Pasolini wrote La Commare Secca intending to direct it, but instead decided to make Accattone. He passed the story of La Commare Secca (literally, “The Dry Housewife,” a Roman slang expression for death) on to Bernardo Bertolucci, his assistant director on Accattone. Together with Pasolini and Sergio Citti, Bertolucci revised the story considerably. Shot on location in Rome, the story of a police investigation following the murder of a prostitute follows a maze-like pattern, held together with a surface web of tension that was to become typical of Bertolucci, especially in his thriller, The Spider's Strategem. Multiple viewpoints--some true, some false--describe the movements of the various suspects at the time of the murder. The tone of the film is sombre, and the raw, almost documentary flavor of its streetlife milieu reflective of Pasolini's influence. But Bertolucci's concern with the flow of time is already apparent in this Rashoman-like narrative, and his flair for the cinema obvious, in what was one of the important directorial debuts of the sixties.