Massacre in Rome

Rome's Gestapo chief (Burton) and a Catholic priest (Mastroianni) size up over the problem of reprisals during the last days of the Nazi occupation in WWII. Although based on fact, the film invents Mastroianni's character for the dramatic purposes of face-to-face confrontation. The ensuing debate, cumbersome and full of doughty moralising about non-involvement and complicity, results in a hands down victory for Burton's well-modulated vowels over Mastroianni's limited machine-gun English. Cosmatos' cripplingly emphatic direction reveals every creak in the plot and displays no whit of faith in an audience's intelligence.