Overview: Days before a general election a young girl is raped and murdered. Bizanti (Gian Maria Volonté, The Working Class Goes to Heaven), the editor of a right-wing newspaper uses the story to help the conservative candidate his paper supports.

The tumultuous time of Italy’s Years of Lead are captured in Marco Bellocchio’s powerful political drama which directly addressed topics of its day and even prefigured the creation of the right-wing paper Il giornale, which came into being two years after this film.

In an age of media manipulation Slap the Monster on Page One has never been more relevant and stands proudly alongside such Italian activist classics as We Still Kill the Old Way and The Mattei Affair.

Blu-ray Verdict: While Slap the Monster on Page One’s Bizanti is nowhere near as dynamic or charismatic as the Inspector in Investigation of a Citizen Above Suspicion (after all, who is?), the intensity Gian Maria Volonté brings to playing characters with beliefs diametrically opposed to his own immediately makes them compelling, and seems to grant these monstrous men a depth they might lack in less confident, politically energized hands.

What’s perhaps most interesting about Bizanti is his easy contentment with his position. He shows none of the ferocious ambition that defines the Inspector’s trajectory and, as he repeatedly displays, has a firm understanding of where he stands in the pecking order of his little world. As well he should, because he’s found a position to which he’s perfectly suited: Bizanti pulls strings, but always has plausible deniability, if he needs it, because he acts only with the approval of a superior, and he genuinely loves the newspaper business, something which is made wonderfully, unexpectedly clear as he watches the presses produce the story on which he’s worked.

Phew! Continuing onward, and there’s also a notable triumph in his manner, certainly, because the narrative detailed in the paper is one he’s carefully guided into being, but there’s also a more fundamental joy of a job well done; of a newspaper editor, remembering the rush of boots-on-the ground reporting.

The only discontent we see in Bizanti comes from the fact that his job isn’t hard enough. When he impassively eviscerates his wife and her intellect, he’s laying out his fury with the masses: at their eager embrace of thinly crafted narratives, and their pitiful desire to be told what to think. Because the kind of storytelling he does has simply gotten too simple — now, the challenges come only from inside, as when a rookie reporter gets ideas about his own importance, rather than from Bizanti’s audience or that of his paper.

Its opponents see through nearly every move Il Giornale makes, but they don’t matter (they never have): they’re not the paper’s audience, and never have been. Their anger is simply a useful side effect, another weapon in Bizanti’s arsenal, a means by which he can condemn the left and their irrational, often violent rage at law, order, and true justice, thus feeding Il Giornale eager customer further confirmation of the narratives they’ve obediently absorbed.

If only the masses weren’t quite so easy to lead, Bizanti would get to experience the rush of successfully completing a difficult task more often than once every few months. But today, even his enemies — sorrowful women in love with leftists; desperate murders obsessed with school girls — can be brought under his sway with little more than a handful of words presented with precisely the right tone.

It’s hardly a challenge at all for him anymore, such is the way Bizanti has so completely become one with his work: he doesn’t even need to think to sway his targets anymore. Instead, he just reacts — in a manner perfectly tailored to his audience of one, and with words which he knows even before he speaks them will achieve his ends.

The absence of emotion from Bizanti, apart from frustration at the lack of roadblocks in his path, and his near smiles when he gets glimpses of the successes that are just ahead, is deeply chilling, revealing him to be a man who holds himself apart from humanity. To him, men are nothing more than pieces to move about on a board, a collection of colorless pawns to be deployed in whatever way best serves his ends.

Bizanti is sharply intelligent, but his intellectual gifts are poured into manipulation; into shaping the political field before him to match the one he’s been asked to create. Some pieces must be sacrificed, of course, so that those who really matter can be advanced with minimal risk, but pawns are a dime a dozen, forgotten the moment they are removed from the grand board over which Bizanti watches. For him, success is concrete: victory in an election, a change of policy, a defeat of an uprising. Feelings are irrelevant, which is precisely what makes Bizanti so good at his job.

Empathy and curiosity are for the weak and naïve; Bizanti is a man of action and calculation, solving problems and putting his solution in place, without wasting time and energy considering the elusive human factor. He has no time for those who hesitate over such things, and anyone who opposes him on the basis of principle or moral obligation only reveals himself to be a fool.

There is an obvious connection to be drawn here with the present day, and the blatantly destructive actions of businesses and governments when it comes to both humanity and the environment, as they take action that, by any measure other than temporarily increasing power and wealth, are damaging to everyone, themselves included. But it simply doesn’t matter — they are what matters, and their only goal is to feed their insatiable desire for more.

Leaving the world better than they found it, or improving the lives of their fellow men are concepts that simply don’t exist in their worlds, just as they don’t in Bizanti’s. Selflessness is an outdated concept: whether it’s 1972 or 2023 it’s achieving for the I that matters. [S.N.]

LIMITED EDITION CONTENTS:
4K restoration of the film from the original negative by Cineteca di Bologna in collaboration with Surf Film and Kavac Film, under the supervision of director Marco Bellocchio
Uncompressed mono PCM audio
Archival interview with Marco Bellocchio (21 mins)
Newly filmed interview with critic and author Mario Sesti (2024, 25 mins)
Appreciation by filmmaker Alex Cox (2024, 10 mins)
Newly improved English subtitle translation
Reversible sleeve featuring designs based on original posters
Limited edition booklet featuring new writing by Wesley Sharer
Limited edition of 3000 copies, presented in full-height Scanavo packaging with removable OBI strip leaving packaging free of certificates and markings

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