La legione dei dannati / Battle of the Commandos

At the end of the 1960s, the editorial collective of Cahiers du cinema proposed that films could be positioned as politically radical or reactionary depending on where they sat on the axes of form and content.

For a film to be genuinely radical it had to have radical content and radical form. This was a combination which meant that 99% or more of films could be condemned as reactionary, including that five or ten per cent which aspired to be politically progressive.

A key influence here was Berthold Brecht’s theories of epic theatre, with their emphasis upon constantly distancing the audience from the action on stage by making them aware that they were watching a constructed fiction.

Crucially, however, the Cahiers writers also provided a get out clause for their own favourites by suggesting the existence of the famous category E film, the one that seemed to initially be formally and ideologically complicit with the status quo, but which could conveniently be recuperated for radicals like themselves to watch without feeling bad, through various strategies of deconstruction and detournement. The classic case was John Ford’s Young Mr Lincoln.

So, what does this have to do with Battle of the Commandos, a 1969 Euro-war entry directed by Umberto Lenzi from a script co-authored by Dario Argento?

Well, on the surface not a lot, given that the film sees yet another post-Dirty Dozen special squad of the condemned sent on a suicide mission, is replete with anachronisms and sees the reduction of complex material forces to simple battles between individual characters – including, of course, the obligatory evil Nazis.

Yet what I would argue is that if we look a bit further and consider the film in the light of its director’s avowed anarchism and similar tendencies in its co-author, we might begin to see it as a commentary – now more intentional, now more unconscious – on the awkward interface between popular film and politics, as a kind of Category E film for the Euro-trash enthusiast.


Palance was also in Godard's Contempt, where Brecht is quoted. Coincidence? Maybe...

We begin with Jack Palance’s Colonel Charlie MacPherson marching into his CO’s office to the strains of Marcello Giombini’s appropriately stirring, martial music.

MacPherson has just returned from his latest mission, unlike the 20-odd men serving under him. For MacPherson their deaths are what matters. For his CO it is that the goal of the mission was accomplished: Yes, 20 men died, but their sacrifice achieved the destruction of 75 enemy panzers.

It’s a basic difference in accounting strategies, nicely summarised by Brecht’s poem “General, your tank is a powerful vehicle”:

“General, man is very useful.
He can fly and he can kill.
But he has one defect:
He can think.”

The general knows this, however, and plays upon it to entice MacPherson into a new mission, one that gives him the opportunity to go up against his old enemy Colonel Ackerman.

MacPherson swallows the bait and hastily assembles a team of military prisoners for the mission. While the usual mismatched group, they’re better characterised than some of their counterparts elsewhere and are used by the filmmakers to make further points.

Claudio Undari’s Private Stone is the profiteering individualist, a Mother Courage type who doesn’t care whether the Axis or the Allies win the war.

He’s contrasted with Helmuth Schneider’s Sam Schrier, a German-Jewish anarchist who fought in the Spanish Civil War and bears a concentration camp tattoo. (One here wonders if the film has exerted any influence on Tarantino's forthcoming Inglorious Basterds, with its all-Jewish hit squad.)

In the middle are the likes of Bruno Corrazzini’s Frank Madigan, who invariably compares anything he eats or drinks to the menu of a luxury hotel, which he apparently visited every day in civilian life; the deliciously revealed punch-line is that this was in the capacity of working as a waiter rather than as a customer.

Rounding out the team are Thomas Hunter’s demolitions expert Captain Burke, a happy-go-lucky type from the USA whose womanising marks him out as less professional than the disapproving – but possibly envious – MacPherson, and the Colonel’s sidekick Sgt. Habinda.

Habinda is one of the film’s most awkward characters, his loyalty to MacPherson and, through him, the British Empire implicitly marking him out as a traitor to his own people in India.

This issue is one that Brecht addressed in his own discussions of the Hollywood film of Rudyard Kipling’s poem Gunga Din: Despite his politics, Brecht found himself being drawn into agreeing with the film’s racist, imperialist sentiments and needing to constantly re-assert his critical distance. If it might be argued that this was a testament to the power of classical Hollywood mise en scene, the point I would make is that neither Gunga Din’s form nor its content proved able to successfully interpellate the viewer.

If Brecht was an exceptional viewer in some regards, his freedom to read the text against the grain is not in itself exceptional.

As it so happens, Habinda is played by Aldo Sambrell. This in turn sets up some questions around performance styles and political correctness: As someone who really gets into his characters Sambrell is akin to a method actor, the antithesis of Brecht’s gestural approach. Although there’s a hint of boot-polish to his make up and an awkward incongruity to the removal of his turban revealing short, thinning hair rather than flowing Sikh locks, he’s a reasonably convincing Indian. Yet these same elements also make for a degree of distancing, that he’s a Spaniard playing at being an Indian.

In one way Sambrell is showing the artificiality of identity but in another he’s being politically incorrect, precisely because these selfsame theoretical identity politics often assume only those who are ‘really’ X should play or depict, X without questioning the reality of X when it pertains to the non-dominant other. (Let’s see who can be more anti-essentialist; you go first.)

Similar productive, thought-provoking contradictions emerge as the mission gets underway. MacPherson and his men successfully establish a beach-head, but the boats following them are spotted and destroyed, leaving them stuck behind enemy lines.

While the SS man, played by the inevitable and inimitable Gerard Herter, is confident that the attack has been repulsed, Ackerman, played by Wolfgang Preiss, is less sure. What’s in play here is not just the conventional contrast between the good German and the bad Nazi – as also seen in another Argento-scripted Dirty Dozen copy, Probability Zero – but also the contrast between the SS ideologue and the Wehrmacht professional.

Viewing the war as all but lost, Ackerman’s goal is the best possible, honourable peace. Having no faith in the Fuhrer nor the master race like his SS counterpart, he’s the kind of soldier who would have supported the July 1944 plot and, had it succeeded, possibly have given the Allies a harder time of things militarily by, for example, not devoting much needed resources to wasteful campaigns of genocide. (Co-incidentally or otherwise, Dirty Dozen II sees the commandos presented with an opportunity to kill Hitler, which they don’t take.)

A game of move and counter-move, bluff and double-bluff between MacPherson and Ackermann thus ensues.

If this gives scope for plenty of battle scenes and set pieces, we can again emphasise their latent contradictions. Clearly dealing with relatively limited resources – albeit still more considerable than he and other filone directors would have to deal with ten or fifteen years later, as evinced by the train-mounted gun that becomes the McGuffin around which MacPherson and Ackerman converge – Lenzi makes extensive use of the zoom lens as an alternative to cutting and, when doing so, frequently presents rapid montages of shots that show little regard for continuity.

While this approach makes it harder to notice the ill-fitting uniforms worn by the extras or the fact that they are wielding Italian manufactured submachine guns not used by the Germans in WWII, it also makes the action sequences that bit harder to engage with for the average viewer. Insofar as this viewer was more likely troubled by difficulties in following the action than with the props – see, for example, some of the comments on the film on the IMDB, this again comes across as something of a distanciating element.

Finally, the theme of food resurfaces again through the ambiguous character of Diana Lorys’s Janine, the erstwhile lover of a collaborationist mayor, who is then taken by MacPherson to be a guide, and is then captured and interrogated by the Wehrmacht and SS in turn. Throughout all this, her motivations are about survival and pain avoidance rather than ideology.

Or, as Ludwig Feuerbach famously put it, “Der Mensch ist was er isst”: “man is what he eats”.

"Food first, then morality."...

I Padroni della città / Mr Scarface / Blood and Bullets / Rulers of the City / The Big Boss / Zwei Supertypen räumen auf

Though not quite as accomplished as the “milieu trilogy” of Milan Calibre 9, Manhunt and Murder Inferno, this 1976 entry is nevertheless the kind of poliziotto that confirms Fernando Di Leo’s position as one of the key players in the filone in terms of style and themes alike.

We open with a slow-motion flashback sequence in which Jack Palace’s ‘Mr Scarface’ / Manzini guns down his partner in crime before the man’s son, whom he then punches out after the boy picks up an empty firearm and tries to shoot his father’s assassin.






The opening scene

What’s odd, however, is that the meaning of this traumatic fragment, beyond the basic fact that Manzini is clearly a badass, though not quite so unremittingly evil as to kill a child who might recognise him like Once Upon a Time in the West’s Frank – is that subsequent sequences appear completely unconnected to it.

Most poliziotto directors would have made it clear that the next character we’re introduced to, Tony, played by German actor and frequent Fassbinder collaborator Harry Baer, is the grown up version of the child who in now in search of revenge. Di Leo leaves us wondering and, indeed, thereafter appears to drop this plot thread. It’s not bad moviemaking, more another sign that he was willing to take risks and do things other filone filmmakers wouldn’t.




Is this the same child grown up?

Much the same can be said of his tendency to avoid straightforward identification figures. Baer’s Tony, like Gastone Moschin in Milan Calibre 9 and Mario Adorf in Manhunt, is clearly a more attractive proposition than the rest of the gang he’s with.


Is this Eleonora Fani?

He adheres to the gangster’s code, as also fore-grounded by his old-timer friend, Napoli, whom the others regard as a has-been or never-was and treat with attitudes ranging from disregard to contempt. (“You know you old guys are pretty funny, all that talk about practice. Give me a Honda and I’d make more snatches than you anyday. Works faster these days,” remarks one younger member, whose pocket Napoli then surreptitiously picks to demonstrate the value of his supposedly outmoded practice.)

He’s also a likeable, light hearted kind of guy – a characterisation further at odds with the conventional figure on a vendetta, if he is indeed such – whose goal is less to be padrone of the city than to make some money and retire to Brazil.

Moreover, he’s reluctant to use violence unnecessarily or to excess, despite being more capable in a hand-to-hand fight than anyone else in either gang. (“You’re beginning to tire me. If I have to fight you like this every week for what you pay our friend, one of us might get hurt,” as he says to one reluctant – and armed – debtor he knocks out with his hands and feet alone, leaving no doubt as to who might get hurt next time round.)

Yet, despite all this, there’s nevertheless the sense that, like the protagonists of the spaghetti westerns Di Leo co-authored, Tony’s the hero because he’s the one who wins the fights, rather than the one who wins the fights because he’s the hero. It’s a subtle, but important, distinction.

The relatively complicated plot really gets going as one of Manzini’s gang, Rick, played by Al Cliver, visits the illegal gambling den run by Tony’s boss, Luigi Cherico, played by Edmund Purdom and clearly cast, like Palance, for special guest star type marquee value.

Rick gets thrown out of the place after complaining – rightfully as it turns out – that its games are rigged by the house, but issues the warning that he or his boss will be back. Whilst Manzini makes a visit to the club to restore face, he is also displeased that Rick should have been fooled and expels him from the gang following a punishment beating. (“If you don’t know which table to sit at don’t go gambling. I stepped in because my men don’t get taken, but if a man gets taken for a sucker he can’t be one of mine”)

Joining a card game and claiming to be out of money, Manzini convinces the dealer to let him cash a cheque for three million lire. In the morning it’s discovered that the cheque is no good. After fighting and defeating his rival Peppi, who considers himself Cherico’s rightful number two, Tony rashly announces that he will get the money back from Manzini.

Back home, it is Rick, whom Tony had conveniently found and taken home to recuperate following his beating, who provides the method: The two men hire an actor from a variety hall and he and Tony then visit Manzini’s offices posing as tax inspectors, compelling the absent boss to pay up ten million lire to avoid an official investigation whilst also helping illustrate the world of corruption and collusion in which the 70s poliziotto as a whole is so firmly embedded.

Keeping seven million for themselves, Tony gives Cherico back his three million, expecting him to be pleased. Instead, however, his boss – encouraged by Peppi – is furious, fearful that Tony has just escalated the conflict with Manzini still further. Disgusted at the gang’s all-talk and little action approach, Tony announces that he is going it alone.

As Manzini makes his next move, sending his men to take care of the music hall performer, whose identity they have uncovered, Tony and Rick realise that continuing to play both ends against the middle – to introduce another spaghetti western theme Di Leo would have been familiar with – is going to prove a challenge, even when assisted by Napoli’s and his wise counsel. (“If you want to take this seriously you’ve got to learn. But a lot of these punks today have never passed the third grade – what do they know?”)


One of the numerous fight scenes

While taking some time to get up to full speed, it would be wrong to give the impression that Mr Scarface is all talk and little or no action, with several decently executed fight scenes affording Tony the opportunity to demonstrate his skills and – more importantly – nature even at this stage, not to mention one of those signature Di Leo girl dancing / camera dancing around girl scenes. But unlike Milan Calibre 9’s Barbara Bouchet, she’s strictly there for decoration, with this proving one of the more masculine films out there and, in the process, reminding one of Leone’s Dollars trilogy westerns.


The definitive Di Leo shot?

Much the same can be said of Gisela Hahn’s nightclub singer cum moll, Clara, clearly included as part of the German side of the co-production given the notable absence of any subplot between her and Tony; if we get no sign that Tony prefers men to women, as per one of Peppi’s taunts, romance isn’t a particular interest / weakness of his either.


Purdom and Hahn

Moreover, after the midway point those more interested in action than auteurism should be more than satisfied with the procession of chases and shootouts that ensue, especially when these culminating in a settling of accounts set against the always welcome abandoned slaughterhouse setting in which also we get an exploding car and a the running down of another bad guy by a motorcyclist doing a wheelie.


Note the various carnival posters expressing Tony's desire to go to Brazil

With a good cast featuring plenty of familiar faces amongst the supporting players, like Fulvio Mingozzi as Manzini’s initial victim; well-chosen locations and adroit use of the camera, and an effective score by regular Di Leo composer Luis Enrique Bacalov – albeit one lacking anything matching the brilliance of his outstanding, oft-used Preludio from Milan Calibre 9, but featuring some nice percussion and funky flute work nonetheless – Masters of the City is well worth a look for fans of the Di Leo or the poliziotto as a whole.