Closed Circuit

Closed Circuit (1978)

Circuito chiuso

At the local cinema, an audience watches a Spaghetti Western matinee. During the film's on-screen climactic duel, a bullet is fired into a patron. With no leads and a theater full of suspects, police investigators lock the doors, put everyone back in their seats, and run the movie again. But will this shot in the dark reveal the real killer?

Date of release
1978-02-22
TMDB
6.5 / 10 (19)
Runtime
1h 46m
Genres
Crime, TV Movie
Director
Giuliano Montaldo

Casting

Interesting facts

Closed Circuit is a 1978 Italian made-for-television mystery film directed by Giuliano Montaldo. It was entered into the 28th Berlin International Film Festival.

Production

In an interview conducted before his death in 2023, director Giuliano Montaldo cited that the Ray Bradbury short story The Veldt was a direct inspiration on the screenplay, though it was not ultimately an official adaptation. In the film's conclusion, while not named, Bradbury is name-checked and the story and its denouement are discussed by the detective and the sociologist.

Though never directly mentioned or named within the movie, the western scenes on the screen were taken from Giulio Petroni's 1968 film A Sky Full of Stars for a Roof, which starred William Berger and Giuliano Gemma. Gemma recreated his character's appearance in new footage shot by Montaldo to make his film gunslinger sentient and aware of the audience.

Shown only on Italian television initially, it received a U.S. Blu-ray release from Severin Films in 2023.

Read on Wikipedia · Text from Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 4.0. Data from Wikidata.

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