As Giorgio Pisani’s (Francis Matthews’) flight arrives – i.e. a classic giallo opening – he is called to the phone – i.e. a key giallo technology – over the intercom. It is his wife, and she is about to give birth.
Pisani contacts family friend Dr Lydia Frantzi (Pascale Rivault) and hurries to his home, finding his newborn son – and his wife dead; Lydia could not save her.
Later, at the hospital, Pisani finds his medical record left on a desk, as if for him to read. Doing so, he learns that he is infertile (apparently a hereditary condition, whose logic thereby makes one wonder.)
Over the next few days two women, whose only points in common are that they are both pregnant and have encountered Pisani, one fleetingly and the other on multiple occasions, are murdered. The method (graphically shown) is the same in both instances: A blade from the pubic region, upwards.
Pisani is brought in for questioning by a police inspector (Howard Ross/Renato Rossini), but released since there is nothing concrete against him.
It’s about this point that Stelvio Massi’s 1974 giallo begins to lose its way. The basic problem is that up until this point we’ve been following Pisani. Now, however, he becomes a suspect while the focus of the narrative shifts to other characters and the police investigation. (That some of the murders show the killer wearing the same distinctive driving gloves as Pisani helps reinforce the suspicion.)
We’re thus given no clear point of identification, in the manner that a Hitchcockian double-pursuit narrative, with Pisani seeking to identify the killer in order to demonstrate his own innocence to the authorities, would have provided.
This tends also to bring out the weaknesses in Massi’s direction. It is not that it lacks style, with there being plenty of hand-held camera work, shock zooms, rack focus, and compositions foregrounding objects before the characters or mirrors. Likewise, in contrast with Mikel Koven’s prosaic narrative/poetic set piece division of scenes, there are potentially poetic touches in even the more routine scenes – the kind of thing that arguably elevates Argento’s work above the generic norm.
This, however, is where the problem arises. For, unlike Argento, there is little sense that Massi’s stylistic devices are employed with any consistent or coherent logic, such that form informs content. The zooms, for instance, sometimes work to heighten dramatic impact, but sometimes just appear to have been used for economy/convenience. As such, they also lack the self-consciously excessive quality that their counterparts in, say, the opening moments of Bava’s Five Dolls for an August Moon have.
This also applies to Giorgio Gaslini’s jazzy score. It’s certainly good and would warrant an extended version CD re-release (it was available via a 1996 Japanese disc, running barely 30 minutes). Unfortunately sometimes it isn’t clear how it fits into the film and its images.
There are, however, some moments when all comes together. One example is the funeral of Giorgio’s wife, where Massi nicely introduces several of the suspects and red herrings. Another is the scene in which one of the titular five women senses she is being stalked and nervously goes to her door and looks through its fish-eye lens, only to find her eccentric but entirely harmless neighbour there. Suspense is thereby built up and deflated, only for shock to then be privileged as, after said neighbour has left, she is suddenly attacked by the killer.
Another point of interest for giallo fans is seeing Ross cast against type as the detective/investigator rather than a perpetrator or suspect, as with the aforementioned Bava film and Fulci’s The New York Ripper.
Hammer enthusiasts, meanwhile, may find it intriguing to see Francis Matthews of Dracula Prince of Darkness and Rasputin the Mad Monk in a contemporary setting.
Future porn queen/MP Ilona Staller has a brief role as a sexually liberated foreigner whose pregnancy precipitates her demise.
Not bad, just not as good as it could have been with a bit more care and attention.
Again thanks must go out to the community for bringing us this composite Italian/German sourced version, in widescreen and with English fansubs. It certainly beats the panned and scanned, Italian-language, VHS-sourced version of the film I viewed a few years back.
Showing posts with label Stelvio Massi. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Stelvio Massi. Show all posts
Wednesday, 13 June 2012
Sunday, 7 February 2010
Poliziotto sprint / Highway Racer
If The Beyond is one of the most single minded of Italian horror films, inasmuch as its anti-narrative is little more than an excuse for stringing together its set pieces and contributing further to its mood, Highway Racer / Poliziotto sprint might be taken as something of its analogue within the poliziotto filone.
For just about everything in it is geared towards showcasing car stunts and chases, to the extent that the contributions of director Stelvio Massi and leading man Maurizio Merli almost feel peripheral at times compared to Remy Julienne and his team: Who staged this scene? Who was behind the wheel of Merli's car, when everything is in long shot and the windows are tinted?
Merli plays Marco Palma, a Rome cop determined to prove he's the best driver out there. This is an opinion not shared by his boss Tagliaferri, due to Palma's tendency to write off one car after another and show little regard for the safety of others, and because in his day Tagliaferri was himself a hot-shot driver.
When Tagliaferri's old nemesis il Nazzardo shows up in Rome to lead a series of audacious robberies, Palma finally gets his chance as he is charged with infiltrating the gang. This necessitates his being shown all of Tagliaferri's old tricks – and showing his teacher some of his own, as far as gunplay is concerned – and given that symbol of Italian machismo, the Ferrari. (Since Lambourghini started off making farm machinery such as tractors, they don't count.)
There's a nationalistic aspect to the cars used by the two sides more generally, with the Italian cops driving the usual boxy Alfa-Romeos – albeit with a blue and white livery rather than the more usually seen green and white squadra volante design – and the French-led robbers preferring the elegant lines of the Citroen DS series.
Where the film fails is away from its action sequence. As written, Merli's character is pretty unsympathetic, with the death of his partner, the result of his reckless driving in their first encounter with il Nazzardo, warranting no soul searching, desire for revenge or even comment. He also plays the role without his trademark moustache. While this helps in making Marco seem more youthful it also creates something of an alienation effect, causing you to do a double take that this is in fact Merli.
While Marco has a girlfriend, played by Lilli Carati, she's included more for the possibility of threatening to reveal his real identity when he is undercover than anything else and, as such, also jars a bit given the single-mindedness he shows in other regards. Still, she does work for a car dealers...
Stelvio Cipriani provides the score, a collection of characteristically ostenato-driven funky / percussive tension-builders.
For just about everything in it is geared towards showcasing car stunts and chases, to the extent that the contributions of director Stelvio Massi and leading man Maurizio Merli almost feel peripheral at times compared to Remy Julienne and his team: Who staged this scene? Who was behind the wheel of Merli's car, when everything is in long shot and the windows are tinted?
Merli plays Marco Palma, a Rome cop determined to prove he's the best driver out there. This is an opinion not shared by his boss Tagliaferri, due to Palma's tendency to write off one car after another and show little regard for the safety of others, and because in his day Tagliaferri was himself a hot-shot driver.
When Tagliaferri's old nemesis il Nazzardo shows up in Rome to lead a series of audacious robberies, Palma finally gets his chance as he is charged with infiltrating the gang. This necessitates his being shown all of Tagliaferri's old tricks – and showing his teacher some of his own, as far as gunplay is concerned – and given that symbol of Italian machismo, the Ferrari. (Since Lambourghini started off making farm machinery such as tractors, they don't count.)
There's a nationalistic aspect to the cars used by the two sides more generally, with the Italian cops driving the usual boxy Alfa-Romeos – albeit with a blue and white livery rather than the more usually seen green and white squadra volante design – and the French-led robbers preferring the elegant lines of the Citroen DS series.
Where the film fails is away from its action sequence. As written, Merli's character is pretty unsympathetic, with the death of his partner, the result of his reckless driving in their first encounter with il Nazzardo, warranting no soul searching, desire for revenge or even comment. He also plays the role without his trademark moustache. While this helps in making Marco seem more youthful it also creates something of an alienation effect, causing you to do a double take that this is in fact Merli.
While Marco has a girlfriend, played by Lilli Carati, she's included more for the possibility of threatening to reveal his real identity when he is undercover than anything else and, as such, also jars a bit given the single-mindedness he shows in other regards. Still, she does work for a car dealers...
Stelvio Cipriani provides the score, a collection of characteristically ostenato-driven funky / percussive tension-builders.
Sunday, 28 June 2009
Mondo cane oggi / Mondo cane 3 / Savage World Today
As the title Mondo cane oggi indicates, this was an attempt to bring the mondo film up to date for the 1980s, representing as it did the first time the name had been used since 1963's Mondo carne 2
As the sometime subtitle l'orrore continua indicates this also entailed a recognition that the nature of the form had changed since the 1960s, to become closer to the horror film with Faces of Death and Snuff.
Although Mondo cane oggi has a number of unpleasant images, it is debatable whether these qualify it as a horror film, especially as they lack the shock value of their counterparts in Africa Addio.
Specificaly, there is hardly any real human on human violence while much of the animal killing, which includes some snakes and a small turtle, is contextualised as being for food.
This said, there is other footage, most notably of two dogs fighting as the credits play, but also perhaps a Spanish bullfight, which would likely fall foul of the censors insofar as it lacks this defensible context.
The film also exhibits that classic mondo racism, insofar as the majority of the ‘outlandish’ and ‘bizarre’ practices shown are presented as the province of the non-Western other, particularly in India, Japan and the Far East.
In one scene, for instance, we see traditional irezumi tattooing practices associated with the yakuza, along with the ritual amputation of a finger segment. What is lacking, however, is a consideration of what mainstream Japanese society thinks of tattoos through their criminal subcultural associations.
With the softer material being represented by the likes of bodybuilders (!) and joggers (!!) the main harder moments pertaining to man are a couple of autopsies, one which reveals the cadaver as having been filled with bags of heroin; a man being subjected to electric shocks in a bid to ‘cure’ his homosexuality (“donne si, uomini no” explains the narrator) and some time-honoured sex change surgery footage.
The authenticity of much of this footage is questionable, in a classic case of “if it excites you pretend it’s real, if it disturbs you pretend it’s fake”
Accompanied by voice over or vaguely scene setting music throughout, the film has something of a music video quality to it – apt insofar as one of the mutations of the mondo was into the music performance backdrop/accompaniment, as with SPK’s Despair.
Stelvio Massi hides as director and cinematographer behind the Max Steel pseudonym.
As the sometime subtitle l'orrore continua indicates this also entailed a recognition that the nature of the form had changed since the 1960s, to become closer to the horror film with Faces of Death and Snuff.
Although Mondo cane oggi has a number of unpleasant images, it is debatable whether these qualify it as a horror film, especially as they lack the shock value of their counterparts in Africa Addio.
Specificaly, there is hardly any real human on human violence while much of the animal killing, which includes some snakes and a small turtle, is contextualised as being for food.
This said, there is other footage, most notably of two dogs fighting as the credits play, but also perhaps a Spanish bullfight, which would likely fall foul of the censors insofar as it lacks this defensible context.
The film also exhibits that classic mondo racism, insofar as the majority of the ‘outlandish’ and ‘bizarre’ practices shown are presented as the province of the non-Western other, particularly in India, Japan and the Far East.
In one scene, for instance, we see traditional irezumi tattooing practices associated with the yakuza, along with the ritual amputation of a finger segment. What is lacking, however, is a consideration of what mainstream Japanese society thinks of tattoos through their criminal subcultural associations.
With the softer material being represented by the likes of bodybuilders (!) and joggers (!!) the main harder moments pertaining to man are a couple of autopsies, one which reveals the cadaver as having been filled with bags of heroin; a man being subjected to electric shocks in a bid to ‘cure’ his homosexuality (“donne si, uomini no” explains the narrator) and some time-honoured sex change surgery footage.
The authenticity of much of this footage is questionable, in a classic case of “if it excites you pretend it’s real, if it disturbs you pretend it’s fake”
Accompanied by voice over or vaguely scene setting music throughout, the film has something of a music video quality to it – apt insofar as one of the mutations of the mondo was into the music performance backdrop/accompaniment, as with SPK’s Despair.
Stelvio Massi hides as director and cinematographer behind the Max Steel pseudonym.
Sunday, 8 February 2009
La Legge violenta della squadra anticrimine / Cross Shot
The perfect poliziotteschi?
In truth I doubt that such a thing exists, in that there will be as many perfect examples as they are variations in the form, in that Lenzi vs Damiano or Merli vs Milian way.
But for a film with a fine balance between action, character-driven drama and socio-political commentary on Italy during the years of lead - a combination also featured in director Stelvio Massi's highly recommended Marc the Narc trilogy - Cross Shot may be difficult to beat.
John Saxon plays Commissioner Javocella, a no-nonsense cop frustrated by the shackles procedure places on his men, the thanklessness of their task, and the way in which the bad guys act with impunity and then go free on the rare occasions when they are brought to trial.
Lee J Cobb plays Dante Ragusa, a blind old-school mafia boss who has used a combination of threats and pay-offs to secure the right to redevelop the city, Bari, his way.
Lino Capolicchio plays Antonio Blasi, a young punk who joins a group of career criminals in a raid on an armoured car and soon finds himself way out of his depth after killing a cop and inadvertently hijacking a car belonging to one of Ragusa's men, containing as it does a briefcase full of incriminating documents detailing pay-offs to the city's government.
Then there is Renzo Palmer's Maselli, a left-liberal journalist concerned by Javocella's emphasis on order at the expense of law, takes every opportunity he can to sell extra copies by critiquing the police and their methods and who positions himself in-between Blasi and his pursuers in search of a scoop.
Finally, there are a whole host of well-drawn supporting characters - Blasi's well-meaning girlfriend, who only realises too late what he and now she have gotten themselves into; Javocella and Maselli's underlings, providing a chorus and commentary on their actions; and the Ragusa's lieutenants and son, the latter a disappointment who owes his position to family ties rather than his own abilities.
While the villains of the piece, in the form of the representatives of organised crime and those within the establishment who co-operate with them - here note the unseen governor's refusal to support Javocella - are are clear everything else is suitably indistinct. Maselli and Javocella are presented closer to one another than they might like to think, being likened at one point they are likened to two dogs fighting for a scrap of a bone
Likewise, although Massi pulls no punches, as illustrated by Javocella's penchant for beating on suspects a la Merli; his instruction not to cover the body of his murdered colleague, apparently a 23-year-old whose wife had just given birth to their first child, for added impact; or the way in which the other robbers throw a woman out of her hijacked car into the path of the incoming police car, he also makes Blasi almost sympathetic, a 1970s update of your classic noir era victim of circumstance. (Perhaps because of the two young lovers on the run set-up, I was reminded here of Farley Granger's character in They Live By Night.)
The expression on Capolicchio's face as he pulls the trigger on the machine gun he's only just been given - and here credit must go to the actor, one of those to straddled the divide between filone and auteur cinemas - tells us everything we need to know: I wasn't prepared for this! What have I just done?
Likewise, it seems plausible that his plight is worsened not only by Javocella's approach but also Maselli's not entirely neutral representation of the same.
Besides drawing out the best from his cast and handling the action scenes well, Massi also makes good use of the Bari locations - themselves welcome as an alternative to the more usual Naples, Rome or Turin - and provides some fascinating actuality footage of the newspaper typesetters and presses which, in conjunction with the other technology on display, further helps make the film into a real document of its time.
Definitely well worth a look, even in this panned and scanned Greek subtitled, English dubbed version.
In truth I doubt that such a thing exists, in that there will be as many perfect examples as they are variations in the form, in that Lenzi vs Damiano or Merli vs Milian way.
But for a film with a fine balance between action, character-driven drama and socio-political commentary on Italy during the years of lead - a combination also featured in director Stelvio Massi's highly recommended Marc the Narc trilogy - Cross Shot may be difficult to beat.
John Saxon plays Commissioner Javocella, a no-nonsense cop frustrated by the shackles procedure places on his men, the thanklessness of their task, and the way in which the bad guys act with impunity and then go free on the rare occasions when they are brought to trial.
Lee J Cobb plays Dante Ragusa, a blind old-school mafia boss who has used a combination of threats and pay-offs to secure the right to redevelop the city, Bari, his way.
Lino Capolicchio plays Antonio Blasi, a young punk who joins a group of career criminals in a raid on an armoured car and soon finds himself way out of his depth after killing a cop and inadvertently hijacking a car belonging to one of Ragusa's men, containing as it does a briefcase full of incriminating documents detailing pay-offs to the city's government.
Then there is Renzo Palmer's Maselli, a left-liberal journalist concerned by Javocella's emphasis on order at the expense of law, takes every opportunity he can to sell extra copies by critiquing the police and their methods and who positions himself in-between Blasi and his pursuers in search of a scoop.
Finally, there are a whole host of well-drawn supporting characters - Blasi's well-meaning girlfriend, who only realises too late what he and now she have gotten themselves into; Javocella and Maselli's underlings, providing a chorus and commentary on their actions; and the Ragusa's lieutenants and son, the latter a disappointment who owes his position to family ties rather than his own abilities.
While the villains of the piece, in the form of the representatives of organised crime and those within the establishment who co-operate with them - here note the unseen governor's refusal to support Javocella - are are clear everything else is suitably indistinct. Maselli and Javocella are presented closer to one another than they might like to think, being likened at one point they are likened to two dogs fighting for a scrap of a bone
Likewise, although Massi pulls no punches, as illustrated by Javocella's penchant for beating on suspects a la Merli; his instruction not to cover the body of his murdered colleague, apparently a 23-year-old whose wife had just given birth to their first child, for added impact; or the way in which the other robbers throw a woman out of her hijacked car into the path of the incoming police car, he also makes Blasi almost sympathetic, a 1970s update of your classic noir era victim of circumstance. (Perhaps because of the two young lovers on the run set-up, I was reminded here of Farley Granger's character in They Live By Night.)
The expression on Capolicchio's face as he pulls the trigger on the machine gun he's only just been given - and here credit must go to the actor, one of those to straddled the divide between filone and auteur cinemas - tells us everything we need to know: I wasn't prepared for this! What have I just done?
Likewise, it seems plausible that his plight is worsened not only by Javocella's approach but also Maselli's not entirely neutral representation of the same.
Besides drawing out the best from his cast and handling the action scenes well, Massi also makes good use of the Bari locations - themselves welcome as an alternative to the more usual Naples, Rome or Turin - and provides some fascinating actuality footage of the newspaper typesetters and presses which, in conjunction with the other technology on display, further helps make the film into a real document of its time.
Definitely well worth a look, even in this panned and scanned Greek subtitled, English dubbed version.
Sunday, 21 September 2008
Sbirro, la tua legge è lenta... la mia... no! / Hunted City
Merli, Merola and Massi
How can you go wrong?
You can't, though it's true that the way in which Merli and Merola's characters operate is perhaps not quite as fans would expect at times, whilst Massi's direction might also come across as somewhat lazy in its frequent reliance upon the zoom.
The truth, I would argue, is that Hunted City has a different approach to the poliziotto that, when considered in wider relation to the films of Umberto Lenzi and Massi's earlier filone entries such as the Marc the Narc series gives a tentative sense of an emergent auteur at work.
Massi's films are more complex in their characterisation, narrative and politics whilst Lenzi's tend to have the superior set-pieces. This is not, however, to diminish the action sequences here or elsewhere in Massi's oeuvre. They're perfectly satisfactory but just don't have the same jaw-dropping intensity as those of Lenzi at his best.
Hunted City begins in classic fashion with the gunning down of a mafia-connected financier, Mr Guidi, followed by the arrival of Merli's cop, Commissioner Paolo Ferro – a name suggestive of his iron nature and also recalling a previous Massi / Merli collaboration, Il Comissario di Ferro – in Milan, where he is met by sidekick Arrigo, on hand to provide comic relief and a sense of contrast with Merli's ubercop.
The first deviation from formula comes when we are introduced to Merola's restauranteur Raffaele Acampora, an ex-mafioso – or at least member of the Camorra; as with most subtitled Italian crime films the distinctions aren't always made clear – telling and showing some punks who try to shake him down for protection exactly where they can go.
He's the sort of character you wouldn't get in a Lenzi film where things tend to be that much more obvious. At this point in the Lenzi version, we'd no doubt have a scene in which we were told that Merola was only using his restaurants as a legitimate front to conceal his illegal activities; a scene which would also likely preclude the preceding shakedown attempt unless it has been staged for the benefit of Merli.
But here, in Massi's vision and version of Violent Milan, we go straight the arrival of Merli's cop as the men are ejecte, being comparatively warmly received by Merola and given the information he's after. It's not so much that Acompara has an alibi, which is as would be expected, as that he had already satisfactorily completed his business dealings with Guidi and, in any case, appears to be doing far better as a legitimate businessman than an illegitimate one. This said, as the film progresses another aspect of Massi's shades of grey approach that emerges is to repeatedly blur the boundaries around respectability and legitimacy anyway; while Lenzi's films also blur the boundaries as a means of criticising the society of the times his protagonists tended to stand apart and above such compromises.
Next, Ferro visits his sister and her family. It's here that one of the film's dramatic contrivances emerges as we recognise her son Stefano's friend as the hitman who killed Guidi. An improbable coincidence perhaps, but one that is excusable and explicable in relation to genre formula whilst also providing for much needed suspense and drama given the anti-climatic nature of the preceding sequence: is Stefano also mixed up in the syndicate? If so will Ferro realise in time and how will he react?
As the assassinations continue, the next victim being a lawyer who is gunned down by some masked, tennis-bag carrying hitmen, another party becomes involved in the form of Don Alfonso, played by Francisco Rabal – albeit almost unrecognisable with / without (not being certain of which is the case) his hairpiece.
Though Alfonso and Ferro have a shared past, the way this works again proves distinctive. Regarding one another as honourable and worthy opponents, a rare commodity in the film's milieux and arguably that of the wider society it represents, the two men agree to put past differences behind them in pursuit of their common enemies:
Ferro: “I once did you a favour”
Alfonso: “But that's how honoured family members speak”
Again, in our imagined Lenzi version of the film it's hard to see the lines being crossed in this way whilst even if they were there would surely be a double-cross from the mafioso sooner or later. Here, by contrast, Ferro is sufficiently trusting to eventually have the Don arrange a hit on him through his contacts – a desparate strategy that he hopes will bring the elusive murder syndicate into the open...
Returning to the subject of Massi's direction, I would argue that it encapsulates the kind of vernacular poetry discussed by Mikel Koven in his study of the giallo. Koven's ideas here are based on the theories of Pasolini, who argued for a distinction between a classical “cinema of prose,” which effaced the signs of its own construction, and a modernist “cinema of poetry,” which foregrounded them.
The key aspect of this theory in relation to Hunted City seems less the intersubjective nature of the poetic camera, as revealing the consciousness of the director behind his characters – although I suspect a case could be made for the use of the zooms in and out as conveying a sense of urgency and immediacy whereby no-one has much time to waste – as constantly making us aware of the camera's presence.
Essentially where the classical cinema would use cuts to break a scene up, going from the establishing shot to the medium shot or the close up and reframing whenever someone or something new enters into the set, Massi instead zooms in or out or, less frequently, racks focus instead, as when the camera picks out three gunmen who know one another from the tennis rackets they are carrying across a plaza.
The danger, of course, is that such an approach can easily be seen as lazy filmmaking, the kind of approach that was adopted by filone filmmakers for economic more than aesthetic reasons. Against this it can be noted that Massi also makes use of handheld; some comparatively elaborate mirror based set-ups; false POV shots from inside a vending machine, all in addition to finding some imaginative locations, most notably a church whose hall has been transformed into a firing range. (In this we also get a neat variant on the Dirty Harry “did he fire six bullets or only five” trope, as Ferro calmly blows away the bad guy who's holding a gun to Arrigo's head in the knowledge that the weapon, one of his, is empty.)
The performances are also pleasing, with Merli, Merola and Rabal each giving their characters greater depth than is often the case. Though they may still not be playing the full eight octaves range in a manner acceptable to art cinema snobs, they are considerably more than one note.
The way Massi handles Ferro's love interest is also noteworthy here. First, because he even gets one, as an apparent departure from single-minded duty. Second, because it gives Merli the opportunity to play – as distinct from be – vulnerable. Third, because the way the scenario ultimately plays out is in accord with the comparatively strong female characters present in some of his other films, most obviously the Baader-Meinhof gang styled terrorist played by Marcella Michelangeli in Mark Strikes Again.
Stelvio Cipriani delivers a solid score, with dynamic suspense and action cues incorporating slapped bass and wacka wacka guitar, further demonstrating his stylistic adaptability by substituting disco themes for the kind of organ-heavy shake cues that would have omnipresent earlier in the 70s in the film's obligatory nightclub scene.
[The film is available to download from Cinemageddon]
How can you go wrong?
You can't, though it's true that the way in which Merli and Merola's characters operate is perhaps not quite as fans would expect at times, whilst Massi's direction might also come across as somewhat lazy in its frequent reliance upon the zoom.
The truth, I would argue, is that Hunted City has a different approach to the poliziotto that, when considered in wider relation to the films of Umberto Lenzi and Massi's earlier filone entries such as the Marc the Narc series gives a tentative sense of an emergent auteur at work.
Massi's films are more complex in their characterisation, narrative and politics whilst Lenzi's tend to have the superior set-pieces. This is not, however, to diminish the action sequences here or elsewhere in Massi's oeuvre. They're perfectly satisfactory but just don't have the same jaw-dropping intensity as those of Lenzi at his best.
Hunted City begins in classic fashion with the gunning down of a mafia-connected financier, Mr Guidi, followed by the arrival of Merli's cop, Commissioner Paolo Ferro – a name suggestive of his iron nature and also recalling a previous Massi / Merli collaboration, Il Comissario di Ferro – in Milan, where he is met by sidekick Arrigo, on hand to provide comic relief and a sense of contrast with Merli's ubercop.
The first deviation from formula comes when we are introduced to Merola's restauranteur Raffaele Acampora, an ex-mafioso – or at least member of the Camorra; as with most subtitled Italian crime films the distinctions aren't always made clear – telling and showing some punks who try to shake him down for protection exactly where they can go.
He's the sort of character you wouldn't get in a Lenzi film where things tend to be that much more obvious. At this point in the Lenzi version, we'd no doubt have a scene in which we were told that Merola was only using his restaurants as a legitimate front to conceal his illegal activities; a scene which would also likely preclude the preceding shakedown attempt unless it has been staged for the benefit of Merli.
But here, in Massi's vision and version of Violent Milan, we go straight the arrival of Merli's cop as the men are ejecte, being comparatively warmly received by Merola and given the information he's after. It's not so much that Acompara has an alibi, which is as would be expected, as that he had already satisfactorily completed his business dealings with Guidi and, in any case, appears to be doing far better as a legitimate businessman than an illegitimate one. This said, as the film progresses another aspect of Massi's shades of grey approach that emerges is to repeatedly blur the boundaries around respectability and legitimacy anyway; while Lenzi's films also blur the boundaries as a means of criticising the society of the times his protagonists tended to stand apart and above such compromises.
Next, Ferro visits his sister and her family. It's here that one of the film's dramatic contrivances emerges as we recognise her son Stefano's friend as the hitman who killed Guidi. An improbable coincidence perhaps, but one that is excusable and explicable in relation to genre formula whilst also providing for much needed suspense and drama given the anti-climatic nature of the preceding sequence: is Stefano also mixed up in the syndicate? If so will Ferro realise in time and how will he react?
As the assassinations continue, the next victim being a lawyer who is gunned down by some masked, tennis-bag carrying hitmen, another party becomes involved in the form of Don Alfonso, played by Francisco Rabal – albeit almost unrecognisable with / without (not being certain of which is the case) his hairpiece.
Though Alfonso and Ferro have a shared past, the way this works again proves distinctive. Regarding one another as honourable and worthy opponents, a rare commodity in the film's milieux and arguably that of the wider society it represents, the two men agree to put past differences behind them in pursuit of their common enemies:
Ferro: “I once did you a favour”
Alfonso: “But that's how honoured family members speak”
Again, in our imagined Lenzi version of the film it's hard to see the lines being crossed in this way whilst even if they were there would surely be a double-cross from the mafioso sooner or later. Here, by contrast, Ferro is sufficiently trusting to eventually have the Don arrange a hit on him through his contacts – a desparate strategy that he hopes will bring the elusive murder syndicate into the open...
Returning to the subject of Massi's direction, I would argue that it encapsulates the kind of vernacular poetry discussed by Mikel Koven in his study of the giallo. Koven's ideas here are based on the theories of Pasolini, who argued for a distinction between a classical “cinema of prose,” which effaced the signs of its own construction, and a modernist “cinema of poetry,” which foregrounded them.
The key aspect of this theory in relation to Hunted City seems less the intersubjective nature of the poetic camera, as revealing the consciousness of the director behind his characters – although I suspect a case could be made for the use of the zooms in and out as conveying a sense of urgency and immediacy whereby no-one has much time to waste – as constantly making us aware of the camera's presence.
Essentially where the classical cinema would use cuts to break a scene up, going from the establishing shot to the medium shot or the close up and reframing whenever someone or something new enters into the set, Massi instead zooms in or out or, less frequently, racks focus instead, as when the camera picks out three gunmen who know one another from the tennis rackets they are carrying across a plaza.
The danger, of course, is that such an approach can easily be seen as lazy filmmaking, the kind of approach that was adopted by filone filmmakers for economic more than aesthetic reasons. Against this it can be noted that Massi also makes use of handheld; some comparatively elaborate mirror based set-ups; false POV shots from inside a vending machine, all in addition to finding some imaginative locations, most notably a church whose hall has been transformed into a firing range. (In this we also get a neat variant on the Dirty Harry “did he fire six bullets or only five” trope, as Ferro calmly blows away the bad guy who's holding a gun to Arrigo's head in the knowledge that the weapon, one of his, is empty.)
The performances are also pleasing, with Merli, Merola and Rabal each giving their characters greater depth than is often the case. Though they may still not be playing the full eight octaves range in a manner acceptable to art cinema snobs, they are considerably more than one note.
The way Massi handles Ferro's love interest is also noteworthy here. First, because he even gets one, as an apparent departure from single-minded duty. Second, because it gives Merli the opportunity to play – as distinct from be – vulnerable. Third, because the way the scenario ultimately plays out is in accord with the comparatively strong female characters present in some of his other films, most obviously the Baader-Meinhof gang styled terrorist played by Marcella Michelangeli in Mark Strikes Again.
Stelvio Cipriani delivers a solid score, with dynamic suspense and action cues incorporating slapped bass and wacka wacka guitar, further demonstrating his stylistic adaptability by substituting disco themes for the kind of organ-heavy shake cues that would have omnipresent earlier in the 70s in the film's obligatory nightclub scene.
[The film is available to download from Cinemageddon]
Tuesday, 12 August 2008
Il Conto è chiuso / The Last Round
A mysterious stranger enters a town controlled by two criminal factions. After proving his abilities and learning who's who in the process, he plays them off against each other, before cleaning up those who are still left...
The drifter on the road
If The Last Round's scenario sounds familiar, it should. For the film is a contemporary update of A Fistful of Dollars set in a northern Italian town, with a revenge subplot involving a music box clearly derived of For a Few Dollars More – even as the protagonist's skill with a knife, which he prefers over the gun if he is forced to use something other than his fists for reasons of range, is more reminiscent of Yojimbo.
The music box and photographic memory
The stranger, Marco Russo, is played by Argentinean middleweight boxing champion Carlos Monzon, who understandably makes up for in physical presence what he may have lacked in acting ability.
The leader of one faction, Rico Manzetti, is played by poliziotti regular Luc Merenda, with his brothers and gang including such familiar filone faces as Gianni Dei and Gianfranco Cianfriglia.
Merenda shows his prowess with a gun, aiming not for the heart but a range of targets, including the left and right eyes.
The leader of the other faction, Belmondo (sic), is played by Leone regular Mario Brega. His faction is not as like the Baxters as Merenda's are the Rojos, in that he's neither the law in the town nor dominated by his wife – indeed, we never actually see his family.
Monzon demonstrates his skills
In the middle of all this are a blind girl and her adoptive father who live in a shack near a run down factory and provide Russo with information and assistance, and a second girl and her mother who kept prisoner by Rico Manzetti. They are played by Giampiero Albertini, Eleonora Fani, Annaluisa Pesce and Mariangela Giordano, the last of whose presence serves to also highlights the involvement of Gabriele Crisanti as executive producer and of his frequent screenwriting collaborator, the prolific Piero Regnoli.
I know the face, but not the name
While Luis Enrique Bacalov's imaginative and varied score also highlights the spaghetti western connection, the actual representation of the town and its two gangs has more in common with the poliziotto and Dashiell Hammett's 1929 novel Red Harvest, itself a largely unacknowledged reference point for Kurosawa and Leone's film alike.
Although we are told that the police have been bought off they never appear as an obstacle to Marco, a plot point which would perhaps have better emphasised the gangsters' power, although against this a magistrate who does make a public stand against them is almost immediately gunned down.
More generally the references to the running down of the city's industry, labour unrest and its heavily polluted atmosphere suggest a wider context not too far removed from that of Hammett's Poisonville.
Though certainly entertaining – the main issue, it must always be remembered – and stimulating – the secondary issue – I was not convinced that The Last Round's relocation of the Leone spaghetti to 1970s Italy really worked.
A nice re-imagining of the Leone corrida in a present-day setting – the two gangs in a sports arena, with Russo watching from above in the middle
The issue isn't so much with corrupt town, which one can easily believe in as an exaggerated version of an actual city in northern Italy at the time – though the selection of this is somewhat unexpected, given that the specific cultural framework of the spaghetti has been convincingly argued to be a southern Italian one by critics like Christopher Frayling – as the juxtaposition of two fundamentally different approaches to place, time and action or, to use Bakhtin's notion, chronotopes.
Marco belongs to the 'mythic' realm, where the single heroic individual can triumph through strength (the peplum film) and / or skill and guile (the spaghetti western) over seemingly impossible odds. These same impossible odds, as they are presented in the poliziotto context of The Last Round, however belong far more to the 'real' world (more so than the superspy films of the previous decade, as a form that cross-fertilised with the spaghetti western in certain ways), where they either cannot be surmounted or the hero's triumph is necessarily 'imaginary'.
This division is apparent in some other poliziotteschi, being highlighted by the traditional maverick cop on a one-man crusade as incarnated by Maurizio Merli, but it is also less pronounced because he is embedded in this same world. To put it crudely, he uses guns versus guns, not a knife or his fists. He can also be defeated, die, or achieve a victory that is partial or pyhrric.
It could also be said, however, that the distinctive combination of character and environment in The Last Round serves to make the imaginary aspect of its solutions to real problems more prominent than in 90 per cent or more of mainstream films, including most other poliziotteschi.
Mario Brega, looking a little like Lucio Fulci here
In real life, that is, the individual is arguably fundamentally powerless, or at least tends to have his or her capabilities overstated by the (non)powers that be for various reasons. (Just try to imagine a politician or party whose message was that they really had little or no control in the grand scheme of things.)
Stelvio Massi's direction is brisk and efficient, presenting a one-two combination of surprisingly elegant camera movements, especially in the studio-bound and interior sequences, and crash zooms. He also throws in some tricksy mirror shots as Russo and Belmondo meet for the first time, an approach which seems less showing off for its own sake as a externalisation of the duplicities inherent in the set up and Russo's character as a trickster hero.
The fight sequences sometimes make use of slow motion to highlight Monzon's pugilistic abilities, although the blows still sound like car doors slamming – realism, that is, is again limited by the higher priority of entertainment...
[The film is on Region 1 DVD from Noshame. The package also includes a CD of contemporary interpretations of 70s poliziotto music and a somewhat surreal extra in the form of a tour of Luc Merenda's antique shop]
The drifter on the road
If The Last Round's scenario sounds familiar, it should. For the film is a contemporary update of A Fistful of Dollars set in a northern Italian town, with a revenge subplot involving a music box clearly derived of For a Few Dollars More – even as the protagonist's skill with a knife, which he prefers over the gun if he is forced to use something other than his fists for reasons of range, is more reminiscent of Yojimbo.
The music box and photographic memory
The stranger, Marco Russo, is played by Argentinean middleweight boxing champion Carlos Monzon, who understandably makes up for in physical presence what he may have lacked in acting ability.
The leader of one faction, Rico Manzetti, is played by poliziotti regular Luc Merenda, with his brothers and gang including such familiar filone faces as Gianni Dei and Gianfranco Cianfriglia.
Merenda shows his prowess with a gun, aiming not for the heart but a range of targets, including the left and right eyes.
The leader of the other faction, Belmondo (sic), is played by Leone regular Mario Brega. His faction is not as like the Baxters as Merenda's are the Rojos, in that he's neither the law in the town nor dominated by his wife – indeed, we never actually see his family.
Monzon demonstrates his skills
In the middle of all this are a blind girl and her adoptive father who live in a shack near a run down factory and provide Russo with information and assistance, and a second girl and her mother who kept prisoner by Rico Manzetti. They are played by Giampiero Albertini, Eleonora Fani, Annaluisa Pesce and Mariangela Giordano, the last of whose presence serves to also highlights the involvement of Gabriele Crisanti as executive producer and of his frequent screenwriting collaborator, the prolific Piero Regnoli.
I know the face, but not the name
While Luis Enrique Bacalov's imaginative and varied score also highlights the spaghetti western connection, the actual representation of the town and its two gangs has more in common with the poliziotto and Dashiell Hammett's 1929 novel Red Harvest, itself a largely unacknowledged reference point for Kurosawa and Leone's film alike.
Although we are told that the police have been bought off they never appear as an obstacle to Marco, a plot point which would perhaps have better emphasised the gangsters' power, although against this a magistrate who does make a public stand against them is almost immediately gunned down.
More generally the references to the running down of the city's industry, labour unrest and its heavily polluted atmosphere suggest a wider context not too far removed from that of Hammett's Poisonville.
Though certainly entertaining – the main issue, it must always be remembered – and stimulating – the secondary issue – I was not convinced that The Last Round's relocation of the Leone spaghetti to 1970s Italy really worked.
A nice re-imagining of the Leone corrida in a present-day setting – the two gangs in a sports arena, with Russo watching from above in the middle
The issue isn't so much with corrupt town, which one can easily believe in as an exaggerated version of an actual city in northern Italy at the time – though the selection of this is somewhat unexpected, given that the specific cultural framework of the spaghetti has been convincingly argued to be a southern Italian one by critics like Christopher Frayling – as the juxtaposition of two fundamentally different approaches to place, time and action or, to use Bakhtin's notion, chronotopes.
Marco belongs to the 'mythic' realm, where the single heroic individual can triumph through strength (the peplum film) and / or skill and guile (the spaghetti western) over seemingly impossible odds. These same impossible odds, as they are presented in the poliziotto context of The Last Round, however belong far more to the 'real' world (more so than the superspy films of the previous decade, as a form that cross-fertilised with the spaghetti western in certain ways), where they either cannot be surmounted or the hero's triumph is necessarily 'imaginary'.
This division is apparent in some other poliziotteschi, being highlighted by the traditional maverick cop on a one-man crusade as incarnated by Maurizio Merli, but it is also less pronounced because he is embedded in this same world. To put it crudely, he uses guns versus guns, not a knife or his fists. He can also be defeated, die, or achieve a victory that is partial or pyhrric.
It could also be said, however, that the distinctive combination of character and environment in The Last Round serves to make the imaginary aspect of its solutions to real problems more prominent than in 90 per cent or more of mainstream films, including most other poliziotteschi.
Mario Brega, looking a little like Lucio Fulci here
In real life, that is, the individual is arguably fundamentally powerless, or at least tends to have his or her capabilities overstated by the (non)powers that be for various reasons. (Just try to imagine a politician or party whose message was that they really had little or no control in the grand scheme of things.)
Stelvio Massi's direction is brisk and efficient, presenting a one-two combination of surprisingly elegant camera movements, especially in the studio-bound and interior sequences, and crash zooms. He also throws in some tricksy mirror shots as Russo and Belmondo meet for the first time, an approach which seems less showing off for its own sake as a externalisation of the duplicities inherent in the set up and Russo's character as a trickster hero.
The fight sequences sometimes make use of slow motion to highlight Monzon's pugilistic abilities, although the blows still sound like car doors slamming – realism, that is, is again limited by the higher priority of entertainment...
[The film is on Region 1 DVD from Noshame. The package also includes a CD of contemporary interpretations of 70s poliziotto music and a somewhat surreal extra in the form of a tour of Luc Merenda's antique shop]
Saturday, 13 October 2007
La Banda del trudico / Destruction Force
Recently promoted following the murder of his predecessor, Taddei, Commissario Ghini (Luc Merenda) faces an unenviable situation. Crime, petty and serious, is spiralling out of control and three notorious underworld figures, Lanza (Franco Citti), Belli and Tocci, have congregated on Rome, clearly with nefarious deeds in mind...
Note Milian's extra credit
Meanwhile 'married' and with a son, Monnezza Jr, Monnezza (Tomas Milian) is running a restaurant – its speciality is abusing customers alongside their meal – and trying to stay out of trouble. This doesn't mean giving up a life of crime per se, more working according to an honourable, old-time credo of “no guns, only balls” and teaching a gang of apprentices the tricks of the trade...
Monnezza's trattoria
While Ghini pursues Lanza, whom he suspects of being behind Taddei's murder – a hit which has clearly been sanctioned by someone high up in the underworld, and for which Lanza has likely gained permission to return to the city following an exile in Sardinia – Monnezza is visited by an old associate, Gianni, who offers him the job of getaway driver on an upcoming score. Though Monnezza declines, wary that Gianni's methods are not always in accord with his own ethos, he suggests that his friend Frog might be a suitable replacement, little realising that the decidedly trigger happy Belli and Tocci are the ones behind the job...
Guns and flipper; there's also the obligatory pool tables there as well...
Predictably their raid on a jewellery wholesalers goes somewhat Reservoir Dogs, leading Belli to cover his tracks and putting him on collision course with Monnezza and Ghini, who has by this time dealt with Lanza...
As this synopsis perhaps suggests, La Banda del trudico / Destruction Force is the kind of film which works more in terms of individual (action) set pieces and (comedy) routines than as a coherent whole, with the Merenda and Milian halves not quite coming together nor being deployed to any particular evident end besides that of crossing off extra checkboxes in the hope of appealing to a wider audience.
Another Jimmy il fenomeno sighting?
It's the way in which – to use a succession of sequences from the midway point – an extended chase and shoot-out between Ghini and Lanza is followed by Monnezza explaining his philosophy of life to his infant son as he prepares a meal, with this in turn succeeded by Lanza's invasion of Ghini's home in search of revenge, followed by yet more ineptitude from Monnezza's apprentices.
There's no real relationship between the four sequences nor any indication of the passage of time between them – Lanza was shot in the shoot out, and has had the wound patched up by the time he enters Ghini's home, the latter sequence also beginning in media res as Ghini receives a phone call from his girlfriend / wife – with a strong impression thus that the Monezza material, credited to Milian, was been inserted more or less at random into the main script, credited to Massi and the Elisa Briganti / Dardano Sacchetti combo. (As an aside, are there any interviews with Briganti out there? Given her work on Zombie and others, one would think she's an ideal subject for further research, particularly around the nature of her collabrations / co-credits with Sacchetti.)
Roma a mano armata
Again, however, none of this necessarily mattered as far as the filone audience was concerned, forty-five minutes of Milian being better than zero, but it does also impart that sense of trying to please everyone and thus failing to completely satisfy anyone when compared with the more consistent and focussed approach one finds in a Milian / Monnezza vehicle or, indeed, Massi's Marc trilogy.
This is about as close to a De Niro / Pacino moment between Milian and Merenda as we get
Likewise, one does wonder what the moral of the tale is when Monnezza's apprentices repeatedly meet with failure in their attempts to be 'honest', old-style criminals and the more direct route of the modern armed robber appears the one more likely to get results, even if the issue is then that of holding on to this loot for long enough to convert it to ready cash...
Milian / Monnezza in full effect
Massi's direction is a touch zoom happy but he counters this with some energetic circling handheld camera, effective handling of the all-important action scenes and inventive set-ups. Again, something seems to be lacking at times, however, as when Monnezza's demonstrations of sleight of hand are broken down in a way that you don't see what Milian is doing when he lifts a wristwatch with his finger or that it's actually his hands doing three card monte. (One here thinks of the way the action and comedy are successfully integrated in the likes of the Police Story films, and the necessity of showing the reality of certain stunts and tricks.)
A show off composition, but what is being shown off to best effect ;-)
Bruno Canfora's score, while pushing the right funky buttons, sounds suspiciously more like pre-existing pieces than tailor-made cues, with some of the action pieces perhaps not as well integrated as they might be; certainly there's no Ghini signature theme along the lines of Marc's “my name is Marc” disco theme. More positively, a spaghetti western cue gives the right mock-serious drama to a sequence in which two of Monnezza's bungling apprentices attempt to snatch fur coats from a hairdressers only to find their getaway car has in turn been stolen; later on there's also a moment where Monnezza strikes a match on his skinhead apprentice's head, reminiscent of the Lee Van Cleef / Klaus Kinski exchange in For a Few Dollars More.
Though Luc Merenda is billed first, there appears little question that it is Tomas Milian who was really running the show, as indicated by the aforementioned dialogue credit and that of his dubbing voice, Ferrucio Amendola. (At this time Milian didn't feel sufficiently comfortable in delivering Monnezza's highly idiomatic dialogue convincingly with his own voice.) This isn't in itself a bad thing, insofar as Milian is clearly having a ball with the character and infects the viewer with his unbridled enthusiasm, but equally there is again that impression of two different half-films passing one another.
Perhaps the emblematic moment here stems from one of the blink-and-you'll miss them scenes of Ghini's domestic life, as he asks his girlfriend / wife whether she would prefer to go see a movie and then have dinner, or to have dinner and then see a movie. Recently recovered from a near rape, she says that if they go to cinema it would have to be for “a funny movie, not a horrible Italian [cop] thriller”
I wonder what she would have made of Destruction Force itself in this regard...
Note Milian's extra credit
Meanwhile 'married' and with a son, Monnezza Jr, Monnezza (Tomas Milian) is running a restaurant – its speciality is abusing customers alongside their meal – and trying to stay out of trouble. This doesn't mean giving up a life of crime per se, more working according to an honourable, old-time credo of “no guns, only balls” and teaching a gang of apprentices the tricks of the trade...
Monnezza's trattoria
While Ghini pursues Lanza, whom he suspects of being behind Taddei's murder – a hit which has clearly been sanctioned by someone high up in the underworld, and for which Lanza has likely gained permission to return to the city following an exile in Sardinia – Monnezza is visited by an old associate, Gianni, who offers him the job of getaway driver on an upcoming score. Though Monnezza declines, wary that Gianni's methods are not always in accord with his own ethos, he suggests that his friend Frog might be a suitable replacement, little realising that the decidedly trigger happy Belli and Tocci are the ones behind the job...
Guns and flipper; there's also the obligatory pool tables there as well...
Predictably their raid on a jewellery wholesalers goes somewhat Reservoir Dogs, leading Belli to cover his tracks and putting him on collision course with Monnezza and Ghini, who has by this time dealt with Lanza...
As this synopsis perhaps suggests, La Banda del trudico / Destruction Force is the kind of film which works more in terms of individual (action) set pieces and (comedy) routines than as a coherent whole, with the Merenda and Milian halves not quite coming together nor being deployed to any particular evident end besides that of crossing off extra checkboxes in the hope of appealing to a wider audience.
Another Jimmy il fenomeno sighting?
It's the way in which – to use a succession of sequences from the midway point – an extended chase and shoot-out between Ghini and Lanza is followed by Monnezza explaining his philosophy of life to his infant son as he prepares a meal, with this in turn succeeded by Lanza's invasion of Ghini's home in search of revenge, followed by yet more ineptitude from Monnezza's apprentices.
There's no real relationship between the four sequences nor any indication of the passage of time between them – Lanza was shot in the shoot out, and has had the wound patched up by the time he enters Ghini's home, the latter sequence also beginning in media res as Ghini receives a phone call from his girlfriend / wife – with a strong impression thus that the Monezza material, credited to Milian, was been inserted more or less at random into the main script, credited to Massi and the Elisa Briganti / Dardano Sacchetti combo. (As an aside, are there any interviews with Briganti out there? Given her work on Zombie and others, one would think she's an ideal subject for further research, particularly around the nature of her collabrations / co-credits with Sacchetti.)
Roma a mano armata
Again, however, none of this necessarily mattered as far as the filone audience was concerned, forty-five minutes of Milian being better than zero, but it does also impart that sense of trying to please everyone and thus failing to completely satisfy anyone when compared with the more consistent and focussed approach one finds in a Milian / Monnezza vehicle or, indeed, Massi's Marc trilogy.
This is about as close to a De Niro / Pacino moment between Milian and Merenda as we get
Likewise, one does wonder what the moral of the tale is when Monnezza's apprentices repeatedly meet with failure in their attempts to be 'honest', old-style criminals and the more direct route of the modern armed robber appears the one more likely to get results, even if the issue is then that of holding on to this loot for long enough to convert it to ready cash...
Milian / Monnezza in full effect
Massi's direction is a touch zoom happy but he counters this with some energetic circling handheld camera, effective handling of the all-important action scenes and inventive set-ups. Again, something seems to be lacking at times, however, as when Monnezza's demonstrations of sleight of hand are broken down in a way that you don't see what Milian is doing when he lifts a wristwatch with his finger or that it's actually his hands doing three card monte. (One here thinks of the way the action and comedy are successfully integrated in the likes of the Police Story films, and the necessity of showing the reality of certain stunts and tricks.)
A show off composition, but what is being shown off to best effect ;-)
Bruno Canfora's score, while pushing the right funky buttons, sounds suspiciously more like pre-existing pieces than tailor-made cues, with some of the action pieces perhaps not as well integrated as they might be; certainly there's no Ghini signature theme along the lines of Marc's “my name is Marc” disco theme. More positively, a spaghetti western cue gives the right mock-serious drama to a sequence in which two of Monnezza's bungling apprentices attempt to snatch fur coats from a hairdressers only to find their getaway car has in turn been stolen; later on there's also a moment where Monnezza strikes a match on his skinhead apprentice's head, reminiscent of the Lee Van Cleef / Klaus Kinski exchange in For a Few Dollars More.
Though Luc Merenda is billed first, there appears little question that it is Tomas Milian who was really running the show, as indicated by the aforementioned dialogue credit and that of his dubbing voice, Ferrucio Amendola. (At this time Milian didn't feel sufficiently comfortable in delivering Monnezza's highly idiomatic dialogue convincingly with his own voice.) This isn't in itself a bad thing, insofar as Milian is clearly having a ball with the character and infects the viewer with his unbridled enthusiasm, but equally there is again that impression of two different half-films passing one another.
Perhaps the emblematic moment here stems from one of the blink-and-you'll miss them scenes of Ghini's domestic life, as he asks his girlfriend / wife whether she would prefer to go see a movie and then have dinner, or to have dinner and then see a movie. Recently recovered from a near rape, she says that if they go to cinema it would have to be for “a funny movie, not a horrible Italian [cop] thriller”
I wonder what she would have made of Destruction Force itself in this regard...
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