Girolimoni, il mostro di Roma

Italian cinema is usually pretty allegorical, so I had to check out a Damiano Damiani movie that was actually about Italian history. It's really a kind of euro-crime movie, set in Mussolini's Rome. The Italian title literally means "Girolimoni, The Monster of Rome". Besides the elements of a euro-crime movie it also serves as a vehicle to think about how things work in a totalitarian society. It's been said of such societies that the more they impose rigid order on the surface, the more they breed chaos below the surface. This movie dramatizes that well. It's worth watching, now late in 2015, as the US moves towards outright fascism with some of the POTUS candidates. It's good to remember what life is like when appearance is very important and facts count for very little. Fascism has come to mean Nazism, and people forget that the first fascist, Mussolini, defined it as "the union of corporate and state interests". It wasn't about racism. If you think that mindset is far from America, just look at the obverse of a Mercury dime coin. That's a Roman fasces, they symbol from which Mussolini took the name of his movement.