holocaust to murder dozens of people and then the ensuing collapse of the city to evade arrest (read the excellent book "Death in the City of Light"). Of course, there's also German killer Peter Kurten whose crimes have spawned a variety of films from Fritz Lang to Robert Hossein.

Likewise, in Mussolini's Italy of the 1920's, a child killer walked the streets and killed a number of young girls, and that's where Damiano Damiani's "Girolimoni, the Monster of Rome" begins. An angry mosaic of the times and repercussions in a fascist society, the film is mostly about hysteria before it turns to a damning exploration of just how repressive a regime can be with the truth.

The hysteria begins when a series of missing children stuns Rome. People rampage into the streets, accusing any man seen walking alone with a young child as being the murderer. The police seem helpless and the paranoia of neighbor-upon-neighbor grows to frightening proportions. In Damiani's vision, his film is less about the murders and more about the ultimate miscarriage of justice. In real life, the crimes have remained unsolved, while in "Girolimoni, the Monster of Rome", the filmmaker quickly introduces us to a man-child (Gabriele Lavia) conducting the murders and then protected by his knowing family. The cries in the streets (and those loudest from the killer's own mother) threaten a Fascist government quickly losing control. Summed up perfectly by one scream of "is this order in a fascist world?!" by an apple cart pusher, Damiani's not-too-subtle perspective soon becomes clear.

Naturally, the uncontrollable public energy has to be quelled, and the Mussolini propaganda machine kicks into high gear. Through a series of vague witness accounts and circumstantial evidence, photographer and labor representative Gino Girolimoni (Nino Manfredi) is accused and arrested on the crimes. It takes almost a year, but he's eventually released. By that time, via the slanderous news headlines and the country's own wish to move, Girolimoni becomes a singular loud voice wailing against the injustices done to his name. 

Interestingly, Damiani's film hurdles from a lurid true-crime thriller into a pointed accusation of governmental control and media manipulation seamlessly. Wrapping these ideas around thirty or so characters and several decades, "Girolimoni, the Monster of Rome" is not only one of his best films, but the perfect example of the type of calculated sociological autopsies being produced in Italian cinema of the 1970's. More political in the genre than most of his counterparts, the film also dares to frame its final few minutes in a more present time when the death penalty is hotly contested. The lifelong repercussions against Gino Girolimoni were real. The carefully constructed myths of guilt and innocence within a Fascist society can't be denied. As one news reporter in the film states, the death penalty for a 'supposed' killer only prepares everyone sweetly for the forced death of anyone in Mussolini's clench. The film dares to posit that even though Gino was innocent of the crimes, Fascism's death sentence is a moral one as well as a physical one. It's why we must always resist.