Kidnap-Murder Still Arouses Debate : Film on Moro Reopens Italian Political Wounds

A controversial feature film about the 1978 kidnaping and murder of Aldo Moro by Red Brigades guerrillas has rekindled debate in Italy on whether the former prime minister’s life could have been saved.

More than eight years after the killing, the polemics that have surrounded the recent release of “The Moro Affair” show the crime is still embedded in Italy’s national psyche.

Moro, then president of the Christian Democrats and a five-time prime minister, was kidnaped on March 16, 1978, and his five-man police escort was gunned down on a Rome street in the Red Brigades’ most spectacular operation.

The 55-day period until his bullet-riddled body was found in a car in Rome was a time of collective national anguish.

Burning Question

The burning question then--and the central theme of the film--was whether a deal should be struck with the guerrillas to spare Moro and whether officials did everything possible to discover where he was being held.

The Christian Democrats, in power at the time, have reacted to the film with rage. Flaminio Piccoli, now party president, condemned it as “an infamy . . . which oozes lies in every passage.”

Moro’s political heirs in the party decided against asking for the film to be banned. “We are for freedom, even for freedom to say nonsense,” said party secretary Ciriaco De Mita.

The controversy was further fueled when actor Gian Maria Volonte, who plays Moro in the film, was suddenly told that his scheduled appearance on Italian state television’s most popular Sunday variety program was canceled.

The program’s producers denied reports that the Christian Democrats had pressured them, saying the appearance was called off because there would not have been enough time to discuss the film adequately.

The film has been showing to packed houses. With a few exceptions, it portrays the party leaders as unwavering in their stand against dealing with the kidnapers despite Moro’s emotional letters from captivity urging them to arrange a swap for several jailed Red Brigades members.

Portrays Police

The film also portrays Italian police and secret services in a less than glowing light, implying that much more could have been done to find Moro and that not everyone in the state power structure was losing sleep over his plight.

It further suggests that some Italian security officials at the time of the kidnaping were part of the secret, illegal “P-2” Masonic lodge whose discovery three years later led to the collapse of the government.

A 1984 parliamentary report said the lodge consisted of nearly 1,000 well-placed Italians who attempted to create a “state within the state” by intervening secretly in political life.

“The question--whether everybody really did everything possible to save Moro and if those able to do so did all they could to find the hide-out--certainly remains open,” journalist Arturo Gismondi wrote in Rome’s Il Messaggero.

On two occasions in the movie police arrive at apartments where the Red Brigades had hide-outs--including the one where Moro was held--but leave when those inside don’t answer their knocks.

Critics have protested that such scenes leave the impression that the state security apparatus was bungling and inefficient or that some people did not want to find the hide-out.

Other controversial scenes concern the patronizing way some politicians and investigators treat Moro’s wife, Elenora, as she pleads with them to save her husband’s life.

The newspaper of the Communist Party, which in 1978 supported the hard-line stand, criticized the film for grouping people into “bad guys” who condemned Moro to death by refusing to deal with his captors, and “good guys” who thought a human life was more important than the honor of the state.

The film’s director, scriptwriters and actor Volonte said they were surprised by all the fuss.

Based on Documents

They say the film is based on documents from parliamentary investigations into the Moro case and the P-2 Masonic lodge, Moro’s letters from captivity, and court documents from the trials of Moro’s kidnapers.

Last year a Rome appeals court upheld the 1983 convictions of 32 Red Brigades members in the Moro case. Twenty-two have been sentenced to life imprisonment.

“To accuse this film of being a historical falsehood is hypocrisy,” Giuseppe Ferrara, the film’s director, said. “We did not invent documents which exist. This film is not a documentary but a documented analysis of one the most important episodes of our republic.”

Robert Katz, an American who co-wrote the script, said: “No film is a book of history but this is a dramatized reconstruction based on documents. The reaction shows we have pulled a few skeletons out of the political closet.”

“The film can be the subject of a thousand critics,” wrote Fabio Cavalera in Milan’s Corriere della Sera. “But it certainly can be credited with reopening a debate that perhaps some people would rather see stifled.”