Silent Action (1975)

aka La polizia accusa: il servizio segreto uccide

A small yet strange series of deaths of people working for the Ministry of Defense and the military hits Italy. Since all of the deaths seem to be accidental or suicides, no alarm bells start to ring anywhere. That's a problem, because the deaths are in fact murders and we the viewers the only witnesses.

The Roman cop Solmi (Luc Merenda) is as unsuspecting as anyone else, until he is starting to investigate the death of the private detective Chiarotti. Chiarotti's death is murder all right - his head has been bashed in with a fire poker. It's just all a little strange. Why is a mere detective as rich as Chiarotti was? Solmi soon finds a prostitute (Delia Boccardo) who must have been present when the detective was killed, but she nearly dies in a murder attempt that's made to look like a suicide. She can't tell Solmi much anyway. That Chiarotti was having an argument with a man and was killed by the man is pretty much all she knows. Useful descriptions are not forthcoming.

For DA Mannino (Mel Ferrer), the girl is still the main suspect in the case, whatever Solmi may think about her physical fitness to kill the victim with a few poker strikes and the psychological absurdity of the theory.

The case gets more interesting when a man gets arrested while breaking into Chiarotti's villa and stealing a single hidden piece of tape with the voice of a dead general declining to cooperate with a man named Rienzi. Even more interesting is the fact that the burglar claims to work for the Secret Service.

Solmi diligently asks the Secret Service what's up, but their Captain Sperli (Tomas Milian) denies everything, as spies are wont to do, but is still interested in talking to the burglar and hearing what's on the tape. When Solmi and Sperli get to the tape, it turns out to have been erased.

This is of course not the last time in the film that Solmi's witnesses are killed or kidnapped or someone who must be pretty close to the investigation interferes with it, but once his sense of justice is awakened, Solmi can't be dissuaded to leave the case be.

People know and love Silent Action's director Sergio Martino mostly for his Giallos, but as a working commercial director, he of course did his time in whatever genre was the flavor of the day, how fitting or unfitting his talents might have been.

Silent Action combines the Italian cop movie with the conspiracy thriller arm of the spy movie, both genres Martino's talents are surprisingly fitting for. The director was always an excellent craftsman, using every bit of technique he could afford to keep his films entertaining. If you ask me, the emphasis on "keeping his films entertaining" is the main difference between him and Bava or Argento who were more artfully minded and willing to use their visual talents to push their films in other, more experimental directions not every audience would be able or willing to follow all of the time. While I love both Bava's and Argento's films, I can't say that I blame Martino for "just" trying to make perfectly great genre films.

In the case of Silent Action, Martino was quite successful. After a somewhat slow start, the film picks up tempo until its plot is ticking along at a joyous pace. I read complaints about a certain lack of action in the movie, but that lack of action only exists in comparison with a handful of Italian cop movies that just don't need as much time to build their plot as a conspiracy thriller does and in the minds of people with severe ADD - on planet reality, there is plenty of chases and shoot-outs to admire, and while Martino as an action director is no Enzo G. Castellari, he is still pretty damn good.

"Pretty damn good" is also a fitting description for Luc Merenda's performance. Merenda usually is the Italian cop movie guy people forget when listing their top five actors in the genre (I blame the lack of a moustache, the moustacheless niche already filled by Fabio Testi), but he really is no slouch. His Solvi is a rather interesting variation on the cop movie hero - besides the lack of a moustache, he is less prone to long, reactionary rants about the evils of modern society and the beauty of the police state and shows a certain restraint in the use of unnecessary violence. Why, it even takes an hour until he starts to torture someone, and even then he's downright subtle about it. This of course makes his character surprisingly believable as someone actually interested in justice and not a vigilante as most of the dubious heroes of police movies often are. This time, the cop hero is actually someone to root for, giving the typical 70s conspiracy film ending (and if someone thinks that this counts as a spoiler, I just can't help it) a bit of weight even though the conspiracy itself isn't all that memorable.

All in all, it's a very fine film that balances the need for action and the need for investigation scenes as effortlessly as Martino is able to decide when to use his hand camera and when a long tracking shot.

 

Technorati-Tags: italian movies,luc merenda,sergio martino,cops,conspiracy,reviews,tomas milian

High Crime (1973)

Today on WTF-Film I hold forth on Enzo G. Castellari's epochal High Crime with Franco Nero and admit to certain physical weaknesses when it comes to Italian crime movies.

 

Technorati-Tags: italian movies,cops,franco nero,enzo g. castellari,reviews,action,james whitmore,other places

In short (and ranting): Roma A Mano Armata (1976)

Usually, I as left-wing, pacifist fan of very violent movies can find excuses or creative interpretations to defend those movies in front of myself. Even the notoriously proto-fascist Italian cop movie does not look all that fascist to me. Leave it to Umberto Lenzi to make a film in the genre I find morally repugnant.

Raving, violent psychopath Leonardo Tanzi (Maurizio Merli) is a lucky guy. His police badge is a fine thing to hide behind when he's smashing bones and torturing people. It even affords him a beautiful moral high horse: The evil gangsters you see, are protected by the way too lenient law (you know, the lenience that affords himself to torture and kill people without getting more than a demotion).

He reserves special hatred for the gang of a certain Savelli (Biagio Pelligra), that seems to be lead by the hunchbacked Moretto (Tomas Milian). But Tanzi can't proof anything and the evil, unfair law doesn't allow him to just grab people off the street and incarcerate them forever. What a letdown! Of course his inability to get the gang has nothing to do with the fact we never see Tanzi do any legal and actual police work.

And, you know what? I am much too irritated by the tone of the movie to get deeper into the quagmire it calls its plot. You know how films like this always go, anyway. Just picture the usual with added right-wing ranting and more gangsters who are let on the streets again to do the vilest crimes imaginable.

 

What gets to me most here is the terrible self-righteousness the film exudes. Unlike in other films of this genre, there is not single thing the hero does the movie itself doesn't seem to applaud; I never had the feeling anyone involved in the production even had the slightest thought about the similarity between our so-called hero and the people he is trying to capture.

There's also the problem of Tanzi's character. Most "cops on the edge" get a final and very personal nudge to finally snap. Tanzi is a brutal thug right from the start. The film even includes an attack on his girlfriend that would be quite a nice motive for an escalation in his violent tendencies, unfortunately subtleties of this kind are beyond Lenzi and writer Dardano Sacchetti in this film. Actually, every element to make Tanzi (and the film's morals) more complex is there, Lenzi just seems to have more fun showing us the next atrocity one of those e-vol gangsters commit.

Which leads me to a more technical problem: The plotting is extremely weak, even if you, like me, don't expect all that much coherence from an Italian movie. There's just no dramatic arc to speak of, it's just one damn thing after another with not much more than Tanzi connecting them.

The action is quite great and Merli and Milian are imbuing the little they have to do with a lot of intensity, but really, what's the use?

 

Technorati-Tags: italian movies,action,cops,umberto lenzi,maurizio merli,tomas milian