A terrific film that uses original and documentary footage to examine the life and death of a powerful Italian leader

 Francesco Rosi's The Mattei Affair (1972) is what today we'd call a "docudrama," a retelling of the life of a man little-known to Americans today, or ever, who was entrusted toward the end of WW2 with the management of the oil reserves of Italy and over the next 20 years or so built the Italian oil conglomerate into a hugely powerful enterprise, broad in scope. Amazingly, in the process of his doing so he seems to have managed his personal integrity - no bribes, no obvious corruption, a relatively Spartan lifestyle (except for his private jet - which he makes a good case that he needs for his constant international travel), and an insistence throughout his career that the oil belongs to the people of Italy and he will do all he can to enrich his country, not himself. Well, of course, in his two decades of making deals for Italian oil reserves he makes many enemies (in particular, the U.S., which tried to undercut him with sales to the oil conglomerates, Standard Oil et al. - one of the great scenes in the film is Mattei's confrontation with a nasty American oil baron who says he won't deal with an "oil salesman"). Mattei is played brilliantly, at an extremely high energy level, by the great Jean Marie Volonte (best known to us as the police chief in Investigation of a Citizen Above Suspicion). Another one of the best scenes has Mattei speaking to a huge, adoring crowd in Sicily - and you have to wonder in that scene if he had or could have had political ambitions. As it happens, he died in a crash of his private jet in 1962: the scene of his plane crash opens the film, and then we go back 20 years and gradually, as Rosi builds the case that the crash was an act of sabotage. Although no foul play was detected at the time (cover-up?), an investigative team (not sure if they were journalists or filmmakers) began a new investigation in about 1970 - when one of the investigators, in Sicily, vanished and has never been seen since. It was unclear to me whether Rosins used any documentary footage (a check of Wikipedia shows that he did include scenes of himself investigating the death of his friend/colleague) but, either way, it's a powerful film by a truly courageous documentary filmmaker.