Director/co-scriptwriter Marco Turco’s Excellent Cadavers/In un altro Paese is a hurried update of Alexander Stille’s 1996 book of the same name, subtitled The Mafia and the Death of the First Italian Republic, tracing the intimate connection between Italy’s notorious mob and its politicians, the escalation of Mafia violence in 1980s Sicily and the crusade of brilliant courageous prosecutors Giovanni Falcone and Paolo Borsellino.

Unmentioned is a 1999 teleplay, same title same source, done like a documentary and actually more effective in that there is a plot, so that interest builds, smaller details can be de-emphasized, and the memorable story (Chazz Palminteri and Andy Luotto are the brave heroes, F. Murray Abraham the star witness) stays with one.

America’s expert on things Italian, New York-based Stille was contacted by the producer, asked to collaborate on the script and, most importantly, serve as on-screen cicerone for the audience. A major part of the update is the inclusion of seventy-year-old photojournalist Letizia Battaglia, who meets our print-journalist guide at Palermo’s airport to start, will herself leave at the end, and whose graphic photographs of “just about every Mafia killing” -- a thousand in 1982 alone -- dot the film. Profound disillusionment prompts her eventual self-exile, and more might have been made of that coupled with the similar malaise expressed by some of ironically maligned and assassinated Falcone and Borsellino’s legal confederates, who today ruefully question whether the sacrifice was worth its fatal cost.

The problem with this documentary lies in its inner distribution and organization. Too many frames are devoted to narrator Stille paging through archives or walking in front of or into ornate buildings, screen time which would better have served to engage a non-Italian public by enlarging on a mere passing mention of the Allies’ culpability in restoring Mafia power through post-War policies designed to limit Communist Party gains. And, counter to Puzo’s Don Corleone’s flattering refusal to deal drugs, linkage should have been made to audience favorite The French Connection’s collapse of the Marseilles heroin hegemony and its continuation out of Sicily. This latter is of particular relevance, since the immense profits involved were what prompted the family from the town of Corleone to challenge the previously ruling one from the capital and thus directly ushered in the late ‘70s-early ‘80s slaughter.

Drawing in many of the island’s poor, electorally essential five million, the internecine warfare outraged a normally cowed and resigned population and led thereafter heavily guarded Falcone and Borsellino and others to their thankless course of action. The general thread emerges, dramatically highlighted by the February 1986 reinforced underground bunker Maxi-Trials of hundreds of organized crime bosses and foot soldiers. The case is broken open, indeed made possible, by increasingly detailed revelations from capo Tommaso Buscetta, extradited from Brazil in 1983, and dozens of rank and file.

Television and cinema overflow with violence, the Italian brand oddly far away and an accepted given even to its leftist fringe terrorism of thirty years ago, and, a relatively new democracy with no background of institutional checks, that nation is unique in the political power wielded by criminal elements and the criminality of its politicians. In defiance of a temporarily aroused public and the airtight victories of two decades ago, laws were changed and convictions overturned, and in the long haul things have changed little.

In the film, however, the effect is diluted further by barbs out of the time frame, that is, against media mogul twice prime minister Silvio Berlusconi, the villainous subject of Stille’s just-published The Sack of Rome, and by so many interviewees and others’ unfamiliar names that the confusing result is like reading Dante without footnotes to indicate the Commedia’s thirteenth century historical personalities and symbolism.

The underworld’s equally merciless war against prosecutors and judges who dared offer opposition, supposedly prompted Sicilian writer Leonardo Sciascia’s term, “excellent cadavers.” If so, he took his cue from cadavre exquis, a parlor game favored by Surrealists between World Wars; Excellent Cadavers, too, comes off as surreal -- the shame that it would capture seems missed and distant.

(Released by First Run/Icarus Films; not rated by MPAA.)