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We were flipping through the thumbnails on the ad-supported streaming service Tubi when my sweetie-wife, a lover of birds, noticed the title The Day of the Owl, and we stopped to investigate.

An Italian/French crime drama from 1968, the film intrigued us enough to start the stream, but on that evening Tubi’s service must have been pushed to its limit because the film stuttered and stopped. We decided to try again another night, and when we did it played perfectly.

les films corona

The Day of the Owl focuses on the new police captain, Bellodi (Franco Nero), recently transferred from Northern Italy to Sicily, and his investigation of an organized crime murder of a local contractor who refused to play along with the region’s rampant corruption. With witnesses who refuse to come forward and informants who work both sides of the conflict, Bellodi soon moves beyond acceptable police work in his attempt to link the murder to the local mafia leader Don Mariano (Lee J. Cobb).

One of the issues one can run into when discovering a film on Tubi is that the service does not always get the most pristine copies to stream, but this was not the case with The Day of the Owl. Image and sound were perfect, though I had the opinion that the sound mix had the foley track too loud; compared to some of the other foreign films we watched on the service, this was like having a Blu-ray in the player. Franco Nero looked fantastic: his intense blue eyes shone brightly, and he cut a fine figure in his uniform. This was also an exception in that the film was presented with its Italian language soundtrack and not dubbed, as is the case with the majority of the films on Tubi. This is not a story for anyone looking for simply good guys and a world where evil is always and easily vanquished, but for those who like more challenging plots, it is worth at least one watch.

The writing is sharp, with a biting sense of humor present throughout most of the film. Sardonic and cynical is the script, and while this movie was released in 1968, it has the tone and resolution of a movie from the deep, dark mid-70s.