NOTE: The below Blu-ray captures were taken directly from the Blu-ray disc.

ADDITION: Radiance Blu-ray (September 2026): Radiance have transferred Mauro Bolognini's Corruption to Blu-ray. Leonida Barboni (The Rover, The Facts of Murder, The White Sheik) shot it, and the choice tells you something about what Bolognini wanted. Barboni was Pietro Germi's man - In the Name of the Law, The Railroad Man, Divorce Italian Style the year before - a cameraman associated with hard Italian daylight, deep focus, and a habit of building interiors out of many small practical sources rather than one broad key. He was not a decorator's cinematographer, and La corruzione is the better for it. The film is ravishing without ever looking lacquered. Radiance bring Corruption to Blu-ray via a 2K restoration, framed at 1.85:1 and encoded on a dual-layered disc. This is a very strong presentation of a demanding black-and-white source. Barboni's photography lives at the extremes - the villa and publishing-house interiors built out of small, isolated practical sources with deep pools of shadow around them, the yacht material blown open into near-white sun - and the restoration handles both ends without flinching. Black levels are dense and stable, whites hold detail rather than clipping into paper, and the midrange gradations that carry so much of the film's texture (skin against white canvas, wood grain in the darkened study) survive intact. Grain is present, evenly resolved, and looks like grain rather than the smeared residue of over-aggressive noise reduction - a relief given how easily the high-key deck sequences can be scrubbed flat. Contrast appears faithful to the intended look, with no sign of the boosted, glossy manipulation that sometimes gets applied to restorations of this vintage. Depth is impressive in the deep-focus interior compositions, which is exactly where you want it in this film. In-motion the 1080P handles the yacht's low-frequency sea movement and the glare off the water cleanly. There's no competing edition to measure it against in English-friendly form, but on its own terms this looks like a careful, unfussy restoration presented without interference - easily the best this film has ever looked on home video.

NOTE: We have added 78 more large resolution Blu-ray captures (in lossless PNG format) for DVDBeaver Patrons HERE

On their Blu-ray, Radiance use a linear PCM mono track (24-bit) in the original Italian language. There is no alternate language option - and, more to the point, no French track, which some will reflexively hope for given that both Alain Cuny (Illustrious Corpses) and Jacques Perrin (Z, The Strangler, Cinema Paradiso) are French. It wouldn't help. Like essentially all Italian production of the period, the film was shot silent and post-synchronized, so neither actor is speaking his own voice under any circumstances; the Italian track is the authentic one and the only one that exists. Within the limits of a 1963 mono mix, this is clean and well-behaved. Dialogue is centered, intelligible, and sits in that characteristically close, unroomed post-sync space that anyone familiar with the era will recognize immediately. Giovanni Fusco's (The Day of the Owl, The Confession, L'Avventura, The Red Desert, L'Eclisse, Hiroshima Mon Amour, Il Grido,) sparse, jazz-inflected score - piano and small combo, deliberately refusing to editorialize - is given decent range, with the low end about as deep as the source allows and no obvious distortion in the party and dance-band cues. Atmospherics on the yacht (wind, water, rigging) are modest but present, and hiss is kept in check without the dialogue sounding scraped. Radiance offer optional English subtitles on their Region FREE Blu-ray.

The Radiance Blu-ray has assembled a modest selection of extras - two video pieces, both substantial. The headline supplement is a new 25-minute interview with film critic and programmer Adrian Wootton, filmed exclusively for Radiance in June 2026, which situates the film's modernist aesthetic within postwar Italian cinema and within Bolognini's career, with welcome attention to the contributions of his collaborators - Barboni, Fusco, the writers. Wootton is a reliably lucid talker on Italian cinema and he does the job this release most needs doing: making the case for Bolognini as something more than the elegant illustrator his reputation has been reduced to, and calling the film what it is - a vicious morality play. Anyone coming to Bolognini cold should watch it before the feature. Accompanying it is a 1/4 hour archival interview (dating from 2007) with the legendary producer Alfredo Bini (Satyricon, The Hawks and the Sparrows, The Gospel According to St. Matthew, Ro.Go.Pa.G., Mamma Roma) alongside Manolo Bolognini, Mauro's brother and himself a producer, discussing the making of the film, its contemporaneous themes and its reception in 1960s Italy. Bini is terrific value - the epitome of the old-school Italian producer, blunt, self-mythologizing and genuinely perceptive about the market he was operating in - and the piece gives valuable context on how a film this bleak about the miracolo economico got financed at the height of it. Packaging is up to the label's usual standard: a reversible sleeve with the original poster art and newly commissioned artwork by Time Tomorrow, and a limited edition booklet with new writing by film scholar Marco Natoli, mounting a defense of Bolognini's legacy and illustrated with production stills. This is a limited edition of 3000 copies, presented in full-height Scanavo packaging with a removable OBI strip that leaves the case free of certificates and markings.

Mauro Bolognini's Corruption is not flawless. The philosophical scaffolding creaks - the schoolmaster's framing device is schematic, and a few exchanges are debate rather than drama - and the charge that has dogged Bolognini his whole career, that the surfaces are lovelier than the thinking underneath, is not entirely unearned here. But the accusation misreads what the beauty is doing. The sun, the linen, the gleaming teak, the gorgeous women are not decoration applied to the subject; they are the subject. Bolognini understood that a film about seduction has to seduce, and that the viewer who finds the yacht inviting has already conceded the argument. On that count La corruzione is among the most quietly implicating Italian films of its decade... and one of the least seen. Bolognini's surfaces are so lovely that the film has been accused of preferring beauty to thought, but the beauty is the argument: a picture about seduction that failed to seduce would prove nothing. Alain Cuny - Steiner from La Dolce Vita, hollowed out - is chilling precisely because he plays corruption as pedagogy, and Rosanna Schiaffino (The Man Called Noon, Ro.Go.Pa.G., The Rover, The Witch,) finds a wounded self-awareness in a role written as an instrument. Radiance's 2K Blu-ray restoration gives Leonida Barboni's high-contrast black-and-white the presentation it has never had, the uncompressed mono is faithful plus the two interviews and Natoli's booklet essay make a coherent case for a director overdue for reappraisal. Strongly recommended.

Gary Tooze