Peter William Sutcliffe, also known as Peter Coonan, was an English serial killer who was convicted of murdering thirteen women and attempting to murder seven others between 1975 and 1980. He was dubbed in press reports as the Yorkshire Ripper, an allusion to the Victorian serial killer Jack the Ripper. He was sentenced to twenty concurrent sentences of life imprisonment, which were converted to a whole life order in 2010. Two of Sutcliffe's murders took place in Manchester; all the others were in West Yorkshire. Criminal psychologist David Holmes characterised Sutcliffe as being an "extremely callous, sexually sadistic serial killer."
Angiolino Giuseppe Pasquale Ventura, known as Lino Ventura, was an Italian-born actor and philanthropist, who lived and worked for most of his life in France. He was considered one of the greatest leading man of French cinema during the 1960s and 1970s, known for his portrayal of tough characters on both sides of the law in crime dramas.
Leonardo Sciascia was an Italian writer, novelist, essayist, playwright, and politician. Some of his works have been made into films, including Porte Aperte, Cadaveri Eccellenti, Todo Modo and Il giorno della civetta. He is one of the greatest literary figures in the European literature of the 20th century.
The Capuchin Catacombs of Palermo are burial catacombs in Palermo, Sicily, southern Italy. Today they provide a somewhat macabre tourist attraction as well as an extraordinary historical record.
Equal Danger is a 1971 detective novel by Leonardo Sciascia where a police inspector investigating a string of murders finds himself involved in existential political intrigues. Set in an indeterminate country this novel is informed by the corrupt politics and the Mafia of Sciascia's experiences in 1970s Sicily.
La Révolution surréaliste was a publication by the Surrealists in Paris. Twelve issues were published between 1924 and 1929.
Excellent Cadavers is a 1995 non-fiction book by American author Alexander Stille about the Sicilian Mafia, concentrating on magistrate Giovanni Falcone's fight against the Mafia and his 1992 assassination.
Eraclio Petri, commonly known as Elio Petri, was an Italian film and theatre director, screenwriter and film critic. The Museum of Modern Art described him as "one of the preeminent political and social satirists of 1960s and early 1970s Italian cinema". His film Investigation of a Citizen Above Suspicion won the 1971 Academy Award for Best Foreign-Language Film, and his subsequent film The Working Class Goes to Heaven received the Palme d'Or at the 1972 Cannes Film Festival.
Salvatore Giuliano is a 1962 Italian drama film directed by Francesco Rosi. Using techniques of the documentary film, it recounts the criminal career of famous Sicilian bandit Salvatore Giuliano between 1943 and 1950, his death. In 2008, the film was included in the Italian Ministry of Cultural Heritage's 100 Italian films to be saved, a list of 100 films that "have changed the collective memory of the country between 1942 and 1978."
Gian Maria Volonté was an Italian actor and activist. He is best known for his roles in four Spaghetti Western films: Ramón Rojo in Sergio Leone's A Fistful of Dollars (1964), El Indio in Leone's For a Few Dollars More (1965), El Chuncho Munoz in Damiano Damiani's A Bullet for the General (1966) and Professor Brad Fletcher in Sergio Sollima's Face to Face (1967).
Marcel Bozzuffi was a French film actor. Internationally, he appeared as a hitman in the Oscar-winning American film The French Connection. In 1963, he married French actress Françoise Fabian.
Francesco Rosi was an Italian filmmaker, screenwriter and theatre director. His film The Mattei Affair won the Palme d'Or at the 1972 Cannes Film Festival. Rosi's films, especially those of the 1960s and 1970s, often appeared to have political messages. While the topics of his later films became less politically oriented and more angled toward literature, he continued to direct until 1997, his last film being the adaptation of Primo Levi's book, The Truce.
Maria Christina "Tina" Aumont was an American actress. She was the daughter of French actor Jean-Pierre Aumont and Dominican actress Maria Montez. She made her acting debut in the British film Modesty Blaise (1966), but later had a prominent career as a leading lady in Italian films.
Alberto Grimaldi was an Italian film producer.
René Xavier Marie Alain Cuny was a French actor of stage and screen. He was closely linked with the works of Paul Claudel and Antonin Artaud, and for his performances for the Théâtre national populaire and Odéon-Théâtre de France.
Death Smiles on a Murderer is a 1973 Italian horror film directed by Joe D'Amato and starring Ewa Aulin, Klaus Kinski and Luciano Rossi.
Alfonso Gatto was an Italian writer. Along with Giuseppe Ungaretti he is one of the foremost Italian poets of the 20th century and a major exponent of hermetic poetry.
The list of the A hundred Italian films to be saved was created with the aim to report "100 films that have changed the collective memory of the country between 1942 and 1978". Film preservation, or film restoration, describes a series of ongoing efforts among film historians, archivists, museums, cinematheques, and non-profit organizations to rescue decaying film stock and preserve the images they contain. In the widest sense, preservation assures that a movie will continue to exist in as close to its original form as possible.
Seven Murders for Scotland Yard is a 1971 Italian-Spanish giallo film directed by José Luis Madrid and starring Paul Naschy, Patricia Loran and Renzo Marignano. Naschy and Madrid wrote the screenplay, Tito Carpi's name was simply added to the credits to satisfy the requirements for a Spanish-Italian co-production. The film was shot in June 1971, and was first released in Italy in 1971 as Sette Cadaveri per Scotland Yard / Seven Corpses for Scotland Yard. It was shown in Spain on July 10, 1972, as Jack el destripador de Londres, and finally wound up theatrically released in the U.S. in 1976 as Seven Murders for Scotland Yard. The Mexican one-sheet poster simply called the film Jack el distripador/ Jack the Ripper.
The organization officially known as Volante Rossa "Martiri Partigiani", often mentioned simply as Volante Rossa, was a clandestine antifascist paramilitary organization active in and around Milan in the postwar to the Second World War, from 1945 to 1949. Led by "tenente Alvaro", nom-de-guerre of Giulio Paggio, it was made up of communist partisans and workers who aimed with their actions to build a continuity with the wartime action of the Italian Resistance.
