Anticipating The Hunger Games (2012) by 47 years, Elio Petri’s The Tenth Victim (1965) has achieved a cult status in lieu of being completely forgotten. The Reality Television death game has been used in The Running Man (1987) and Battle Royale (2000). And the Man Hunt has been featured in many other films, most notably The Most Dangerous Game (1932) and has been a trope for many other films and television show episodes.
The 10th Victim takes the premise and make humans hunting humans part of our society’s natural order. The countries of the World have agreed to allow this as a means to channel society’s aggressiveness away from war. At the same time, like wars, particular rules apply to the Man Hunt which make certain areas for killing off limits. And should you shoot accidentally a non-participant in the game, you get an automatic 30 years prison sentence. The game’s participants have a propensity for violence. The hunter and hunted are chosen by chance. The pursued may know someone is coming after them but do not know who this person is. One you have reached ten kills, you get a million dollars and can live the good life (the theoretic prize for the winners in The Hunger Games).
The innovative aspect of the film is how it enfolds the systematically sanctioned killings into the world of entertainment. Hunters can make great deals with companies by incorporating a killing to a commercial advertisement. This bears a close resemblance to product placement which, in the Sixties, was a growing element in films, like the James Bond series. Caroline Meredith (Ursula Andress) hunts Marcello (Marcello Mastroianni), who will be her 10th victim. She has an arrangement with Ming Tea to kill Marcello before television cameras at the Temple of Venus. She poses as reporter trying to interview Marcello, who is one of the more famous of the hunters. Marcello is beleaguered by his ex-wife and a mistress who spends all his money. Marcello soon arranges a deal similar to Caroline’s.
In the midst of the facades and machinations to lure their victims to their deaths. Marcello and Caroline fall in love. At least, it appears so. However, at the moment of truth, in separate episodes, each do try to kill the other. They allow the other to think they have been killed. Marcello dies first. But he has faked it. He knows Caroline couldn’t resist the rewards for killing him. He confronts her and then shoots her. He believes she is dead but she also returns. Before she can act, they are being shot at by assassins working for Marcello’s mistress. Carolina and Marcello make it to a waiting Pan Am jet and are whisked away. However, their escape is a ruse for her to marry him, to which he accedes at gunpoint.
The film’s tag line: “Why control the births when you can increase the deaths?” hits a tender Italian nerve. In the 1960s, Italian society was rebelling against the Catholic in matters of divorce, birth control, and abortion. The line also acknowledges the issue of overpopulation. However, the most merciless satire comes at the expense of television. Instead of worrying about the moral entanglement of these issues, the film captures the modern tendency turn everything into entertainment and profit. Entertainment at all costs, with an elite of assassins living the lives that the audience desires. The viewers can participate vicariously in the human sacrifice that lies at the base of the television ethos (see my article).
The 10th Victim exists for me in separate segments of my life. The first times I watched it, I could understand the satire but not really believe there was much at stake for me. Since reading the work of Rene Girard, author of The Scapegoat and Violence and the Sacred, I have become keenly aware of the ways of our Age have incorporated practices that we’ve thought that we’d left far behind in a very murky past (like human sacrifice) and have continued practices that have always been vile (like scapegoating).
I’m not saying that this is Petri’s goal. The 10th Victim follows the thematic course and meaning of his best work: The Assassin (1961); Investigation of a Citizen Above Suspicion (1970), and Property is No Longer Theft (1973). Investigation of a Citizen is his best known, starring Gian Maria Volonte (best known for his villain roles in A Fistful of Dollars [1964] and For a Few Dollars More [1965]), as a homicide chief inspector, who kills his mistress and deliberately leaves clues to his guilt.
The Assassin, starring Mastroianni, also tells the tale of a murdered mistress, but in this case we are never certain that the accused (M.M.) committed the crime. Property is No Longer Theft, by its satiric title, alludes to Petri’s leftist political leanings, a member of the Italian Communist Party until 1956 (Volonte was a member of the Party until 1977).
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