Almost Human (1974)

Almost Human (Milano odia: la polizia non può sparare) is a 1974 poliziottesco directed by Umberto Lenzi. This is the first of half a dozen poliziotteschi Lenzi made with star Tomas Milian. Confusingly it has been released with numerous different titles.

Milian is Giulio Sacchi, a particularly dumb hoodlum. After he almost causes a bank robbery to go wrong Giulio gets beaten up by his accomplices. He decides to strike out on his own. He’s ambitious. He’s going to pull a really really big job. He’s going to kidnap Marilù Porrino (Laura Belli), the daughter of a fabulously rich industrialist.

Giulio is ambitious but he’s too dumb and too crazy to figure out that he’s unlikely to get away with it. Especially with accomplices like Vittorio (Gino Santercole) and Carmine (Ray Lovelock). Vittorio is just dumb but Carmine is an obvious weak link - he’s young, emotional and highly strung. Once the killings start he’s not going to cope very well.

And the killings start immediately. Giulio does not intend to leave a single witness alive. Anyone who knows anything at all, no matter how insignificant, is going to be killed. Giulio has obtained three submachine-guns. They are going to get a lot of use.

Commissario Walter Grandi (Henry Silva) is a no-nonsense cop who knows his job. Giulio has left a few minor loose ends and Grandi is slowly putting the pieces of the puzzle together.

This is certainly a violent movie. The violence is graphic and it’s doubly shocking in its remorselessness. You know that anybody who crosses Giulio’s path is going to die in a hail of machine-gun bullets.

Marilù’s father is willing to pay the ransom. Commissario Grandi has no doubts that if the ransom is paid the girl will be killed anyway. And we know right from the start that that’s what Giulio intends to do.

As you might expect things get tense between the three hoodlums but Giulio’s plan seems to be working. The trail of corpses he leaves behind provide Commissario Grandi with vital clues but no hard evidence - dead witnesses don’t talk.

Tomas Milian plays Giulio as a vicious out-of-control thug. Any attempt to give the movie a political interpretation, to see Giulio as a representative of the suffering downtrodden masses, comes up against the problem that Giulio is one of the least sympathetic protagonists in movie history. He has no redeeming features. We feel no sympathy for him whatsoever. He’s always been a loser and we want to see him keep losing. Any attempt to see neo-noir elements in the film is similarly doomed. Giulio has not been corrupted or led astray or forced into a life of crime - he is rotten all the way through right from the start. We are entirely on the side of Commissario Grandi - we want to see Giulio hunted down like an animal and killed. Milian’s performance is remarkable in its sheer excessiveness.

Ray Loveock is pretty good as Carmine. He’s a marginally more sympathetic character perhaps but while he’s a jumpy nervous killer he’s still a killer. Henry Silva gives a fairly nuanced performance - Grandi does not come across as conforming to the usual movie cop clichés.

Lenzi had the ability to make interesting movies in lots of different genres and to avoid the obvious clichés. In this case having a screenplay by the great Ernesto Gastaldi certainly helped. This is a poliziottesco but the focus is less on the cops and more on the psycho killer.

There’s a fine car chase early on and the action scenes are well-mounted and are not lacking in shock effect.

Giulio might be unintelligent but his very ruthlessness makes him a formidable problem for the police. And he does have a certain crazed cunning. They might know that he is guilty but finding actual evidence is a problem since Giulio leaves no-one alive to give evidence against him. He really doesn’t care how many people he kills. Commissario Grandi seems to be coming up against a brick wall.

The plot is basic but Almost Human has style and energy and a great deal of raw power. Highly recommended.

This movie has had countless DVD and Blu-Ray releases. Severin’s is the most recent (in their Violent Streets Umberto Lenzi boxed set) and it looks great and includes a host of extras.

Savage Three (1975)

Savage Three (Fango bollente) is a 1975 poliziottesco directed by Vittorio Salerno and based on a story by Ernesto Gastaldi.

This was an unsettled rather anxious period in Italian history. As in most western countries violent crime was on the rise but in Italy there was a great deal of political violence as well. There was an air of paranoia, and some sympathy for the idea that a degree of ruthlessness on the part of the police was sometimes justified. The emergence of the hard-edged ultra-violent paranoid poliziotteschi genre was hardly surprising.

Savage Three is the story of three young men who work with computers in a research facility. The research involves things like violence and the effects of overcrowding on aggression. The facility has links with the police who are coming to see computers as a useful tool in regaining control of the streets.

Ovidio (Joe Dallesandro) is the leader of this little band. They’re bored and frustrated by their work and feel that they’re being exploited. Ovidio clearly has a few psychological issues as well. Ovidio is the catalyst.

The three provoke a violent riot at a football stadium. They enjoy watching the violence they’ve unleashed. They’re like overgrown juvenile delinquents, spoilt and bored. Ovidio might be the leader but his buddies Giacomo and Peppe take to thuggery like ducks to water.

Ovidio and his pals develop a taste for violence which quickly escalates to rape and murder. One can’t help feeling that Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange was an influence on this movie. Ovidio and his two pals are like middle-class versions of Alex and his droogs, out for a bit of the old ultra-violence.

Violence seems to be an addiction for the three friends. They don’t always intend to commit murder but things always seem to get out of hand. Once the violence starts it always escalates. The city is now in the grip of a wave of exceptionally violent crimes and while the police have almost no clues they are sure that there are three perpetrators and that they’re responsible for all these horrific crimes.

The research facility conducts experiments on rat behaviour, so we’re clearly expected to see a link here. Ovidio and company are like rats living in an unnatural environment starting to display symptoms of frustration-aggression. We’re presumably also meant to see computers as a symptom of a society becoming dehumanised.

This is however (unlike A Clockwork Orange) very much an exploitation movie and it revels in the violence, and those socio-economic subtexts may be little more than an attempt to give the movie a political veneer. On the other hand the interview with the director on the Blu-Ray suggests that he was reasonably sincere in his intentions.

This is also the story of Commissario Santagà (played by the director’s brother Enrico Maria Salerno), a somewhat disillusioned cop. There’s some conflict between Santagà and his colleague Commissario Tamaraglio. Tamaraglio is younger and he’s inclined to see almost every violent crime as a political crime. Santagà is the middle-aged old school street cop. He trusts his gut instincts, but despite being older he’s more flexible in his thinking.

Santagà is intrigued by the fact that these crime are apparently motiveless. He thinks that’s important and he’s starting to develop the germ of a theory.

It has to be said that some of Santagà’s flashes of insight are just a little implausible, and a little bit too convenient in plot terms.

Enrico Maria Salerno is very good as Santagà. He’s sympathetic but with a few rough edges.

The standout performer is however Joe Dallesandro. He has the ability to project both evil and an odd kind of innocence simultaneously and he’s rather chillingly coldblooded. I was very impressed by Dallesandro.

Gianfranco De Grassi who plays Giacomo seems to have based his performance (and very effective it is too) on a close study of Malcolm McDowell’s performance in A Clockwork Orange.

There is some gore and there are a few harrowing scenes. Vittorio Salerno mostly relies on the sheer senselessness of the violence to give the movie its impact. There’s a small amount of topless nudity but Salerno was trying to keep the sexual explicitness to the minimum, consistent with the inherently sleazy subject matter.

Savage Three is a fairly nasty little movie but it has a few interesting ideas and the combination of poliziottesco and psycho killer movie works quite well. Highly recommended.

Arrow have released this movie in their Years of Lead poliziotteschi boxed set. The transfer is excellent. Extras include a lengthy and fairly interesting interview with the director.

Syndicate Sadists (1975)

Syndicate Sadists (Il giustiziere sfida la città) is a 1975 movie directed by Umberto Lenzi that falls within the poliziotteschi genre.

This is not a cop movie. The police play no part whatsoever in the story. This is more of a lone wolf hero vigilante movie.

It begins with a mysterious stranger riding into town. He rides a motorcycle rather than a horse but this movie does have major western elements.

The stranger is Rambo (Tomas Milian) and yes the name was taken from the books on which the Sylvester Stallone movies were based. Rambo is a loner. He doesn’t like authority. His buddy Scalia (Mario Piave) works for a private police force. This was the period of Italian history known as the Years of Lead, with violent crime getting out of control and regular terrorist outrages. The idea of rich people turning to private cops rather than the official police has plenty of plausibility. Scalia wants Rambo to join up but Rambo isn’t a team player. This is the equivalent of the scene in dozens of westerns in which the hero is offered a sheriff’s badge or a deputy’s badge but turns it down.

Scalia is trying to solve a kidnapping on his own, to further his career. Milan is run by two criminal organisations, the equivalent of rival outlaw gangs in a western. There’s the Conti gang, run by a hoodlum named Conti (Luciano Catenacci), and the Paternò gang, run by old man Paternò (Joseph Cotten). Paternò is old and blind and his hot-headed son has ambitions to take over.

Rambo has no interest in the case, until something happens that gives him a personal score to settle. Now he intends to wage a one-man war against both gangs.

Vincenzo Mannino’s script is basically a grab-bag of clichés. Lenzi wasn’t enthusiastic about doing this movie and wasn’t happy with it. It’s easy to see why but Tomas Milian’s charismatic performance and the excellent action scenes more than compensate for the deficiencies of the screenplay. There are as many car and motorcycle chases as any reasonable person could wish for.

While the plot might be lacking in originality it holds together very satisfactorily and it provides the necessary excuses for the action scenes.

There’s also plenty of violence but it’s not especially graphic. Lenzi is more interested in giving the viewer an adrenalin rush than in relying on gore.

There is however a copious expenditure of small arms ammunition.

The final showdown is superbly executed and very tense and exciting.

Lenzi paces the film extremely well.

There’s no sex and no nudity. The emphasis is entirely on action and Lenzi is not going to distract us from that for a moment.

There’s no complexity to any of the characters. Rambo is just another mysterious gunslinger of the kind so familiar in westerns.

The one possible exception is old man Paternò, who has a strange and interesting attitude towards Rambo. It’s possible that Rambo is the son he’d have liked to have had, instead of the idiot son he actually has. This relationship could perhaps have been developed a bit more. Joseph Cotten has his moments in this film but he looks very old and frail. Of course that’s the point of the character, that he’s an old man losing his grip on his organisation so Cotten’s performance does actually work quite well.

Don’t expect anything profound or ground-breaking from this movie. Just sit back and enjoy the roller-coaster ride and the mayhem, and enjoy watching Tomas Milian giving a master-class in charisma.

My liking for Umberto Lenzi grows with each Lenzi film I see. Syndicate Sadists is top-notch entertainment, highly recommended.

This is one of five films in Severin’s Violent Streets Umberto Lenzi/Tomas Milian poliziotteschi Blu-Ray boxed set. Extras include interviews with various people involved in the film, the most interesting being the Lenzi interview. The transfer is superb. English and Italian language options are provided.

Colt 38 Special Squad (1976)

Colt 38 Special Squad was the last movie directed by Massimo Dallamano before his death in a car accident in 1976. It belongs to the poliziotteschi genre, as does his earlier Super Bitch.

To understand the poliziotteschi genre you have to understand that these were violent times in western Europe with widespread terrorist activity by groups such as the Baader-Meinhof Gang in Germany and the Red Brigades in Italy as well as organised crime due to the boom in the drug trade. There was an air of paranoia, and a certain sympathy for the idea that the police sometimes needed to be ruthless. There was of course at least some of the same paranoia in the United States in Britain, but the sheer extent of terrorist violence in Italy kicked the paranoia there into overdrive. The emergence of a genre of hard-edged ultra-violent crime films should have come as no great surprise (and crime movies in Britain and the U.S. were become more hard-edged at the same time with movies like Get Carter and Dirty Harry).

The poliziotteschi genre emerged at the end of the 60s, just a couple of years after the rise of the giallo. By this time the spaghetti western genre had fizzled out and gothic horror was in decline.

Colt 38 Special Squad gets off to a flying start. A police raid led by Inspector Vanni (Marcel Bozzuffi) turns into a full-scale gun battle. The brother of the gang leader is shot to death by Inspector Vanni. The gang leaders is known as the Black Angel, and he takes a terrible revenge.

Inspector Vanni now has a personal score to settle.

He’s been angling for the formation of an elite four-man squad of motorcycle-riding cops with special firearms training. Now he’s been given the go-ahead. The Special Squad are not exactly given carte blanche but they’re given to understand that they’ll be given some leeway in their methods. A certain degree of ruthlessness is expected of them.

They prove to be not just ruthless but undisciplined hot-heads who will be more trouble than they’re worth unless Vanni can lick them into shape. But they’re brave and they’re keen.

A stroke of luck may point Inspector Vanni in the direction of the Black Angel. A large shipment of dynamite has been stolen. One of the thieves is caught quite by accident, and he is linked to the Black Angel.

It doesn’t help much, but at least the police know that the Black Angel is planning something that requires a lot of dynamite.

The Black Angel holds a few aces that the police don’t know about and he is always a step ahead of them. He plans to hold the city to ransom.

This is a very violent movie with a very dark tone. Innocent people get killed. The body count is very high. The police cannot protect people. Inspector Vanni is a smart tough cop but he’s up against a criminal who is also very smart and has the advantage of not having to care about his methods. He’d cheerfully kill hundreds of people if it would further his plan. Vanni finds some leads but they don’t lead to quick results, time is against him and the most promising leads go nowhere.

Ivan Rassimov (who also starred in Dallamano’s Super Bitch) makes an effectively ice-cold villain. Marcel Bozzuffi gives some real substance to Inspector Vanni, a man driven to the brink of despair by his inability to catch the Black Angel.

Carole André is very good as Sandra, a pretty young nightclub owner who is mixed up in the Black Angel’s plans. She’s a nice girl but she’s naïve and she has a bad boy boyfriend and she gets much more involved than she wants to be.

There’s as much action as you could want. There are explosions, gun battles and car and motorcycle chases. Some of the violence is pretty gruesome, after dynamite has done its work.

Dallamano handles the action scenes with confidence. Dallamano really was one of the great Italian directors of his era and has never received quite as much recognition as he deserved.

Colt 38 Special Squad deals with terrorism but it doesn’t deal with specifically political crimes. Perhaps there was a feeling that it would be unwise to give the film anything that could be interpreted as a political slant.

This is a fine if rather grim action thriller. Highly recommended.

Arrow have released this movie in their Years of Lead poliziotteschi boxed set. The transfer is excellent. Those who care about extras may be disappointed that there are virtually none for this movie.

I’ve reviewed a couple of other movies in this genre - Revolver (1973) which is extremely good, the incredibly nihilistic Milano Calibro 9 (1972) and the superb Live Like a Cop, Die Like a Man (1976).

Live Like a Cop, Die Like a Man (1976)

If you’re going to make a movie in the poliziotteschi genre could you come up with a better title than Live Like a Cop, Die Like a Man? That’s the title of this 1976 entry in the genre directed by Ruggero Deodato (the original Italian title is (Uomini si nasce poliziotti si muore).

It starts off with a manic motorcycle chase. A woman has not only had her purse snatched she’s been brutally beaten by two men on a motorcycle. Two cops set off in pursuit. It’s not only a frenzied adrenaline rush of a chase it also tells us quite a bit about these two cops. Alfredo (Marc Porel) and Alberto (Ray Lovelock) are partners and they work together like a well-oiled machine. They never give up. And they have no time at all for such legal niceties as due process or suspects’ rights. Their idea of crime-fighting is that violent criminals need killing and they’re happy to do the killing. They’re nutters so it’s just as well they’re on the side of the good guys.

We find out that they work for a police Special Force. It’s an elite squad that doesn’t mind bending the rules a little. Alfredo and Alberto don’t just bend the rules, they ignore them completely. Even in the Special Force they’re considered to be dangerous and crazy but they get results.

The main plot thread concerns a big-time gangster named Pasquini. The Special Force has been trying to nail him for several years. Now Pasquini has had a senior Special Force officer assassinated. So Alfredo and Alberto are now really keen to get Pasquini. Their task may however be complicated by police corruption at a high level.

Alfredo and Alberto find time to get involved in plenty of other violent situations, such a siege which they deal with in their own individual style. Their style is messy but it works.

They also find plenty of time to chase women.

Our two cop heroes decide to put some pressure on Pasquini, which they do with the aid of lots of explosions. That’s usually a good way to get someone’s attention.

The trouble with Pasquini is that he’s obsessive about covering his tracks. Nobody knows where to find him. Alfredo and Alberto do however know where his sister Lina lives. They decide to interrogate her. Their interrogation methods are somewhat unorthodox. They involve both Alfredo and Alberto having sex with her. They don’t get any useful information but Lina really enjoys this method of interrogation.

Unfortunately while our two rogue cops are hunting Pasquini at the same time Pasquini is also hunting them. Their best chance of survival is to find him before he finds them.

That opening motorcycle chase is justly famous but it’s just one of a series of amazing action set-pieces. The shoot-out at the quarry is inspired. It’s also like something out of a spaghetti western. Ruggero Deodato had been assistant director on Sergio Corbucci’s classic spaghetti western Django and Live Like a Cop, Die Like a Man does have a bit of a spaghetti western feel, with the two heroes being more like gunslingers than cops.

It’s an extremely violent movie. I’m not always a fan of ultra-violent cop movies but the violence in this movie is stylish and imaginative rather than merely crude and the movie lacks the extreme nihilism that sometimes afflicts the poliziotteschi genre.

The humour has some lighter moments to balance the violence and some of the violence has a definite black comedy tinge to it.

There’s a bit of nudity but not too much. In fact by 1976 standards very little.

Marc Sorel and Ray Lovelock make a great team. They’re both charismatic and they both have a rogueish charm. The presence of Adolfo Celi in the cast (playing their long-suffering boss) is a bonus. The entire cast acquits itself well.

I should add that Ray Lovelock gets to sing - his ballads are interspersed throughout the movie.

The Raro Video DVD (they’ve released in on Blu-Ray as well) offers an excellent transfer and is apparently pretty much uncut (it’s a movie that had quite a few censorship problems). There are some sparse liner notes and a very good 42-minute documentary, Violent Cops, featuring interviews with many of those involved in the production including director Ruggero Deodato and star Ray Lovelock (both of whom are, quite righty, proud of this movie).

I have mixed feelings about the the poliziotteschi genre but Live Like a Cop, Die Like a Man is now easily my favourite representative of the genre. It’s fast and furious and incredibly stylish and very entertaining. Very highly recommended.

Milano Calibro 9 (1972)

Fernando De Leo’s much admired Milano Calibro 9 is a 1972 Italian crime film that belongs to the poliziotteschi genre rather than the giallo genre. It was based on a noir pulp crime story by Giorgio Scerbanenco.

It begins with a series of exchanges of parcels. Clearly the parcels contain something illegal since those involved look very obviously like hoodlums. In fact the parcels contain money. This is a currency export racket. When all the exchanges are complete and the final parcel is opened it contains, much to the horror of the bad guys, stacks of blank paper. These criminals have been swindled. And they’re not happy. If you can’t trust criminals then whom can you trust? They take a terrible and blood-drenched revenge on everyone who might conceivably have stolen their money.

Three years later Ugo Piazza (Gastone Moschin) is released from prison. The rumour in the underworld is that he was the one who stole the money, a rumour he vehemently denies. His problem is that the boss of the crime syndicate he was working for, a man known as the Americano, is convinced that Ugo took his money. And it’s not healthy for a man to have the Americano suspecting him of disloyalty.

Ugo gets beaten up. Not because he’s likely to admit his guilt, but because in this situation that’s what happens. You get beaten up. The Milan underworld is a very violent world. If this movie is to be believed Milan in the early 70s was like Chicago in the 20s only more so.

The Americano, having had Ugo beaten up again, gives him his old job back. Ugo has his own reasons for accepting - it will give him the opportunity to clear his name.

Ugo meets up with his old girlfriend, dancer Nelly Borden (Barbara Buchet) and they rekindle their affair.

Chino (Philippe Leroy) gets mixed up in Ugo’s troubles. Chino and Ugo are old buddies. Chino is a hitman but he’s an honest hitman! Chino looks after Don Vincenzo, who used to be the local godfather. Don Vincenzo is now old and blind and spends his time lamenting the fact that the Mafia just isn’t what it used to be.

What follows is a succession of incredibly violent episodes. Lots of beatings, lots of shootings. Then we get a series of twists at the end.

It sounds promising that there are problems. For starters the characters are loathsome. I just wanted them all to die. Lots of them do die but unfortunately it takes 100 minutes to accomplish this. There’s not a single character we can possibly care about. The police are equally repellant. The Commissario (Frank Wolff) is a tedious blistering buffoon. His second-in-command, Mercuri (Luigi Pistilli), treats us to a serious of excruciatingly heavy-handed political diatribes on the evils of capitalism. Then he gets transferred but he comes back to deliver yet another series of political lectures. The police shouldn’t be chasing criminals - they should be out on the streets protesting with the students and workers.

Then we get lots more violence, culminating in the most ludicrous shootout in cinema history.

I like Barbara Bouchet but she might as well have not bothered making this film. OK, she looks great dancing in that very revealing beaded bikini but apart from that she contributes nothing. Her part is appallingly underwritten.

Gastone Moschin is good at looking stolid. That’s all he does throughout the film. He does not change his facial expression once. OK, that type of minimalist acting can work in a crime thriller if you’re Alain Delon or Steve McQueen. You can come across as ultra-cool and icily obsessive. Unfortunately in this film Gastone Moschin just looks stolid. In fact he looks like he might well have been unconscious for most of the filming.

Mario Adorf as the Americano’s chief henchman Rocco makes up for this, giving a performance that ranges from mild hysteria to off-the-scale hysteria. Lionel Stander as the Americano is too hammy to be genuinely menacing.

Oddly enough for a movie with so much action and so much violence the results are a bit on the boring side. Some of the better giallo directors could get away with lots of hyper-violence by at least filming it in interesting ways but De Leo proves himself to be rather uninspired as a director. The violence just becomes wearying.

I’ll admit that the ending does provide a satisfying series of twists. And of course it provides more extreme violence. And I’ll admit that the opening parcel-exchange sequences are very well done.

Arrow’s Blu-Ray/DVD combo release is what we’ve come to expect from this company - a very good transfer with lots of extras. We get no less than three documentaries, one on the film itself, one on Giorgio Scerbanenco who wrote the story on which it’s based and one on De Leo’s career. De Leo is featured in the documentaries and he’s a guy who certainly has an optimistic view of his own talents.

If you like your crime thrillers to be extremely violent and extremely brutal Milano Calibro 9 delivers the goods on that count. If you like your crime thrillers to be stylish you may be disappointed. It’s a competently made film but it doesn’t quite have the visual inspiration you expect from Italian movies of this era. If you like tight plotting it has its moments but it’s not going to dazzle you. If you want characters you can care about, forget it. I’d suggest renting rather than buying this one. I can’t honestly say I enjoyed it, but that may just be a matter of personal taste.

Super Bitch (1973)

Super Bitch (Si può essere più bastardi dell'ispettore Cliff?) was a surprising foray in to the poliziotteschi genre by Massimo Dallamano. The genre was not really particularly suited to Dallamano’s style but he does manage to give this movie a few touches of his own.

The poliziotteschi flourished briefly in Italy during the 1970s, partly inspired by the success of Hollywood tough guy cop movies like Dirty Harry (1971) and The French Connection (1971). The chaos of Italy during the decade, with Red Brigades terrorists carrying out kidnappings and murders, also contributed to the popularity of a genre that showed the police fighting back (in a very violent way) against crime and terrorism.

The hero (or anti-hero) of Super Bitch is Inspector Cliff (Ivan Rassimov), an agent for the Federal Bureau of Narcotics in Washington. He is working undercover infiltrating a major heroin smuggling gang but it is obvious from the start that he is pursuing his own agenda as well.

The gang he has infiltrated is run by Morell (Ettore Manni), who runs an escort agency in London as a front. Several other gangs will figure in this movie, most notably that led by the colourful but deadly Mamma the Turk (Patricia Hayes) and her murderous children. Cliff’s method is to play off the gangs against each other. Joanne (Stephanie Beacham) works for Morell as an escort, as well as being his mistress, and she will play a key role in the movie.

Joanne is the Super Bitch of the English title (or at least one of the English titles - the movie was also released as Mafia Junction) but that gives a rather misleading idea of her character and of her importance to the plot. The focus is really on Cliff.

There are a bewildering number of double-crosses, with Cliff managing to have every criminal at every other criminal’s throat. The various gangs are happy enough to double-cross one another but they don’t realise they’re being double-crossed in turn by a cop. The movie, like most movies of this genre, is perhaps a bit too cynical for its own good.

There’s plenty of graphic violence and plenty of action. Like the 1970s American cop movies that influenced them the poliziotteschi are as much action movies as police movies.

Ivan Rassimov makes a very good morally ambiguous hero. Well actually he’s not that morally ambiguous - he’s really an evil SOB and probably psychotic. His big mistake is that he fails to realise that Joanne is actually in love with Morell. Cliff assumes that everyone is as cynical as he is and the idea that Joanne might be loyal to Morell (even while she’s having an affair with Cliff) doesn’t occur to him. The relationship between Joanne and Morell is the only honest relationship in the movie.

Patricia Hayes is delightfully over-the-top as Mamma the Turk. Mamma and her children, vicious thugs all of them, provide one of the movie’s more surreal touches with one of her children strumming a guitar and singing while the others carry out various acts of mayhem.

The sheer excessiveness of the movie and the bizarre touch added by Mamma the Turk makes this movie more of a surreal fantasy than a realistic cop movie. Dallamano of course would have had little interest in making a straightforward exercise in realism. Apart from the violence there’s a considerable helping of sex and nudity, as you’d expect in a 1970s European exploitation movie.

Arrow Films have done a fine job with their DVD release, giving us an excellent anamorphic transfer accompanied by a fascinating documentary on the poliziotteschi genre.

This is not one of my favourite genres but it is a Dallamano movie and it has enough of his signature style to make it worthwhile. It’s an entertaining roller coaster ride of violence and mayhem.

Revolver (1973)

Revolver is a rather cynical 1973 Italian crime thriller with political overtones, not the sort of movie I’d normally watch except for the presence of Oliver Reed in the cast.

Reed is prison governor Vito Cipriani who becomes unwittingly involved in a complex web of political and criminal intrigue. Someone wants one of his prisoners out of gaol, and kidnaps his wife to force him to arrange the escape. Milo Ruiz is a petty criminal and he doesn’t know himself why anyone would want to go to such lengths to free him from incarceration. Vito is determined not just to get his wife back, but to make the kidnappers pay. He forms an unlikely alliance with Milo, and increasingly they discover that they’re both victims, and both pawns in a very big game.

Vito’s hunt for the kidnappers will take them both to France, and to the home of pop star Al Niko, whose connection with plots involving political assassinations seems even more unlikely than Milo’s. Both Vito and Milo will find themselves questioning their assumptions about each other and about themselves. Director Sergio Sollima was most interested in the idea that there are no clear-cut good guys and bad guys, and as he says in the accompanying featurette, it’s often the good guys who do the most harm.

The strange friendship that develops between these two mismatched characters provides the most interesting moments in the film. Oliver Reed and Fabio Testi (as Milo) deliver powerful and surprisingly subtle performances.

The plot is heavily laced with paranoia, and is formidably complex. There’s plenty of action and quite a bit of violence, but the violence is used effectively to underscore the increasingly anomalous position that Vito finds himself in, a lawman unable to turn to the law for help and having as his only reliable ally an habitual criminal.

Sergio Sollima’s direction is assured and very stylish. Ennio Morricone provides a memorable and effective score. The scenes involving pop star Al Niko include some of the most unforgettable fashion catastrophes of the 1970s.

The Blue Underground DVD includes a very short but reasonably interesting making-of featurette. Sollima remembers Oliver Reed with fondness, although he admits that after his 26th bottle of wine for the day he could become a little difficult, while Reed’s co-star Fabio Testi seems to have enjoyed working with him.

Revolver is a very dark and very pessimistic little movie, offering little hope for the triumph of justice or for ay worthwhile human ideals. Corruption is inescapable and all-pervasive. It’s entertaining and engrossing, and it’s a must for fans of Oliver Reed.