Action

Directed by Tinto Brass in the wake of the Caligula debacle and prior to his reinvention as a purveyor of sophisticated erotica, Action comes across in the main as something of a throwback to his more pop / avant-garde films of the 1960s such as Yankee and Cul cuore in gola.

The main difference, however, is that whereas those films engaged with genre and filone cinema in the form of the Italian style western and thriller, Action seems more of an attempt to respond to the such art films of the time as Bertolucci's Partner, Godard's Weekend and Pasolini's Uccellacci e uccellini, infused with a touch of 1970s punk spirit reminiscent – if almost certainly not consciously derived from – Jarman's Jubilee.


Anarchy in the UK

As such, the results are something of a deliberate mess, albeit an intermittently entertaining and provocative one.

Luc Merenda plays Bruno Martel, an idealistic young actor working on a curious looking gangster movie – curious insofar as he dresses and acts like an American gangster whilst the cops pursuing him are London bobbies – who walks off the set and goes wandering through the literal and metaphorical wasteland, searching for existential meaning.

In the course of this ballade or bildungsroman – choose your frame of reference – he encounters Garibaldi; his co-star Doris and her double Ofelia; a group of menacing punks; the inhabitants of a Snake Pit style madhouse; witnesses his co-star being forced to defecate on cue and on camera; and, possibly most memorable of all as an image, a decidedly surrealistic and oneiric group of formally attired men and women with penises and vaginas for noses and mouths respectively.




Brass's genital faced figures


Rene Magritte's Le Viol




Two of the Chapman Brothers' figures

The presence of Adriana Asti references another likely source of inspiration in Bunuel's The Phantom of Liberty – and thus, perhaps, a further vague justification / rationale for the sadistic defecation scene, given its memorable vignette where defectation is public and eating is private – whilst genre fans will delight in John Steiner's appearance as Merenda's manager and the casting of Suspiria's Susanna Javicoli as Doris / Ofelia.

That the viewer must endeavour to tease out such meanings is, of course, the whole crux of how he or she is likely responds to Action beyond simple knee jerk reactions that it is misogynistic or tasteless, as the feminist and bourgeois responses respectively.

Is it just bad?

Is it only bad by the selfsame conventional standards Brass wants his audience to (re-)(re-)re-examine?

Is it a bad example of its particular type of filmmaking, inasmuch as it seems to have little that is particularly insightful or original to actually say?

And then, if the last of these – not entirely incommensurable – possibilities is the case, could this potentially be the point, as a joke targeted at contemporary avant-garde types?

Gli Amici di Nick Hezard / Nick the Sting

Here's an interesting one: crime auteur Fernando Di Leo directing a script by Alberto Silvestri that seems less written for him than as an obvious imitation of The Sting for whomever happened to be available to take on the project.

The closest point of comparison amongst Di Leo's own films as a writer-director – and sometimes producer– is probably probably Colpo in canna, as another relatively light-hearted entry where the cat and mouse games are more for fun than keeps.

The story is simple: Nick Hezard, played with winning charm by Luc Merenda, wants to avenge the dead of one of his friends at the hands of Robert Clark, played by Lee J. Cobb, and plans an elaborate con to achieve this end.

While Clark is a more or less direct stand in for the Robert Shaw character in The Sting, there is perhaps also a Di Leo element in that he has clearly transgressed against the kind of rogue's code often found in the director's work. Killing someone because they successfully conned you and thereby demonstrated themselves to be a better player of the game than you is fundamentally 'against the rules' that these men (and occasionally women) live by.


Umberto Raho and Tom Felleghy


Lassander and Merenda, in exaggerated form

The most pronounced departure from The Sting is that the film is less a buddy movie than a buddies movie, as highlighted by the alternative The Friends of Nick Hezard title. There is no figure comparable to Paul Newman's character in George Roy Hill's film, but rather a host of endearing supporting characters ranging from Valentina Cortese's eccentric mother to Luciana Paluzzi's jealous girlfriend to Gabrielle Ferzetti's fellow professional.

Besides the already formidable array of talent already mentioned, the cast also includes the likes of Dagmar Lassander, William Berger, Umberto Raho and Fulvio Mingozzi to make for arguably the best ensemble Di Leo would ever work with and a virtual who's who of Italian popular cinema around this time.

Di Leo's regular composer Bacalov contributes a score that is by turns suspenseful and whimsical, demonstrating his versatility by avoiding more contemporary instrumentation and stylings – this despite the film's present day setting – in favour of jazzy clarinet, oboe and so on.






Split screens

Di Leo's own work is replete with gimmicks both old and new, such as irising, wipes, split screens and multiple images. If this proves a combination that at times feels a touch schizophrenic as a mix of 1920s and 1960s idioms, it also helps further distance the film from its sepia-toned period inspiration and, with the split screens recalling the original version of The Thomas Crowne Affair and thereby highlighting another possible caper film inspiration.

Importantly, however, sometimes this technology amount to more than a gimmick, as when the fragmentation of the characters' spatial relations during a car journey hints of Nick's closeness to his mother in one frame within the frame and his relative distance from girlfriend in another in a way a conventional two or three shot perhaps couldn't.


Nick and his friends

Likewise these constant reminders that we are watching a film – as another carefully orchestrated performance – neatly c(l)ue us in to the film-within-the-film finale, where Nick plays a role comparable to Di Leo's own.

A welcome further demonstration of Di Leo's talents and versatility.

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]

La Polizia accusa: il servizio segreto uccide / Silent Action / Chopper Squad

Three high-ranking military men, including General Stocchi, are found dead in suspicious circumstances within the space of a couple of months, prompting an inquiry by the army and considerable media and public interest.


Precise statements of time and place help to convey a sense of authenticity...


... of a story ripped directly from the headlines

The police, in the shape of Inspector Giorgio Solmi (Luc Merenda) and his men have other cases to investigate, however, such as the murder of electronics expert Carotti, found bludgeoned to death in his expensive villa.


The staging of a suicide; the black gloved figure is immediately given a face in a non-giallo move

The evidence points to his murderer being the call girl who visited him that night, with her attempted suicide and the tens of thousands of lira found in her apartment convincing public prosecutor Mannino (Mel Ferrer) of her guilt, “as good as a confession.”


A respectable noblewoman is soon revealed as the madam of a brothel, indicating both the deceptiveness of appearances and the pervasiveness of corruption

Solmi, however, is not convinced, refusing to “stop at first appearances” and strongly doubting that La Tunisiana had the strength to cave in Carotti's skull with three or four blows from a poker. Accordingly he assigns his men to stake out Carotti's place lest the killer – or someone else – return to the scene of the crime. This leads to the apprehension of Remo Ortolani and the discovery of a tape indicate that Carotti, who financed his lavish lifestyle through blackmail, had uncovered a conspiracy involving General Stocchi and another man, Renzi.

With the army again declining to share information and Ortolani revealing that he himself is working for one of the secret services whilst indicating that he knows nothing else, there is unfortunately no indication as to who Renzi might be.


Milian in pensive mood


The familiar sight of the tape reels

Ortolani's claim prompts Solmi to go see his superior, Captain Sperli (Tomas Milian) who denies that Ortolani – or whoever he might really be – is one of his men and casts doubt on his claims. Even more worryingly for Sperli the tape of the conversation proves to have been wiped, raising his suspicions that Mannino or someone else knows more than they are willing to let on. Still worse follows as Ortolani is assassinated by a gunman posing as a traffic cop, indicating that Solmi's investigation is a threat and that Renzi or whoever else it could expose are powerful and utterly ruthless....


Another cog in the machine; the fake policeman assassinates Alighieri

Happily, however, another lead in the case emerges around this time, as La Tunisiana confesses to Solmi that she saw Carotti's murderer. Unfortunately the same man then abducts her from the hospital, sub-machinegunning some guards in the process. While La Tunisiana manages to escape and to contact Solmi, to give a name to the face – Massu (Antonio Casale) – he soon catches and disposes of her...




Poison was the cure – two killers pose as medical orderlies but soon reveal their true colours

Solmi puts out an all-point bulletin on Massu and soon manages to apprehend him. An initial interrogation fails to provide much new information, while Massu is then himself murdered in a prison riot clearly engineered by Renzi or his co-conspirators, further establishing the pattern implied by the Italian title: the police accuse, the secret service kills...

This densely-plotted 1975 poliziotto from Sergio Martino fits very much into the same mould as its predecessor, Milano trema - la polizia vuole giustizia /The Violent Professionals, on account of the presence of Luc Merenda in the lead and the same exposure of a wide-reaching conspiracy in which identities, boundaries and issues of guilt and innocence become ever more muddled.


Another otherwise giallo moment rendered poliziotto style


Assassinate the assassin, the trope of the footage or shots of the crime and of the fall of man...


... and the forbidden photographs of a citizen above suspicion...


A car bomb takes out one of Solmi's underlings, but was clearly meant for him

If the filmmaker’s popular / vernacular approach and lack of an obvious left- or right-wing stance prevents them from offering much in the way of analysis, insight or thought-provoking conclusions in the manner of more political counterparts like Francesco Rosi’s Exquisite Cadavers and The Mattei Affair, the overriding state of confusion that reigns throughout the piece can also be argued for as a genuine reflection of the political situation in Italy at the time.

Similarly, if the full scale pitched battle between Solmi’s men and the private army that leads to the identification and apprehension of the mysterious Renzi strains credibility, the reality of CIA sponsored “stay behind” armies in Italy and elsewhere indicates that something similar certainly could have existed, albeit perhaps in a more clandestine, less spectacular fashion.




Despite appearances these are not images from a war movie

Unfortunately the battle sequence and the sundry chases and shoot outs in between plot points come across as competent rather than genuinely inspired when compared to, for example, Castellari’s work.

While Martino earlier proved himself more comfortable at the giallo than Castellari, comparable criticisms might also be levelled at the more investigative and suspense scenes, with a second-hand quality to the identification of Massu via a distinctive piece of jewellery (as previously seen in The Case of the Scorpion’s Tail) or the locked room suicide scenario (as found in The Strange Vice of Signorah Wardh).

The mise-en-scene likewise has that predictability to it, where Martino will endeavour to turn on the style from time to time, in going to the handling camera for instance, but otherwise seems content to just go through the motions; the issue then being that the selfsame obviousness of the dramatic moment is as much undercut as emphasised.

Much the same can be said of Luciano Michelini’s score, which has the right ingredients, but never seems to bring them together into something particularly memorable; in this regard it’s telling that of Michelini’s dozen credits as composer the majority have been for films either directed by Sergio Martino or produced by his brother Luciano.

On the plus side, lead actor Merenda and special guest star Milian are better balanced than they were in Destruction Force, with the latter’s restrained performance sitting better with the former’s typically relaxed, easy-going style.

The ending – complete with dramatic slow-motion to add gravitas – is also surprisingly bold, although one is nevertheless confident that more politically committed naysayers will nevertheless interpret it negatively, as encouraging an attitude of despair about the prospects for changing the system more than as confirmation that the paradigm of the individual hero able to resolve all society's contradictions is now outmoded.

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...