The Spider’s Stratagem 1970

At the request of his father’s mistress, Draifa, Alida Valli Athos Magnani arrives by train in the town of Tara, a place where his father, also named Athos Magnani, Giulio Brogi was said to have been killed before his birth. The locals remember the elder Magnani as a resistance hero, and a square featuring his statue anchors the town’s communal memory. Draifa believes Athos can uncover the truth behind his father’s death or seek justice on his behalf, and she has sought him out after spotting his image in a newspaper. The atmosphere is thick with rumor, ritual, and a shared need to maintain a myth, even as the real story remains elusive.

A sense of fate hangs over Tara. A fortune teller once predicted the father’s end, a prophecy that echoes through the town’s stories, and an unopened letter found on the elder Magnani’s corpse warns him not to go ahead—an ominous message that resembles a Shakespearean warning from Macbeth or Julius Caesar in tone. The letter’s words linger in the air as Athos confronts the town’s public monuments and the quiet, guarded nods of those who knew his father. The landscape itself seems to conspire to keep the truth buried, and Athos feels the weight of history pressing in from every corner.

As he probes deeper, Athos encounters evasions and hostility from those who once worked with or knew his father. Eventually three acquaintances reveal a version of events that challenges the common story. Costa, Tino Scotti, one of the elder Magnani’s contacts, explains a plan to strike at Benito Mussolini in the local theatre during a performance of Rigoletto. The tale expands with the input of Gaibazzi, Pippo Campanini, and Razori, Franco Giovanelli, who claim the bombing never took place because fear, betrayal, or a combination of both kept the plan from being carried out. They also suggest that the elder Magnani died as a consequence of those tangled loyalties rather than as a straightforward victim of fascist brutality. Athos remains skeptical, unsure whether the truth hides somewhere between courage and cowardice, and whether the town’s need for a heroic narrative eclipses any real resolution.

The town’s theatre and its looming memory become a running motif. From the outside, the aria of Rigoletto seems to accompany Athos’s search, linking the stage with the executive of a community that would rather protect a myth than admit a messy truth. The theatre’s echo resonates with the questions that haunt him: if his father sought to strike a blow against Mussolini, did he fail because of his own doubts, or because others turned against him? The weight of this question compounds the sense that Tara stabilizes itself through legend as much as through fact.

During a ceremonial moment in front of the elder Magnani’s statue, Athos begins to tell the story he’s learned, only to stop short. He observes that the town’s need for a myth may trump the orbit of a single, painful truth. The ceremony becomes a mirror of Tara itself: a place where memory is curated, where silence can feel like complicity, and where admitting the full truth could unravel the carefully constructed identity the town clings to.

With the decision to leave looming, Athos steps toward the railway and notices how trains are increasingly late and the tracks appear rusted and overgrown. The practical path out of Tara is blocked by a broader, more insidious trap: the town’s myth is binding him as surely as any chain. He, too, risks becoming another figure in a narrative that sustains itself by refusing to confront its own contradictions. The final image is both literal and symbolic—a transportation line, a fading road, and a mind that cannot easily disentangle fact from legend. In the end, the web that held the town together threatens to hold him as well, leaving him to decide whether to stay and fight for a harder truth or to depart in search of a reality untainted by myth.

A brief, uncredited appearance punctuates the film’s textures: a Sailor, Allen Midgette, crosses the frame in a moment that underscores how ordinary individuals intersect with extraordinary histories, even as the larger truth remains unsettled.