Oedipus Rex

“Pasolini’s Terrifying… Compassionate… Magnificent…”

An oracle tells Oedipus (Franco Citti) that he will kill his father and marry his mother, so he leaves the Corinth palace where Merope (Alida Valli) raised him as her own son. On the road he fights an older man and kills him, and he walks on toward Thebes without knowing what the oracle has set moving. Pasolini opens in pre-war Italy, then moves the same story into a barren desert of antiquity.