Like Leone’s spaghetti Westerns, Slap the Monster on Page One comes from the fascinating intersection between genre cinema and Italian political filmmaking of the late 1960s and early 1970s. The film tells the pulpy tale of a right-wing newspaper editor who labors to frame an anarchist for rape and murder in an attempt to swing an upcoming election. Bellocchio keeps the action moving briskly—a rather complicated plot speeds by in an hour and a half. Welcoming the chance to experiment with working in a more mainstream vein than the art cinema in which he started, Bellocchio stepped in at the last minute to take over from the film’s intended director who had fallen ill. Slap the Monster does include some recognizably Bellocchio-ish touches, such as the insertion of news footage of political demonstrations into the fictional world of the film. Nevertheless, the experience of making the film sealed Bellocchio’s decision to never again to work in a commercial mode and also initiated his drift from directly political cinema.