SOURCE: "Pasolini Leaves a Literary Legacy," in Village Voice, Vol. XX, No. 46, November 17, 1975, p. 127.

In the following essay, Sarris discusses Pasolini's career and gruesome death.

Pier Paolo Pasolini, the 53-year-old film director, was murdered last week near Rome. His confessed killer, 17-year-old Giuseppe Pelosi, says that he rejected Mr. Pasolini's sexual advances, beat him unconscious with a piece of wooden fencing, and then ran over him in Pasolini's own sportscar.

The gruesome murder of Pier Paolo Pasolini was more violent and more senseless than anything he had ever conceived in his films. He died on the edge of an abyss he had attempted to explore in Accattone back in 1961. The eponymous protagonist of Accattone was no mere middle-class "vitellone" with time on his hands. Pasolini's characters, unlike Fellini's, were hopelessly mired in the lower depths. Indeed, Accattone might have been the cinematic prototype of 17-year-old Giuseppe Pelosi, the...