Highway Racer (1977)

Original title: Poliziotti sprint

Palma (Maurizo Merli, confusingly enough without any facial hair) is part of the police unit responsible for all the high-speed chase work the police in Rome apparently get up to. Palma’s a tense macho guy utterly in love with cars (so much so, one would not be surprised to see him having sex with one), as well as with the idea of becoming a big shot cop hero driver like his boss, Tagliaferri (Giancarlo Sbragia), was. The problem is that Palma’s all guts and mouth and no technique, crashing cars with wild abandon without getting his men, driving his long-suffering partner and Tagliaferri insane with his bullshit. Add to this how much of an asshole Palma is to everyone, and it’s a bit of a surprise he’s not already tasked with filling out parking tickets instead of endangering the citizens of Rome.

Despite all the man-shouting between them, Tagliaferri does see the potential of a great driver in Palma, as well as something of his own, younger self. So when Tagliaferri’s old arch enemy, the Nicean (Angelo Infanti) reappears as the head of a gang of bank robbers whose claim to infamy is their insane (and actually pretty clever) getaway driving, the old copper decides to take a chance on Palma. He takes the young man under his wing and tries to turn him into the grown-up man he could be, so that Palma can then go undercover with the Nicean and break things up from the inside.

Because this is very much that sort of movie, Palma, already in macho man love with Tagliaferri, will fall equally hard for the man he is bound to betray.

So yes, Stelvio Massi’s Highway Racer (because Rome is full of highways), is very much a prototype for all of those films about men of violence betraying the other man of violence with whom they are in (platonic, because it’s a hetero movie world) violent men love. I wouldn’t be surprised if Katheryn Bigelow had seen this one some time before she made Point Break. And as we all know, the first Fast and the Furious movie is pretty much a remake of that film that replaces surfboards with cars and therefore feels even more inspired by the film at hand, even though it is further removed from it.

Obviously, this doesn’t mean there really has to be any actual direct influence at all, for the story set-up has been done in many a film in-between (and at least partially before), it’s just that the parallels between the second half of this one and the later American films feel particularly striking to me. Especially since the film at hand does quite a bit of what the first F&F movie does with big American muscle cars with small Italian ones, though of course in a late 70s style. These car stunts, even to someone like me who isn’t really into cars, are pretty damn insane, looking dangerous and exciting, and astonishingly real (because, of course, when this was made, they more or less were), crazy and exciting.

Massi shoots the car stunts to the highest effect too, never missing a beat when it comes to make things more dynamic, and at the same time also keeping the audience perfectly informed of what they are actually supposed to see. So there are no cop-out sequences that only go for wheels on the road and hands on the wheel to keep thing together – dynamic clarity is the name of the game.

That’s not the film’s only strength though, for even though its character set-up is of course a bit of a cliché by now, the script by Gino Capone (an Italian genre movie with a single writer credited, honestly) does really understand how to portray its macho characters and their emotional connections, dropping a little jailhouse cupboard philosophy now and then but spending most of its energy in making the guys larger than life in a believable way. I think it actually helps that the film isn’t looking at these men with a raised eyebrow but takes them and their view on life seriously, though never so seriously it isn’t able to call them assholes when it needs to.

The acting’s just as fine, too. Merli seems rather one note here at first, but he actually sells the transition from baby macho (which ironically seems to be what incels think a man should act like) to actual manly man whose macho swagger is so secure he is actually willing and able to admit doubts and weakness very well indeed. His two father/platonic lover (you decide) figures do put the right work in, too. I found myself especially fond of Sbragia’s performance, because of how easily he suggests he knows all the bullshit mistakes Palma makes from his own experience without ever actually needing to say it.

In short: 5 Donne Per L'Assassino (1974)

aka 5 Women for the Killer

When writer Giorgio Pisani (Francis Matthews) returns home from some (possibly journalism related) travels, he finds his wife has not survived the birth of their first child. Shortly after the burial, Pisani learns that the child can't be his own, for family friend Dr. Lydia Franzi (Pascale Rivault) and his wife had hidden the most horrible of truths - at least that's how the film treats it - from him: his sperm count is so bad, he can't possibly be responsible for anyone's pregnancy.

Soon after that, a brutal series of murders of young women in the early stages of pregnancy begins. All of the victims are connected to Pisani one way or the other, so the nameless cop investigating the case (Howard Ross) obviously begins to suspect the writer.

Were this a more interesting giallo, Pisani would now start an investigation of his own to find the true killer among the good number of other possible suspects - a misogynist prick of a doctor (Giorgio Albertazzi), his wife's step brother, his wife's sleazy brother-brother - but as it stands, neither of our supposed protagonists is going to do much investigating on screen.

And that right there is the main problem I have with Stelvio Massi's 5 Donne Per L'Assassino. While it does feature many a stylishly filmed scene, creatively sleazy murders, and an excellent jazz-based soundtrack by Giorgio Gaslini, that's about all it has going for it.

The characters are boring and flat, and are certainly never doing anything of interest, the script is only interested in the murder scenes but ignores chance after chance to develop any thematic depth even though the film's basic set-up screams for an actual exploration of the different ways its different male characters hate women. Instead, it's all murders and set-ups of obvious red herrings, with little to keep them interesting. It's as if Massi were trying to make a giallo that's closer to a more conventional murder mystery, but forgot to add the actual mystery solving aspect to the film.

Else, there are some of the genre-mandatory jibes against the bourgeoisie, but these I've seen treated with more enthusiasm and effectiveness in dozens of other giallos.

As a whole 5 Donne Per L'Assassino treads the boring middle-ground of the giallo genre, and leaves more involved things to other movies.

 

Technorati-Markierungen: italian movies,in short,giallo,stelvio massi,francis matthews,pascale rivault

In short: Black Cobra (1987)

Original title: Cobra nero

Fashion photographer Elys Trumbo (Eva Grimaldi) witnesses one of the dozen murders a nameless gang of evildoers with an equally nameless leader (Bruno Bilotta) commits per week. The gang isn't amused and at once attempts to kill the accidental witness too, but Elys manages to flee into the protective arms of the police.

Alas, the police is nothing these particular evildoers are afraid of. The very same night, members of the gang attack the hospital where Elys is being taken care of. Fortunately, the chief of police has put maverick cop and professional asshole Robert Malone (Fred Williamson!) on the photographer's case. Malone arrives just in time to do what he does best: slaughtering the bad guys and acting like a douche towards the traumatised woman.

Of course, the hospital shoot-out won't be the last attempt on Elys's life. The poor woman will not even be safe in that most secure of all places the police could put her - Malone's apartment. On the positive side, the photographer has a thing for complete assholes, so there'll be a glorious romance in her and Malone's future if they survive the whole nameless bandit affair first.

There really was no movie made during the 80s too bad for the always hungry Italian rip-off machine to ignore. Case in point is Black Cobra, a film actually ripping off Sylvester Stallone's painful Cobra, of course on a mere fraction of the Hollywood film's budget. But I have to say, if I had to decide between the Stallone vehicle and this film, I'd certainly go with the Italian version, seeing as it features in Fred Williamson the charismatic lead actor the American movie lacks, tortures its audience with fewer crypto-fascist soliloquies and even is in the possession of a sense of humour.

That sense of humour mainly shows in the loving care the film puts into making Williamson's character the most unsympathetic asshole possible (while still making the man look his trademark cool), until he has all the negative character traits of any action hero ever combined, making it completely impossible to take anything he says or does seriously. Williamson seems to have fun with that and applies his considerable powers of self-irony to his role.

As it goes with Williamson vehicles, he is the most entertaining part of his movie. The script goes through the mandatory variations of scenes and elements from Cobra and adds bits and pieces of other cop vigilante movies, without too much care for logic (What exactly are the bad guys trying to do here? Or, for that matter, the police?); there's a female lead without any agency whatsoever; and the bad guys aren't just nameless but also weirdly vague characterised and without anything much memorable about them.

Although there a too few of them for an action film, director Stelvio Massi knows how to shoot mildly exciting action sequences. They're nothing to write home about, especially compared with what a Hong Kong director or someone like Enzo G. Castellari would have done on a comparable budget, but they're clean, have loud noises and people dying, so I'm kinda alright with them, as I am with the whole of the film.

And, truth be told, for a film ripping off Cobra, being "kinda alright" is quite an achievement.

 

Technorati-Markierungen: italian movies,in short,action,stelvio massi,fred williamson,eva grimaldi

In short: Mark Strikes Back (1976)

aka The .44 Specialist (not to be mixed up with The 44 Specialist, also featuring John Saxon and also made in 1976, but in the Philippines by good old Cirio H. Santiago)

Mark Patti (Franco Gasparri) is a small-time undercover cop working for the Italian police. Mark is quite unsatisfied with his position and the fact that he is only able to go after the small fry. It suits him just fine when chance lets him fall in with Olga (Marcella Michelangeli) and Paul (John Steiner), two international terrorists. The anti-terror squad is all too pleased to finally be able to get someone close to two people relatively high in the undefined terrorist organization and Patti is just too happy to finally be of real use.

That is, until he has reason to doubt the motives and methods of his new boss, a certain Altman (John Saxon). At that point, it might just be too late for Mark to change his mind about his job or to just get out alive.

Mark Strikes Back has every possibility to be an excellent film. Stelvio Massi's direction is unobtrusive, yet obviously skilled, the actors (especially Steiner) are doing great work, there's even a fine soundtrack by Stelvio Cipriani to round it all out.

Alas, Dardano Sacchetti's script really lets the whole film down. It all starts out well enough and for about forty-five minutes, the film seems to slowly but surely move into a direction where Eurocrime film and 70s conspiracy thriller meet, until the actual plot is suddenly cut short at the movie's halfway point and replaced by a very Sacchetti-typical episodic drifting from one loosely connected set-piece to the next. Why one would just stop one's plot in the middle of a film, robbing it of every sense of urgency in the process, is beyond me. Sacchetti might well be going for something like "terrorism has no head and more than one reason, so there can be no real throughline" (at least that's what the film more or less states outright), but this sadly ignores the fact that a thriller needs a plot and an audience needs a reason to care about the things that are happening on screen beyond the mere fact that they are in the script.

Thanks to everyone else's contributions, the film stays watchable as a technically excellent accumulation of scenes that probably would make an excellent movie, if someone would just bother to actually connect them.

Technorati-Tags: italian movies,eurocrime,john saxon,john steiner,franco gasparri,stelvio massi,in short