La mano lunga del padrino / The Long Arm of the Godfather

In that the main conflict in this 1972 poliziotto is in fact between rival gangsters, with the police barely making an appearance despite the gunning down of several soldiers and the theft of a consignment of arms, this is this is one of those filone entries which qualifies as a poliziotto in name only.


Groovy credits superimposed over cold blooded killing

It's also a somewhat difficult film to otherwise place. The groovy credits and the breezy lounge score (complete with frequent use of la la la la type male and female vocalism) are at odds with the cynicism, violence and general air of misogyny and/or misanthropy that is otherwise the film's stock in trade. Perhaps tellingly the film was also the only credited work for composer Silvano D'Auria and co-writer and director Nando Bonomi alike.


Casual violence and sadism

Elsewhere we are on more familiar ground, insofar as the other co-writer and editor was Giulio Berruti of Killer Nun note, the three leads are Adolfo Celi, Peter Lee Lawrence and Erica Blanc and many of the gang members familiar faces.

Celi plays the Godfather of the title, Lawrence the treacherous underling who does a double crosses and tries to sell the arms on himself, and Blanc the moll whom he wishes to impress.

The pacing is often somewhat leisurely and the game of cat and mouse not as tense as it could have been.

This is partly down to the characterisation of the leads: Celi’s Don Carmelo is a criminal mastermind in the Thunderball or Danger Diabolik mode, confident he’s always at least one move ahead of everyone else:

Goon: Don't you want revenge?
Don Carmelo: Romantic notions don't interest me. I want the money.

Lawrence’s Vincenzo thinks he is smarter than he actually is, but is also adept at improvising his way out of sticky situations:

Vincenzo: For the moment I'm still winning.
Sabina: Don't count on that.
Vincenzo: I always do.

It is also down to the fact that the action quickly relocates from Italy to somewhere in North Africa or the Middle East, such that we get a fair amount of tourist style sightseeing worked into the narrative.






And something a bit more disturbing, perhaps

Things do get back down to the serious business after a bit, albeit again with some awkward inconsistencies in tone, not least when Blanc’s Sabina is brutalised by one of Don Vincenzo’s thugs to some incongruous but not obviously intentionally ironic musical accompaniment.

In sum, an oddity that doesn’t always work but which isn’t the kind of disaster that its first and only film nature might lead you to assume.

Dalle Ardenne all'inferno / The Dirty Heroes

Wow, what a mess!

An intermittently entertaining one, to be sure, but a mess nonetheless.

For this post- Dirty Dozen WWII action / caper crossover can't seem to decide what it wants to be, the tone it wants to take, and generally outlives its welcome somewhat thanks to a resulting lack of focus and a near two-hour running time.

We begin with the escape of two Chicago gangsters, Joe Mortimer (Frederick Stafford) and Randall (Howard Ross) from a Nazi POW camp, aided by one of the guards, Sergeant Rudolph Petrowsky; Petrowsky just happens to also be from the Windy City, having had to leave the US in a hurry and take advantage of his dual nationality sometime before the war.

The three men are intent on steal some diamonds and plans for the V1 and V2 rockets from the Nazis. To accompany these goals they need the assistance of three people.

The first person is local resistance leader, Luc Rollman (Adolfo Celi). He unfortunately expects that the diamonds should be returned to the Dutch people from whom the Nazi's appropriated them...

Students of geography and military history will at this point note that the Ardennes, as referred to the in film's Italian title, is in Belgium rather than Holland; suffice to say that this proves an early indicator of the film's somewhat slapdash approach to such matters.

The second person is Kristina von Keist (Daniela Bianchi). She's the wife of the local Wermacht commander, General von Keist (Curd Jurgens). She's also Jewish, her real name being Hannah Goldschmitt.

Needless to say it would be very bad for her and her husband if recently arrived SS commander General Hassler (Helmuth Schneider) were to find out.

Being intent on pursuing what his army counterpart Keist feels to be a lost cause, Hassler's has brought about an end to the uneasy truce that had existed between Rollman's partisans and Keist's men by a series of punitive SS actions.

The third person - finally we get there - is another of the men's old Chicago crime colleagues, O'Connor (John Ireland) who's now a Colonel in the advancing US army. They need him to create a diversion by launching an attack on the German positions at the right time. The complication here is that O'Connor doesn't really have the authority to make such an attack...

In sum, what we have is an convoluted and co-incidence based story that alternates awkwardly between war as hell and war as caper approaches, with few clichés left unexplored - the good German and the bad Nazi, the Jewish woman passing as 'Aryan' - and some dubious treatments of the partisan struggle and the Holocaust where attempts at pathos tend instead to come off as bathos.

Alberto De Martino's direction is a mixed bag, some effective compositions and set pieces - most notably the underwater sequence in which our (anti-)heroes enter the Nazi compound through the canal system - being offset by a lack of imagination in the battle scenes, some poorly integrated stock footage and, most laughably, a moment when a reconnaissance plane commandeered by O'Connor transforms into a bomber, delivers its payload, and metamorphoses back again.

Bruno Nicolai and Ennio Morricone contribute some suitably stirring martial music.

The leading men acquit themselves well enough in the derring-do stakes - Howard Ross looking as though he'd been working out particularly hard - whilst Bianchi makes for a suitably attractive love interest and sympathy figure.

The cast are nicely rounded out by some of those always welcome Eurocult faces, including, in two rather unimaginative pieces of casting John Bartha as an SS officer and Tom Felleghy as one of his allied counterparts.

La Mano lunga del padrino / Long Arm of the Godfather

We open with a daring attack on an army convoy carrying a consignment of weapons. But for the technology on display – cars, trucks and submachine guns – it could easily be a scene in a spaghetti western, all the more so when one of the robbers proceeds to make off with the loot, leaving his companions for dead.

As Long Arm of the Godfather's title suggests, however, we're actually in poliziotto territory. In truth, however, the term is something of a misnomer here insofar as no members of the police or other authorities are ever seen ever as taking any interest in the case, which is a curious omission given that you would think that soldiers would be the kind of crime to that attention.




Noir-ish imagery with Lawrence

This is not to say, however, that the perpetrator of the betrayal, Vincenzo, is about to have things easy since his ex-boss Don Carmelo is, as his title indicates, a rather prominent gangster and soon proves to have also survived the incident.

And then there's the issue of actually finding a buyer for the guns...


Erica Blanc, intelligent and charming as ever

Directed and co-written by Nardo Bonomi, whose only credit this is, the latter role in conjuction with Giulio Berutti of Killer Nun fame, this is nasty little crime film where Peter Lee Lawrence / Karl Hirenbach's Vincenzo provides our point of identification almost by default.

About the only things he has going for him in comparison with Adolfo Celi's old school Don are that he is the attractive young underdog aspiring to have his day and is acting at least partly out love, in the form of Erika Blanc's somewhat more level headed and forward thinking moll, Sabina.





Shades of giallo

Otherwise, however, they're cut from much the same cloth, with the action providing that familiar mix of car chases, shootouts, men beating one another and women up to car door slamming type sound effects, and a reasonable degree of suspense over what is going to happen next.


This is the kind of film where the nightclub owner is more interested in whether the dancer can also serve drinks than her primary talents


Yet another savage beating

Though nothing outstanding Bonomi's direction is efficient, with a good use of locations and some eye-catching camera set-ups. The performances are more going through the motions than truly inspired, although there is an added poignancy to the denoument if one is aware Lawrence and Blanc's rumoured real-life relationship and of the actor's subsequent suicide less than two years later.