Oedipus Rex (1967) on Netflix
A jealous soldier in pre-war Italy has his infant son abandoned. Raised in Corinth as Oedipus, the boy learns from an oracle he will kill his father and marry his mother.
- Netflix4.0/5
- IMDb7.2/107,743 votes
- Rotten Tomatoes89%
Trailer
Plot summary
In 1920s Italy a soldier is jealous of the bond between his wife and their newborn son, and the child is left in the desert. The setting becomes the ancient world, where the childless king and queen of Corinth, Polybus and Merope, take the foundling in and name him Oedipus. He grows up believing they are his parents, until a classmate taunts him as a foundling during a sports game and he is plagued by bad dreams. He travels alone to the Oracle of Delphi, which tells him he is fated to kill his father and to marry his mother. Rather than return to Corinth, he wanders the desert, where a wagon and armed soldiers halt him and the king riding in the wagon orders him off the road.
Cast
- Ahmed Belhachmias Polibo
- Giandomenico Davolias Pastore di Polibo
Did you know?!Facts and trivia about Oedipus Rex (1967)
Can contain spoilers, watch the movie first.
- Pier Paolo Pasolini said the child in the prologue of Oedipus Rex was himself, the father his own father, an infantry officer, and the mother a teacher, his own mother, calling the film the story of his Oedipal complex.
- Pasolini wanted a rugged, stark landscape resembling Greece for the film. He found Romania a modern industrialized country where old wooden villages were a rarity, and settled instead on Morocco, whose mountains and desert bear little resemblance to Greece.
- Oedipus Rex was Pier Paolo Pasolini's first feature-length colour film, though he had already used colour in "The Earth Seen from the Moon", his episode of the 1967 anthology film The Witches.
- The score of Oedipus Rex is largely Romanian folk music taken from an Electrecord album, Anthology of Romanian Folk Music, which Pasolini chose for its ambiguous sound and language.
