Réjeanne Padovani (1973)

50th anniversary special edition! Montreal mafioso Vincent Padovani (Tadpole and the Whale’s Jean Lajeunesse) has spent years building a diversified crime empire fronted by “legitimate” business interests and sustained through illicit political connections. Having secured a much-publicized government contract for his thriving construction company, Vincent is throwing an opulent private dinner to thank his many co-conspirators, including the Mayor of Montreal (Blind Trust’s René Caron) and a host of other highly placed powerbrokers. But when the evening is thrown wildly off course – by press at the door, a looming construction protest, and the sudden reappearance of Padovani’s estranged wife Réjeanne (Dirty Money’s Luce Guilbeault) – the mob enforcers and corrupt cops that serve Vincent are called into action for a long and bloody night’s work.Three decades before winning the Best Foreign Language Film Oscar for The Barbarian Invasions, Denys Arcand started his fiction filmmaking career with an informal trilogy (Dirty Money, Réjeanne Padovani, and Gina) that remains the high-water mark for Canadian crime cinema. Powered by an all-star Quebecois cast – many playing thinly veiled versions of real-life politicians and gangsters – Réjeanne Padovani is a grand, gloriously acidic indictment of the pervasive corruption that infiltrated all corners of ’70s Quebec. Mixing the upstairs-downstairs satire of The Rules of the Game with the mafia intrigue of The Godfather, this is one of Canada’s sharpest and most incriminating cinematic self-portraits.