Z

The fifth and last of the nominations for the 1969 Best Picture Oscar I'll be discussing is Z, which was the first film to be nominated for both Best Picture and Best Foreign Language Film (which it won, along with editing). Directed by Costa-Gavras, it is one of the best political thrillers ever made.

Although the language is French and the location shoot was in Algeria, Z is all about Greek politics. In 1963 a Greek politician, Grigoris Lambrakis, was assassinated and the military dictatorship covered it up. This film is a very thinly veiled account of that, so thinly veiled that a title card announces that any resemblance to actual persons is not coincidental, it is intentional.

Yves Montand plays the leader of the opposition party, who are for banning the bomb and peace. This gets them labeled as communists. Montand is in the city to give a speech, and while the government claims they are a democracy, and let him give his speech, they do everything they can do stop it, including hiring thugs to demonstrate. A pair of them, on a three-wheeled vehicle, manage to hit Montand with a club, killing him.

The police and the prosecutor's office declare it an accident. But the magistrate assigned to the case (Jean-Louis Trintignant) is a straight arrow. He accepts the accident story at first, politely telling witnesses that it is an "incident," not a "murder," until the doctors tell him that Montand's injuries are consistent with a blow to the head from a blunt object, not from hitting the street. This gets Trintignant digging deeper, uncovering witnesses, such as a coffin varnisher who is attacked, but stubbornly gives evidence.

Z is expertly paced, with wonderful music by Mikas Theodakaris, who was under house arrest at the time. The climactic sequence, in which military police officials, their chests weighted down by ribbons, are brought in one by one and charged with murder by Trintignant, is a rousing crowd pleaser (I first saw this film with an audience back in college and it provided a festive atmosphere). Of course, the world being as it is, the ending deflates those positive emotions.

Z was banned in Greece for many years, but the character that Trintignant is based on was later elected president of Greece. As Martin Luther King Jr. said, "the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice."