Strategies of Tension, or, Il Brivido Del Proibito the ‘Violent Italy: Italian Crime Films’ retrospective at the 72nd San Sebastián International Film Festival

With an acknowledgement of thanks to Fabrizio Fogliato

On 25 September 1967, a Milan bank-heist went violently, tragically awry: as the escaping robbers exchanged gunfire with police in a high-speed car chase, three innocent “civilians” were shot dead and a dozen more were injured. The gangsters — motivated as much by political as financial aspirations — were captured, arrested and nine months later went on trial.

By this point, Carlo Lizzani’s semi-documentary-style dramatisation of the robbery and its chaotic aftermath, Banditi a Milano (The Violent Four) had already established itself as one of 1968’s major domestic box office hits. Its success changed the face of Italian cinema — the last eight decades of which were engagingly sampled by the 22-title ‘Violent Italy’ retrospective at the 72nd San Sebastian International Film Festival.

The Violent Four proved one of the sidebar’s outstanding highlights, as electric today as it was seminal back then. Proceedings are dominated by the mercurially charismatic Gian Maria Volonté as Marx-admiring ringleader Piero Cavallero, a performance which bridges the generational gap between Cagney and De Niro. Making the most of its widescreen Techniscope frame and edited with barrellingly irresistible, frenetic intensity by Franco Fraticelli — the unheralded virtuoso who later cut the capolavori of both Lina Wertmüller and Dario Argento — The Violent Four (presented at San Sebastian via an excellent 35mm print) was, in Lizzani’s words, “effettivamente un instant movie.”

It was shot in a few weeks around the northern metropolis’s wintry streets, the low sun barely illuminating the chilly haze of smog, and finished in time for a March premiere. Highly serendipitous timing: that month had begun with further big-city bloodshed in the form of spectacularly violent clashes between young militants (left and right, united for what would prove the final time) and cops at Rome University. The ‘Battle of Valle Giulia,’ is perhaps now best remembered for the fact that Pasolini publicly favoured the police since they were the “sons of the peasants and proletariat.”

Yet again, sessantotto emerges as the pivotal juncture of European post-war political, social and cultural history: Valle Giulia is now acknowledged as inaugurating Italy’s notorious “Years of Lead” (Anni di piombo), a bullet-strewn period of severe social unrest that persisted well into the 1980s but peaked in 1978 with the kidnapping and execution of former prime minister Aldo Moro by the leftist Brigate Rosse (Red Brigades).

These years are also seen as exemplifying the strategia della tensione (“strategy of tension”), the process by which such tumult is cynically initiated and/or sustained by the state as a means to increase popular demands for security, thus justifying further repressions. Against such a febrile backdrop, the poliziotteschi flourished. In the early and mid 1970s, dozens of variations would follow in The Violent Four’s wake — none of them matching its bracingly direct impact, its deft juggling of non-linear chronology and overlapping formal modes as it analyses how people from all social strata are drawn to “il brivido del proibito” (the thrill of the forbidden.)

Investigation of a Citizen Above Suspicion

With a tiny handful of classy exceptions — most prominently Elio Petri’s Oscar-winning, Volonté-centric Indagine su un cittadino al di sopra di ogni sospetto (Investigation of a Citizen Above Suspicion, 1970) and Francesco Rosi’s Cadaveri eccellenti (Illustrious Corpses, 1976) — these were scuzzily unpretentious genre exercises, more influenced by American gangster and cop pictures than anything so rarefied as Melvillean French polar.

Propelled by blaring, funk-inflected, horn-heavy scores by the likes of Franco Micalizzi, the De Angelis brothers (aka “Oliver Onions”), Riz Ortolani, Luis Enrique Bacalov and occasionally Ennio Morricone, these films are evocative time-capsules. They are packed to bursting with period detail — the cop-cars are small, boxy, nippy pale-green Alfa Romeo Giulia 1600 Supers — invariably utilising actual, grubby urban locations to evoke social milieux at the lower end of the scale.

Many starred either the volatile Cuban-American-Italian Tomas Milian (always dubbed by Turin native Ferruccio Amendola) or the more stolid, moustachioed Roman beefcake, Maurizio Merli, the sub-genre’s twin titans. Gesso e formaggio, chalk and cheese: the former became synonymous with a live-wire, possibly cocaine-fuelled dynamism; the latter exuded unflappable sang-froid. Ironic then, that whereas Milian died at the ripe age of 84 having worked with Steven Spielberg, Steven Soderbergh and James Gray in the his career’s late twilight, the ripplingly athletic Merli would drop dead of a heart attack on a Rome tennis-court at just 49.

A fresh-faced, clean-cut Milian (who later specialised in hirsute characters much given to rule-bending/breaking) is firmly on the right side of the law for once in The Violent Four. His youthful, cockily articulate police-chief is first encountered in a helicopter swooping over the city’s rapidly-modernising skyline as he chats to a crew of filmmakers — a breezy metafictional conceit which assists Lizzani in his wrongfooting of spectatorial expectation.

An established, seemingly journeyman filmmaker with credits dating back to the early 1950s, Lizzani had already laid the groundwork for The Violent Four with 1966’s true-crime, fresh-from-the-headlines saga Svegliati e uccidi (Wake Up and Die), starring Robert Hoffmann as machine-gun-wielding bank-robber Luciano Lutring and Volonté as the inspector on his trail. 

Lizzani’s only return to the genre after The Violent Four would be Torino nera (Black Torino, 1972), featuring the legendary Bud Spencer in unusually serious mode. Indeed, no director — not even the tirelessly prolific Stelvio Massi — ever specialised solely in poliziotteschi. A world or two away from the Fellinis, Wertmüllers, Viscontis and Bertoluccis fêted on the red carpet film-festival circuit, the busily opportunistic mainstream Italian filmmakers of the 1960s and 1970s tended to shift freely across genres — crime, comedy, “spaghetti” western, horror and lurid giallo murder-mysteries — occasionally combining two or more flavours in a single work.

Among aficionados, a few poliziotteschi-prone auteurs are nevertheless held in particularly high esteem: Quentin Tarantino’s hero Enzo G. Castellari (La polizia incrimina la legge assolve (High Crime, 1973), Il cittadino si ribella (Street Law, 1974), Il grande racket (The Big Racket, 1976)); Fernando Di Leo, specifically his “Milieu trilogy” comprising Milano Calibro 9 (Caliber 9, 1972), La mala ordina (The Italian Connection, 1972) and Il Boss (The Boss, 1973); Umberto Lenzi (Milano odia: la polizia non può sparare (Almost Human, 1974), Roma a mano armata (The Tough Ones, 1976) and Napoli violenta (Violent Naples, 1976.))

When San Sebastian announced the ‘Violent Italy’ retrospective in June 2023 — an unusual double-header press-release, also covering the September 2023 focus on Hiroshi Teshigahara — poliziotteschists anticipated a rare chance to experience such often-overlooked works on the big screen. But when the line-up was actually announced in mid-August 2024, the chronological and thematic scope of the sidebar — curated by Felipe Cabrerizo in collaboration with Quim Casas — was significantly larger than anticipated, even if the actual number of films (22) seemed on the low side for such an ambitious endeavour.¹

A sampling of the “classical” poliziotteschi was duly present, but only via half-a-dozen films: two by Lenzi (Almost Human and The Tough Ones), one by Di Leo (Caliber 9) and precisely zero by Castellari — an inexplicable omission, especially regrettable omission given that the director of the original 1977 The Inglorious Bastards (i.e. Quel maledetto treno blindato) is, almost uniquely among his genre-fixated contemporaries, actually still with us. 

In the Name of the Law

The director most extensively represented in ‘Violent Italy’ turned out to be neither Lenzi nor Di Leo but rather the emphatically “respectable” Pietro Germi, who won Cannes’ top prize in 1965 with Signore & Signori (The Birds, the Bees and the Italians). Attempting to put the Italian crime film into the perspective of shifting social-political backgrounds since the Second World War, Cabrerizo and Casas chose seven works from the 1940s and 1950s, starting with Visconti’s Ossessione (Obsession, 1943), and also included Germi’s In nome della legge (In the Name of the Law, 1949), La città si difende (Four Ways Out, 1951) and Un maledetto imbroglio (The Facts of Murder, 1959) — which he made just before the picture that marked his international breakthrough, Divorzio all’italiana (Divorce Italian Style, 1961.)

Their retro ended up with a somewhat lop-sided chronological spread. The curators included four titles from the 45 years following Moro’s 1978 demise, two dealing squarely with that specific, epochal event: Giuseppe Ferrara’s Il caso Moro (The Moro Affair, 1986, starring Volonté in the title role) and Marco Bellocchio’s Buongiorno, notte (Good Morning, Night, 2003). Cabrerizo and Casas also selected the 2021 director’s cut of Matteo Garrone’s Gomorra (Gomorrah, 2008) — and, somewhat randomly, a fairly “new” picture in the form of Andrea Di Stefano’s L’ultima notte di Amore (Last Night of Amore), only 18 months after its Italian release.

We therefore had a poliziotteschi retrospective that included Andrea Di Stefano, Giuseppe Ferrara and Pasquale Squitieri (via Il prefetto di ferro (The Iron Prefect, 1977)) — but not Enzo G Castellari, Stelvio Massi or Sergio Martino (Morte sospetta di una minorenne (The Suspicious Death of a Minor), 1975.) Che peccato!

Mafioso

But rather than dwell on such lacunae, healthier to celebrate the more unheralded inclusions. The discoveries and surprises of ‘Violent Italy’ were lurking in the eight black-and-white titles predating The Violent Four — even if that octet’s obvious standout was Alberto Lattuada’s widely-acknowledged classic Mafioso (1962). A sui generis blend of light and dark elements, the mainly Sicily-set Mafioso — among its many other merits — superbly showcases the protean talents of Italian cinema’s #1 comedy star Alberto Sordi.

He’s magnetic and majestic here as a super-efficient Milan car-factory manager who takes his wife and daughters back home to visit his family, with consequences that reveal long-dormant layers of his personality — Sordi’s casual brilliance in this taxing role deserves to be as lauded as Peter O’Toole’s work in Lawrence of Arabia (David Lean), from the same year.

Two films of much lower profile were, unusually in a retrospective which generally consisted of DCP projections, shown from 35mm prints: Mario Soldati’s Fuga in Francia (Escape to France, 1948) and Fernando Cerchio’s Il bivio (The Crossroads, 1951). The former is an oblique kind of missing link between Orson Welles’ The Stranger (1946) and Mr Arkadin (1956) — the not-entirely-unsympathetic protagonist is a creepy Fascist war-criminal (played by Folco Lulli) attempting to elude justice by fleeing across the Alps with his young son.

His directorial career already well underway by this point, Germi makes a thespian impact as a migrant worker also seeking a new life on the other side of the border. Newcomer Rosi Mirafiore (who somehow only made two films) is the real find, however; such is her appeal as an ill-fated barmaid that, following her exit from the picture (in a genuinely harrowing scene), it never again quite manages to find proper narrative stride.

The Crossroads, meanwhile, is top-to-bottom a star-vehicle for Raf Vallone — earlier a Coppa Italia-winning footballer for Torino FC, later a Hollywood pin-up. He plays a crook who secures himself a job as a cop in order to help his underground accomplices, only to experience a crisis of conscience. In many ways the embodiment of his home city, Turin, the ruggedly proletarian Vallone here also incarnates Italy itself in a period when the nation was struggling to find a viable modern identity following the dark chaos of the Fascist period.

Like The Crossroads, Germi’s La città si difende is a neo-realist exercise which prefigures the poliziotteschi of the 1960s and 1970s in its preference for grittily urban locations. The unusual structure of the screenplay (credited to Germi, Federico Fellini, Luigi Comencini and Tullio Pinelli) takes a — summarily-presented — heist at a Rome football-stadium merely as a pretext to chronicle and examine the city’s lower social strata via the subsequent peregrinations of the four robbers. Indeed, La città si difende is to Rome as The Violent Four would later be for Milan.

While several poliziotteschi of the “classical” (or rather down-and-dirty) 1968-78 period would take in other cities, all six of the examples selected by Cabrerizo and Casas unfolded in either Rome or Milan — three in each. 

Caliber 9

Di Leo’s Caliber 9 is often held up as the quintessential manifestation of the genre, and indeed exemplifies its recurring preference for bringing together clashing protagonists and starkly contrasting acting-styles. The baldingly crop-headed, fascinatingly inexpressive Gastone Moschin (very much a Jason Statham avant la lettre) is a fresh-from-stir gangster, who may or may not have stashed away the proceeds from the bank-robbery that landed him in jail.

He is relentlessly pestered and persecuted by his former partner-in-crime, played by a magnificently over-the-top Mario Adorf — loquacious of tongue and sporting a generously-pomaded mop of hair.  The plot proceeds through a handful of slam-bang set-pieces to a genuinely berserk and bloody finale in which (among other eyebrow-raising revelations) the true nature of Adorf’s seemingly antagonistic fixation on Moschin becomes surprisingly apparent.

In Lenzi’s Almost Human and The Tough Ones, Milian is granted similarly free rein as he perfects the swaggering excess he would later bestow on numerous lesser enterprises — in the Milan film he is matched against Henry Silva’s granite-faced cop, in the Roman one his unhinged psychopath (“I’m protected by Satan! I’m shitting lead!”) comes up against a sternly reactionary, crotch-kicking Merli. This would be one of only two screen-encounters between the pair, the other being Lenzi’s Il cinico, l’infame, il violento (The Cynic, the Rat and the Fist, 1977.))

Lenzi handles both pictures with unfussily functional aplomb; indeed, he even manages to cheekily interpolate car-chase footage from Almost Human into a similar sequence in The Tough Ones, despite the fact that the pictures are set in completely different cities.

In Sergio Sollima’s generally dour and pedestrian Revolver (1973) the contrasting protagonists are a straight-arrow representative of the law — cop-turned-prison-deputy Oliver Reed — and fashion-plate career-criminal Fabio Testi. When the former’s wife is kidnapped, he must team up with the latter to track her down, only to discover a much wider web of nefariousness reaching into the upper echelons of Italian (and international) business.

Revolver

Indeed, of all poliziotteschi, Revolver is the one most explicit about pointing out how the most serious of “crimes” in post-war Italy are systemic and economic, rather than the headline-grabbing business of bank-heists and so on. Everything begins with the assassination of an industrialist who had to be eliminated because he “betrayed the interests of his class.”

Severely hamstrung by having all his lines dubbed into Italian, Reed has to rely on his bullish physicality as he juggernauts stolidly through proceedings — while free-spirit Testi gets to show off his lithe frame in a series of modish mid-‘70s outfits. The wild-card here is Daniel Beretta as ‘Al Niko,’ a somewhat fey folk-pop chart-topper in the Ed Sheeran mould who turns out to have unexpectedly serious underworld connections.

The Al Niko subplot helps provide the touches of offbeat humour which, in poliziotteschi, can provide crucial counterpoint to the violence, sordidness and bygone-era misogyny that generally take up the bulk of the running-time.

Such levity is largely absent from La polizia ringrazia (Execution Squad, 1972), directed and co-written by ‘Steno’ — a.k.a. Stefano Vanzina, ironically enough best known for his broad comedies. Here there are only occasional moments of dark wit as (prefiguring Magnum Force (Ted Post, 1972)), a shadowy group, frustrated that (as one character puts it) a “democratic system is useless when it comes to crime,” seeks to sort out the capital’s disorder using vigilante tactics: they dump their victims’ bodies in front of anti-litter posters counselling “Rome Is Yours Too! Keep It Clean.” 

Execution Squad

With Adorf in uncharacteristic straight-arrow mode as a high-ranking cop, the picture emerges (despite its considerable box-office success and a major prize at San Sebastián) as an unlikely fit for the veteran, mirth-inclined director.  Steno was on much safer ground with his next outing, Piedone lo sbirro (Flatfoot, 1973), a larkish spoof of the poliziotteschi genre starring Bud Spencer which ended up outgrossing all the movies it parodied.

And while “straight” poliziotteschi would continue to be made for the next half-decade or so, their box-office and cultural impact within Italy steadily declined. After the sobering death of Moro, the public’s preference increasingly shifted to escapist laughs; on the wider scale, Italian domestic product was steadily overshadowed by slicker, bigger-budgeted Hollywood imports. On the big screen at least, crime — Italian-style — no longer paid.

San Sebastián International Film Festival
20 – 28 September 2024
https://www.sansebastianfestival.com

Endnotes