Ian Jane runs the movie and music review site Rock! Shock! Pop!, contributes regularly to DVD Talk and in the past has written extensively for AV Maniacs and provided liner notes for Synapse Films, Mondo Macabro and Media Blasters. He’s currently hard at work co-writing his first book to be published in 2012. He lives in New York City with his pretty and surprisingly tolerant wife but was born and raised in Canada and still proudly clings to his citizenship.
5. Revolver – 1973 / Director: Sergio Sollima
Known in America as Blood in the Streets, Sergio Sollima’s Revolver is an unsung classic of the European crime genre with great sets, and wonderful performances. The late, great Oliver Reed plays Vito Capriani, a prison warden in Rome with a penchant for violence. When his wife Anna (Agostina Belli) is kidnapped, her abductors demand that Vito release one of his prisoners, Milo Ruiz (Fabio Testi). If he refuses, they’ll kill her. When Vito allows Milo to escape, the pair becomes tangled up in a messy conspiracy that takes them across the border to Paris where they try and figure out who’s kidnapped Anna and why. It turns out that Vito is the only one who can pin the murder of an important businessman on the right culprit, and the ones behind it all will kill anyone they have to in order to make sure that Milo keeps his mouth shut forever. Featuring Reed in one of his most manic roles (he’s going to tear this city apart one punk at a time!) and during a particularly volatile time in his life due to his increasing dependency on alcohol, you really do get the impression that Reed is completely unhinged here and this definitely adds to the tension. The script will keep you interested throughout and while it might not fly at the fast pace of some of its genre counterparts, it is a very effective film in regards to how it builds tension and how it plays its two central characters off of one another. Testi is handsome and dashing and charming but it’s Reed who owns this one and who earns the film ‘classic’ status within the hallowed halls of Eurocrime infamy.
4. Convoy Busters (Un poliziotto scomodo) – 1978 / Director Stelvio Massi
In Massi’s 1978 action extravaganza, Maurizio ‘King of the Italian Bitch Slap!’ Merli plays inspector Olmi, a man who spends his days and nights upholding justice in the homicide department on the violent streets of Rome. When he lands in some hot water after getting too rough with a suspect and then later flies around in a helicopter shooting down machine gun toting cop killers with his six-shooter the brass decides to get rid of him by sending him to work on the emergency squad where his violent tactics might prove to be more useful. It all comes to a head when Olmi accidently kills an innocent man – carrying the weight of the world on his shoulders, Olmi winds up taking a job at a precinct in a small town on the coast of Italy where he hooks up with a pretty schoolteacher named Anna (Olga Karlatos who will always be remembered for Zombie!). While he an Anna are out walking along the pier, one of the fisherman gives them some free fish and it’s then that Olmi realizes something is amiss. Not only is he a top notch cop but he’s also apparently pretty expert in the regional habits of fish as he notices that one of the fish that’s on display is not native to the Adriatic Sea. Never the less, he pays it no mind until he lays down to watch a porno with Anna and it hits him like a ton of bricks – the fisherman are running a gun smuggling ring! Olmi bursts into action and grabs his pistol proving that old habits die hard as he chases down the evil fisherman and makes them pay for breaking the law in his town. Merli made a lot of these movies and they’re all pretty much solid gold, but Convoy Busters is just so off the rails loopy that it will always hold a special place in this writer’s heart. Merli really is at his eternally cool slap-happy best here, really dishing it out to any no good punk who crosses his path, rules be damned. Massi never quite achieves the same level of thick, palpable tension that some of his compatriots were able to bring to the table but the movie goes by at a great pace and any time it seems like the plot is going to slow down, Merli will slap the shit out of some grease-ball and before you know it, all is well with the world again.
3. Almost Human (Milano odia: la polizia non può sparare) – 1974 / Director: Umberto Lenzi
Umberto Lenzi’s 1974 police thriller begins with a remarkably tense bank robbery. The bandits get out of the car, masked, and enter the bank while the getaway car driver, mask-less, gets harassed by a cop for parking in a no parking zone. When the cop asks to see his license, the driver shoots the cop in cold blood forcing the thieves to high tail it out of there pronto before the heat really comes down on them. This is our introduction to Giulio Sacchi (Tomas Milian), the getaway car driver and an all around low life thug with no regard for human life at all, save for his own, and the rest of the movie follows his journey through the underworld as he’s kicked out of the gang and works on a comeback plan with two accomplices – all the while pursued by an obsessive cop named Walter Grandi (Henry Silva). You can’t not have a Silva movie in your top five list, right? It’s okay if others put his work with Di Leo over this one, but for this writer’s money Almost Human is his defining Eurocrime movie simply because he’s cast so perfectly and appears so committed to his role here. He’s been cooler in other films, no doubt, but when he curses out Milian’s rat bastard Sacchi at the end of the movie, you’ve never seen him more convincing. Lenzi’s contributions to the genre are all great, and it’s tough to narrow it down to just one pick but this is the one that gets more replay around these parts than his other films.
2. Caliber 9 (Milan Calibro 9) – 1972 / Director: Fernando Di Leo
This one might be an obvious choice but let’s face it, Di Leo was so good in the Eurocrime genre that he really has to be on this list. Some might choose the director’s own La Mala Ordina or maybe Il Boss or Killers Vs. Killers over this one but Caliber 9 earns the number two spot on this for one reason – Mario Adorf! Cast against type and given the rare opportunity to play a straight dramatic role over the comedic characters he was known for, he really steals the show out from under more traditional tough guy Gastone Moschin. The plot revolves a man named Ugo Piazza (Gastone Moschin) who has just been released from prison. He soon meets up with his former employer, Americano (Lionel Stander) after some toughs kidnap him and beat him severely. Their motive? Ugo hid a sizeable amount of money from a job he did before he went away for a stint in the pen and Americano wants it. Ugo’s a tough guy, however, and he’s not going to crack no matter how many times they might smack him around. Complicating matters further is the fact that the cops figure Ugo’s got the money too, and they’d also like a piece of it. The only people he has on his side is a sadistic crook named Rocco (this is where Adorf comes in!) and his foxy girlfriend, a stripper named Nelly (Barbara Bouchet), but can he even trust them? Chock full of tough talking guys, sneaky criminals types and sexy women, this one holds up better than a bottle of aged J&B. Di Leo’s work here is super tight, pulling from his appreciation of French and American crime noir and giving it a distinctly Italian spin.
1. The Big Racket (Il Grande Racket) – 1976 / Director: Enzo G. Castellari
Castellari gets a lot of love in this genre but none of it is undeserved. While there are plenty who will no doubt disagree with this choice and a lot of fans will put the director’s own High Crime over this one, The Big Racket is, in this writer’s opinion, a perfect example of everything that makes these movies so much damn fun in the first place. In this film, Fabio Testi plays a police officer named Nico Palmieri who gets involved in trying to break up a protection racket run by some hoods in a small Italian town. They’ve been going around extorting insane amounts of money from the local businessmen using the all too real threat of sadistic violence against them should they not pay up. Of course, the crooks aren’t happy about this, and when Nico is kicked off the police force he finds himself having to team up with some of the local citizens to clean up the streets. Fast paced, violent and containing one of the coolest car stunt scenes in the history of motion pictures, The Big Racket does not disappoint. Testi might be a pretty boy to some but he proves here he can play ‘tough guy’ with the best of them and Castellari’s direction has rarely been tighter. A perfect mix of both style and substance, this is one you’ll go back to on a regular basis and a sterling highlight from a director who really proved himself in this genre.
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danke Rolande!