Z

How a political murder is made to look like an accident. Costa-Gavras’s extraordinary thriller, from 1969—one of the fastest, most exciting melodramas ever made—was based on contemporary events in Greece. The picture never loses emotional contact with the audience; it derives from the traditions of the American gangster movies and prison pictures and anti-Fascist melodramas of the forties, and is based on the real-life Lambrakis affair, as it was presented in fictional form in the novel “Z,” by the Greek exile Vassili Vassilikas. In 1965, Gregoris Lambrakis, a professor of medicine, was struck down by a delivery truck as he left a peace meeting; the investigation of his death uncovered such a scandalous network of corruption and illegality in the police and in the government that the leader of the opposition party, George Papandreou, became Premier. But in 1967 a military coup d’état overturned the legal government. The movie reënacts the murder and the investigation in an attempt to show how the mechanics of fascist corruption may be hidden under the mask of law and order. When the picture is over and you’ve caught your breath, you know perfectly well that its techniques of excitation could as easily be used by a smart fascist filmmaker