Sergio Corbucci's COMPANEROS (Vamos a matar..., 1970)

Companeros is a thematic remake of Sergio Corbucci's Il Mercenario, with Franco Nero in a similar role as an archetypal foreign expert -- Polish before, he's a Swede now -- and Jack Palance as an even more eccentric antagonist: a Scottish (I think) pot smoker and bird fancier with an artificial hand. Added to the mix in place of Mercenario's Tony Musante is Tomas Milian, as much a spaghetti-western stalwart as Nero, as the archetypal primitive bandit. Corbucci gives him a Che Guevara look, complete with beret, but Milian's Vasco is no ideologue, but the usual self-interested, ignorant brute who almost by accident becomes an officer in the insurgent army of the retroactively regrettably named General Mongo (Jose Modalo). Mongo wears a fiery red tunic but is no leftist. His is one of at least two rival forces battling the Porfirio Diaz government in Mexico circa 1910. His main rival, for this movie's purposes, is the intellectual Professor Xantos (Fernando Rey), who has built a mass movement despite his personal nonviolence. Xantos was naive enough to seek support in the U.S., where he remains an involuntary guest as the story opens. The Americans are willing to support him against Diaz and Mongo, but only if he agrees to grant oil concessions to U.S. firms. While the Americans work on him, Mongo has taken a town from his followers. Xantos's treasury is inside a safe, but only he knows the combination. If Mongo is to pay the Swede for his boxcar full of weapons and explosives (disguised as a quarantined car), he needs the Swede and Vasco to cross the border and break his rival out of captivity. Once he has the information he needs, Mongo plans to put Xantos on trial and execute him.

For his natty attire the Swede (Franco Nero, above) earns the nickname "Penguin" from Vasco (Tomas Milian, below) who's never been warned about drinking while shooting.

This is a more broadly comical and less pictorially ambitious film than Il Mercenario, but Corbucci and cinematographer Alexander Ulloa still put together an attractive picture. Like most of the foreign expert/primitive bandit buddy films from Italy, Companeros is still a consciousness-raising exercise, but it shows characters changing in different ways. In the most predictable scenario, Vasco evolves from one of Mongo's goons to a supporter of Xantos, taking the side of his sometime girlfriend (Iris Berben) whom he transforms from long-haired beauty to pixie revolutionary by hacking off most of her hair after finding her in bed with the Swede. The native usually gets the girl in these pictures, while the foreign expert either dies (sometimes deservingly) or gains revolutionary consciousness himself. Sometimes his new loyalty is just a matter of friendship, and that seems partly the case with Nero here, despite the impending duel with Vasco that serves as a framing device for the Italian edition of the film. Xantos himself evolves during the picture, finally abandoning his implausible insistence (given the situation) on non-violence when he's in a no-alternative position to rescue the good guys from Palance. Given the time and the likely audiences, non-violence was never going to get far in spaghetti westerns.

Xantos (Fernando Rey, above) hopes to convince you of the justice of his cause, while Mongo (Jose Modalo, below) would just as soon shoot you as look at you.

As the new element in the Corbucci scheme, Milian makes the best impression. Even playing an ignorant brute as he often does -- Vasco starts a gunfight when he mistakes the flash of a camera for an attack -- the Cuban actor always manages to convey that his character's mind is working on some level. Nero isn't exactly challenged by his role but at least he seems to enjoy it, while Palance is in his own special place as an almost superfluous and certainly gratuitous villain.

Let's leave Jack Palance (above) alone with his bird and his bliss while acknowledging Iris Berben (below) and her ambivalent band of rebels.

For a Corbucci film, Companeros has little obvious influence on Django Unchained, Quentin Tarantino's Corbucci homage, apart from a humorous tone that was also present, in a more moderate degree, in the more influential Mercenario. If anything, Companeros is Corbucci's homage to himself -- Vasco gets to drag a coffin around Django-style briefly -- or to Mercenario specifically. Its derivative nature keeps it from the top rank of Corbucci's westerns, but on its own terms it's an entertaining adventure that could be enjoyed easily enough by people who've never heard of the director or his earlier work.

SYNDICATE SADISTS (Il giustiziere sfida la citta', 1975)

The way Umberto Lenzi tells it, Tomas Milian came back from a trip to the U.S. raving about a book he'd bought at an airport to read on the flight back to Italy. The book was David Morrell's First Blood, and Milian thought that the novel's antihero, the alienated Vietnam veteran John Rambo, would be a great part for him. Fat chance of Lenzi getting the rights, of course, but couldn't Milian play a character like Rambo in his next film for the director? Couldn't he even call the man Rambo? That he could do, and so Milian is just plain Rambo, with no first name that I can recall hearing, in Lenzi's Giustiziere sfida la citta' -- "The Executioner vs. the City" according to Bing Translation. Lenzi says that he wanted to call it Rambo vs. the City but got rebuffed by the distributor because "rambo" was a nonsense word in Italy and could never sell a movie. Lenzi tells the story with some hindsight, of course, but he also relates that Milian wanted to do the film to improve his image after having played his ultimate criminal grotesque in the director's Almost Human earlier in 1975. The star's desire to play a good guy doesn't sit well with his desire to evoke the irreconcilable Rambo of Morrell's novel, as opposed to the redeemable Rambo of subsequent Sylvester Stallone movies.

Who is that masked man?

How much of the "real" Rambo is in Milian's Rambo? Lenzi's protagonist is a loner and a drifter who apparently has been carrying on a personal war on crime that had taken him to Marseilles before he arrives in Milan in the movie. The look seems right, though Milian's overall scruffiness seems more to anticipate feral cops like Mick Belker on the Hill Street Blues TV show. He doesn't care to work with others, rebuffing his buddy's invitation to join him in a new private police force (a sign identifies it as "Mondiapol"), but will lend a hand when the chips are down. This Rambo doesn't like to "grow moss" in one place, but that makes him as much like the wandering heroes of Westerns (or peplums) as it makes him a Rambo redux. In Milan's career, his Rambo looks most like a dry run for his more lighthearted Nico Giraldi character in Cop in Blue Jeans and its sequels.

Test your might -- fight!

If Giustiziere is a lesser Lenzi cop movie compared to such genre highpoints as Almost Human and Violent Naples (the latter featuring another prime Milian grotesque) it may be because director and star were trying to do too much at once. On top of polishing Milian's image and allowing him to riff on Rambo, Lenzi and writer Vincenzo Mannino are playing the old Red Harvest game, following in the foosteps of Hammett, Kurosawa and Leone by having their protagonist play two crime families against each other. Rambo's pal in the private police force is trying to solve the kidnapping of a rich man's son, for whom the perps want 2,000,000,000 lira ransom. After his buddy gets killed -- a failed pursuit ends with his skull getting smashed on a rock -- Rambo's revenge (as the film would get retitled in some places) consists of goading a rival crime clan to muscle in on the kidnappers. This brings him into contact with Paterno, an aging boss whose path last crossed with Rambo's in Marseille. He'd love to destroy Rambo, but feels incapable himself -- it's a secret that he's going blind -- and fears that his impetuous son will only get killed trying. We should see an old lion making a last stand, but what we get is an alarmingly decrepit Joseph Cotten, far from the days of his Forties stardom in Hollywood. He wears a huge pair of glasses most of the time -- there's a plot reason but you can't help thinking it's all the better to read cue cards with -- and his voice is slow and tremulous as he speaks his lines. Some of his line readings are robotic, as if he doesn't understand what he's saying or what's going on in the picture. He may have been sick, or drunk, or both, but it's a demoralizing sight that makes it hard to enjoy the picture.

Cotten aside, Giustiziere lacks the force and flash of Lenzi's best work in the genre. While we might expect a Rambo type to become a furious avenger, especially after his girlfriend is beaten to death, Milian seems too committed to being a good guy to give his part the power it needs. Nor is Lenzi in top form; most of what's good here he's done better elsewhere. For what it's worth, the film doesn't come close to living up to its American title. The U.S. poster and DVD box art show a bald fellow applying a blowtorch to a chained couple. The film itself has the chained couple but no baldy with a blowtorch. In the actual scene, Rambo's idea of torture, after having cuffed them together across a bathroom pipe, is to take a leak in front of them and throw the cuff key in the unflushed toilet.

The shot above is more suggestive than the scene itself;

the scene below is more violent.

It may be bad form to express disappointment over this, but violence and cruelty are part of the genre and any given film looks tepid without it. Worse still, keeping track of the kidnapped kid grows tiresome quickly -- as Lenzi and Mannino must have realized themselves in giving Rambo an extra revenge incentive. The American edition is apparently an incomplete translation of the Italian original, but I suspect that the full film won't make a much better impression. You might want to try Syndicate Sadists as your first Lenzi cop picture before watching the stronger stuff, but if you want to watch just one to see what the genre's about, it should be something else.

YOUNG, VIOLENT, DANGEROUS (Liberi, Armati, Pericolosi, 1976)

Romolo Guerrieri's film from a screenplay by Fernando di Leo is a juvenile-delinquent action picture with a mystery at its heart. They mystery is why? Why do three relatively well-off young men go on a nihilistic robbery and thrill-kill spree in Milan? What gives the film an extra edge is the suggestion that their motives are unfathomable. The girlfriend of one of the kids, an informant turned diffident hostage, rages at a police investigator (Tomas Milian) who wants to know the answer. He'd rather kill them than find out, she protests, because neither he nor society as a whole really wants to know the truth. The cop wants to blame the boys' neglectful parents, but they blow off his chiding. "You're living in another world," they tell him -- but the truth seems to be that the three kids are. Luis, Blondie and Joe denounce themselves without an authority to hear them with their constant invocations -- most of these come from Joe, the craziest of the three -- of commercial slogans and movie titles. Di Leo name-checks at least two of his own past works, his screenplay for A Fistful of Dollars and his directorial effort La Mala Ordina (aka Manhunt or The Italian Connection) -- and it should be noted in this context that "Joe" and "Blondie" are two names for the "Man With No Name."

Products of a cacophanous pop culture, why shouldn't their motives be incoherent? Why else rob a bank and toss a lot of lira out your car windows as you drive through a public marketplace? Why else hook up with another gang to rob a grocery store, only to turn on your new partners and mow them down inside? "Why not?" suggests itself, and that may have to do, because the boys probably don't understand themselves. The girl, Lea (Eleonora Georgi) finally guesses that some subliminal gay feeling between her boyfriend Luis, aka Luigi (Max Delys) and ringleader Mario, aka Blondie (Stefano Patrizi) has something to do with it. But worse than that in her opinion, the boys are already dead inside, and Blondie is "worse than dead." Blondie himself has a hard time figuring out Luigi, the least violent of the three. "You come to destroy the world but you won't run a red light!" he tells his friend. Why does Luigi run with the other two, the more obvious and hopeless mad dogs? Why does Eleonora follow along so passively, as much as she's repelled by the escalating violence, until Luigi finally has to deny her entry into their car before their last ride? It's too easy for juvenile-delinquent films to answer these questions and promise resolution. But unless you take the gay angle more seriously than the filmmakers themselves probably do, you're left with no satisfaction of enlightenment once this film is done.

Oh great, a gun to my head!

No one would mistake two kids screwing in a field for wanted criminals.

By this point in the picture there are fewer opportunities for jokey captions.

But that's okay if you wanted to see a hard-hitting Italian crime movie, because Guerrieri delivers the bloody goods with picturesque panache. Milan is a great place to stage car chases -- with Carlo Lizzani's Bandits in Milan offering the best example -- and Guerrieri makes the most of his locations. He stages decent gunplay on foot as well. Cinematographer Erico Menczer does screencappers like me a favor by keeping characters in focus in the midst of rapid, rushing action -- it certainly helps that the transfer on the Raro Video DVD is crisp and vivid.

Above, an auto graveyard becomes a human graveyard.

Below, Italian police dogs are not playing!

The four young actors in the lead roles capture the desperate inscrutability of their situation that I presume the writer and director intended. Benjamin Lev as Joe goes over the top a bit, but it's not as if we've never seen creeps like him maniacally calling out catchphrases and laughing like jackasses at death. Georgi, Delys and Patrizi need no excuses for their work. Despite the prominence of crime-cinema stalwart Milian on the Raro box cover, Liberi, Armati, Pericolosi (literally, "Free, Armed and Dangerous") is no standard tough-cop movie, as some viewers may discover to their chagrin. It's the sort of film that ends with the cops shrugging in frustration at the futility of their work.

Milian's detective won't learn the answers to the questions he's asking, and neither will the perpetrators learn the truth about themselves, much less face up to it. Whether we can figure it out for ourselves is open to question. We'll get our kicks from the violence or we'll despair for the rootless, hopeless kids, since this film is smartly designed from a commercial standpoint to please different audiences. It won't please everyone and it's definitely open to the charge of exploiting what it denounces, but I think it anticipates and incorporates that criticism by making the kids pop-culture puppets. It's not necessarily a classic of JD cinema, but there's more here than may meet the eye at first glance.

FACE TO FACE (Faccia a faccia, 1967)

Often ranked among the top spaghetti westerns, Sergio Sollima's second attempt at the genre is a character-driven and action-packed reflection on the mutuality of influence and the ironic ways in which seemingly diametrically opposed personalities change each other. Boasting superior production values and location photography and the ultimate mark of quality -- an Ennio Morricone score, Faccia a faccia pits two already-proven spaghetti stars against each other: Gian Maria Volonte (Sergio Leone's "Dollars" films) and Tomas Milian (The Bounty Killer, Sollima's Big Gundown). Volonte is Brad Fletcher, a New England college professor ordered west by his doctor for health reasons. Milian is Beauregard Bennett, a notorious and newly-captured bandit who becomes the object of Fletcher's compassion. In short order, Fletcher becomes Bennett's hostage and human shield during a daring escape. The intellectual talks Bennett out of killing him, but proves too squeamish to help the outlaw remove a bullet he took in flight. The two men find each other almost equally intriguing, though this is no bromance by any means.

Instead, Face to Face is reminiscent partly of Lawrence of Arabia, and partly of Delmer Daves's Cowboy. The Lawrence influence is obvious in Sollima's desert locations and the basic storyline of an intellectual outsider who teaches the natives -- outlaws, not Indians -- to be more effective fighters. As Fletcher grows more impressed with Bennett's courage and strength, he begins to see the outlaw life as a form of virile self-realization, and he makes himself into a criminal mastermind. The Cowboy influence will be less apparent because Daves's film is less well known. In short, Jack Lemmon's hotel clerk falls under the spell of Glenn Ford's trail boss and joins Ford on a cattle drive, during which he becomes disillusioned when Ford fails to live up to his romantic ideas of cowboy life, and eventually becomes a pitiless hardcase in embittered emulation of his role model. In both Cowboy and Lawrence, the outsider becomes hardened and even brutalized by experience to an extent that alarms the experienced natives. Just as, in Cowboy, the Ford character recognizes his own faults in Lemmon's exaggerated form, so Milian's bandit experiences a kind of intellectual awakening when exposed to the professor's learning and initial scruples, followed by a moral awakening as he sees the extent of Fletcher's corruption and ruthlessness, and its consequences for his friends.

The different stages of the doomed friendship of Beauregard Bennett (Tomas Milian, top left) and Brad Fletcher (Gian Maria Volonte, top right) in Face to Face.

Unlike in Lawrence, the outsider brings unmitigated disaster to his new friends, and unlike in Cowboy, reconciliation between the protagonists becomes impossible. Fletcher and Bennett hole up in the almost utopian multicultural community of Puerta del Fuego, which becomes a base for their banditry. When Fletcher plots a major bank robbery that turns into a bloodbath in part because Bennett finds himself unwilling to kill a child who recognizes him as an outlaw, a posse forms to destroy Puerta del Fuego and drive its people into the desert. Complicating things further is a righteous traitor in their midst: Charlie Siringo (William Berger) -- a rare spaghetti character based on a real person -- who plays a bandit but is actually a Pinkerton detective. He completes the classic spaghetti triangle, and the film climaxes with a threeway confrontation after a battle with the posse. Should a helpless Siringo be killed? If not, what does Siringo owe to his savior, and what does he owe to the law?

I'm inclined to agree with the high ranking generally given Face to Face after one viewing because, in its focus on character development and moral choices, it's more like an American western from the classic period of the 1950s, the high point of the genre overall, than the often cartoonishly amoral generality of spaghetti westerns. At the same time, Sollima and his cinematographers invest the picture with all the visual dynamism and violent energy that Italy contributed to the western genre, while his cast of spaghetti stalwarts, including Berger, all seem near the top of their game. There's a certain universality to the story that transcends the American period setting and the Italian aesthetic preoccupations, so that people who aren't keen on spaghettis in general should find this one easy to appreciate. I don't believe it's ever been released officially on DVD in the U.S., but you can see it for free -- in a single uninterrupted widescreen installment -- on YouTube. Face to Face deserves better, but for now that will do.

BANDITS IN MILAN (The Violent Four, 1968)

A young man walks past a bank. Through the window, he sees what looks like a robbery in progress. The first thing he asks the man standing in front is, "Is it a movie?" "Yeah," the other guy answers, "those guns are empty." We know better; the robbery is real and this guy is a lookout for the robbers. The kid asks him, "Can I stand here and watch?" The lookout shoos him away, and the kid sulks, "Oh, I had someplace to go, anyway."

Like I said, we knew better -- or did we? Our confusion isn't necessarily a credit to the tricky structure of Carlo Lizzani's docudrama, which comes on early more like a mockumentary, or a mock mondo, based on an actual September 1967 bank robbery and police chase that left several Milanese citizens wounded and two dead.

September 26, 1967.

The film opens at the end of a car chase, with a mob threatening to lynch a man pulled from a car and the police, led by Commissario Bassevi (a clean-cut Tomas Milian) intervening to save him. Inside a squad car, Bassevi interrogates his man, demanding to know the names of his accomplices. But from here the film digresses, following a rhetorical question asking how things had gotten so out of control in Milan that the events of September 1967 could have taken place. Bassevi becomes a narrator, and is shown directing or supervising scenes that our original narrator has identified as recreations of actual crimes for the purpose of illustration. We are reminded repeatedly that we are not watching real events, and I think Lizzani meant us to remember that when the kid shows up outside the Banco di Napoli.

The long, disorienting digression takes us into mondo or pop-art territory. The subject is mob infiltration and intimidation of nightclubs, and we're shown a protection racket horning in on a club owner who already pays off another gang. He's warned to play ball with the new people, and when he hesitates, Lizzani cuts to clippings from Batman comics, including their infamous onomatopoeia, before cutting back to show the owner's office wrecked. From there we segue to the story of an aspiring model exploited and eventually set on fire by the mob.

While all this is going on, we learn, Piero Cavallero (Gian Maria Volonte), an ex-leftist who's turned from Communism to crime after his expulsion from the party, is assembling a crack robbery gang. Thinking himself a kind of guerrilla general, Piero's strategy is to stretch police resources thin by hitting a series of banks in a single day in rapid succession. He envisions the Banco di Napoli robbery as his last big score in Milan, but it's one bank too many. Bystanders identify the license plate of the getaway car and the chase is on.

Gian Maria Volonte vs. Tomas Milian on the streets of Milan.

The chase is epic. Lizzani seems to have had the run of the city to film it. Piero turns mad dog, blasting away at cops and civilians alike, hoping to create distractions and obstacles by hitting the latter. Hoping to get out of town, he changes his mind once he realizes that Bassevi won't have his men fire within city limits. He exploits the cops' fear of hurting civilians, having no such scruple himself, and the chase continues. Even in the truncated fullscreen version available for streaming on Netflix, it's pretty stupendous. It isn't a collection of stunts but a sustained race against an insane man as Volonte (best remembered in the U.S. for his villainous roles in Sergio Leone's Dollars films) and his men hurtle down streets blasting away at all and sundry. In the prologue, Lizzani had shown us Piero's victims. During the chase, he reintroduces us to them as they get up in the morning and go about their daily routines, each appearance a milestone of irreversible doom. You're rooting for Bassevi to somehow ride down the bad guys, but you know (and the original Italian audience knew better) that it can't end until all the victims are accounted for. The chase is by far the highlight of an otherwise muddled movie.

History forces Lizzani into anticlimax. While future Italian cop films would have scripted an appropriately violent end to Piero's gang, Bandits sticks to the facts. All of the robbers are taken alive, Piero and his last accomplice readily surrendering when cornered in a small town barn. The film ends with Piero lording it over the media as he's booked, boasting of his generalship and cynically downplaying his killings compared to Vietnam, while the accomplice sullenly denounces Piero to anyone who'll listen. That's it. No moral, no catharsis, no closure. Just the facts -- if you can believe what you see on film.

Lizzani began his career and has apparently finished it (as of 2008) as a documentarian, so the docudrama approach, the mockumondo elements notwithstanding, may be a matter of personal style. The mondo influence (down to Riz Ortolani's score) shouldn't be underrated, since it probably explains why the film doesn't seem to have a dramatic point, and why such a film would have been made in 1968 Italy. Italian audiences were accustomed to the enhanced actuality approach of mondo movies, so Bandits probably didn't seem as strange to them as it must have seemed to most Americans when Paramount released it in the U.S. as The Violent Four. Lizzani also has roots in neorealism as an assistant to (and later biographer of) Roberto Rossellini, and his apparent commitment to urban verisimilitude serves him well in the crowd and chase scenes. But Bandits ends up an odd, unassimilated hybrid of styles without the real thematic payoff all the establishing stuff about recreating crime with cops in control seems to be pointing at. Despite that, Italian crime-film fans should definitely check out this precursor to the Seventies cop-film cycle for the big chase scene, Volonte's voluble villainy and Milian's understated authority as the commisario. But they should probably try to find it in a format that does Lizzani's vision real justice.

THE BOUNTY KILLER (El Precio de un hombre, 1967)

Directed by Eugenio Martin, perhaps best known for the immortal Horror Express, this adaptation of a western novel is a milestone in the spaghetti/paella western genre as the first appearance in said genre of the redoubtable Tomas Milian, here playing the villain in much the manner he employed in the police films of Umberto Lenzi and others during the 1970s. El Precio de un hombre (released in the U.S. in 1968 as The Ugly Ones) is also a textbook example of some of the qualities that set the Euro westerns apart from their immediate American predecessors, the "adult" westerns of the 1950s. The Bounty Killer is out to debunk the myth of the noble outlaw, the "social bandit" of the Jesse James archetype. James is cited by some of the characters in Martin's film as an example of the sort of misunderstood criminal Jose Gomez (Milian) is. Those characters are the people of a very small town where Gomez grew up as the playmate of the now-beautiful Eden (Halina Zalewska aka Ella Karin), who has aided him in an escape from the law that turned into a massacre. They remember when Jose was a genuine victim of unfair circumstances, and they defend him, argumentatively and literally, against the title bounty hunter, Luke Chilson (the late Richard Wyler). Chilson warns them that the Jose they knew is long gone, replaced by a vicious, cold-blooded killer. They pay a high price for failing to heed his warning.

Richard Wyler is The Bounty Killer. Tomas Milian is the killer bounty.

Fifties Westerns were distinctive in their time for rejecting the white hat/black hat dichotomy of B films and singing cowboy vehicles in favor of ambiguous antiheroes and charismatic, nearly sympathetic antagonists. The idea often was that only a fine line of ethics separated a Jimmy Stewart or Randolph Scott, to take the best examples, from their various antagonists. What made a villain was a certain ruthlessness, a readiness to take steps the heroes wouldn't, but that ruthlessness didn't seem to make those men evil. In a way, spaghetti westerns brought evil back into the picture without restoring the good. The way they brought back evil was by enhancing the villains' cruelty, the pleasure they took in tormenting victims. These are the qualities his erstwhile friends discover in Jose Gomez once they make the mistake of helping him defeat Luke Chilson.

Jose seems to defer to their sentiment by refusing to kill Chilson, but that reprieve only gives him ample time to torture his enemy. Meanwhile, his gang converges on the village as a new base of operations. Requiring secrecy, they murder a young man, no friend of Chilson, who decides to leave town. Needing funds, they finally decide to loot the place, while Jose mockingly promises his victims that he'll pay them back after robbing a bank in Mexico. By then, fortunately, Eden has wised up enough to free Chilson at night so the bounty killer can come storming back in to annihilate the Gomez gang, with belated help from the community.

Milian torments Wyler until Halina Zalewska can't stands no more

Wyler, a former Hollywood contract player working in Europe under another name, is a living license for Milian to steal the film. Director Martin lets Milian rip as the Cuban-born onetime glamor boy works himself into the grotesque mode he'd perfect in Lenzi's cop films. He keeps his handsome looks, the better to be seductive with Eden, but makes a beast of himself with drunkenness and depravity. Martin also indulges him with a remarkable death scene, giving Milian a huge close-up as he breathes his last into the dirt, setting the dust aswirl with every gasp.

Judging from Videoasia's halfway decent widescreen copy of the film (apparently taken from a Spanish DVD with a English dub option) in its The Fast, the Saved and the Damned collection, Bounty Killer is well photographed in picturesque (albeit often un-American looking) locations. Stelvio Cipriani contributes an erratic score that has a little too much pop-art flavor for my taste but is often effective anyway. I shouldn't overstate the cruelty of this film in terms of violence; it doesn't really go in for gore, but pushes the idea of Jose's cruelty to the forefront of our attention. Audiences in Italy, Spain and beyond clearly responded to spaghetti cruelty. Maybe many of them still felt something like the exploitative cruelty shown in El Precio in their daily lives. Whether they did or not, they seemed to have little patience for the fine but crucial distinctions drawn in American westerns of the period. The more I see Fifties westerns, the more things seem missing in the spaghettis, but the Italians and Spaniards brought new things to the table, including a sensationalistic visual sense, that give their westerns distinctive qualities that make movies like The Bounty Killer still worth seeing.

Here's an Ugly Ones trailer from United Artists, uploaded to YouTube by SWDBTrailer:

EMERGENCY SQUAD (Squadra Volante, 1974)

Stelvio Massi's film must have set the template for star Tomas Milian's later series of "Squadra" films starting with The Cop in Blue Jeans in which he plays a tough, sardonic slob of a lawman. This one has more of a sting to it, a more ambiguous conclusion than many of Italy's more manichean cop films. It's a showdown between Milian's widower Inspector Ravelli and Gastone Moschin's robbery gang leader, "the Marsigliese." Ravelli's investigation of a bloody robbery, perpetrated by the gang disguised as a movie crew, becomes personal when he learns that one of the victims was most likely killed by the same gun that killed his wife, an innocent bystander mowed down during the Marsigliese's escape from an earlier heist.

As Ravelli, Tomas Milian has an easy time envisioning an event he never witnessed; his wife's death by accidental drive-by.

As Ravelli gradually closes in, the gang starts to fall apart, and Marsigliese intends to keep all the loot for himself and split with his Marilyn Monroe-obsessed girlfriend Rita (Stefania Casini burdened with a dubbed dumb-blond voice). Ravelli nearly nabs them in a helicopter-vs-car chase, but Marsigliese outwits them inside a tunnel, abandoning his vehicle (and one of the gang) and carjacking another going the other way. That sets up a Desperate Hours style hostage situation while the cops await a fresh lead, before Marsigliese lights out on his own. But before he can run off with Rita he has to deal with another rival criminal, and by the time they're done with that, Ravelli and a small army of cops have them tracked on the dock.

This is where Squadra Volante takes its own peculiar stand. Seeing himself hopelessly outnumbered, Marsigliese throws down his weapon and surrenders. Then Ravelli appears with damning evidence against him, only to announce, "I'm not a cop anymore." At this point, I wondered how Massi and his three co-writers wanted their audience to feel. Ravelli wants revenge; is he entitled? Marsigliese has been a betraying scumbag for most of the picture, but he's shown resourcefulness rescuing Rita, and she's shown bravery and loyalty to her man. Ravelli proposes to kill Marsigliese in cold blood in front of a loved one. If he'd had a chance to take his man down in battle, in the kind of climax more typical of Italian cop films, there'd be no ambiguity about the justice of his revenge. Confronting an unarmed man is a different story -- to me, at least. To spoil the ending, Ravelli opens fire, every shot intercut with flashbacks of his wife's death. To him, presumably, this equalizes things. But as we leave Rita weeping over the Marsigliese's corpse, should we feel that Ravelli did the right thing? Did Italian audiences think so? How about cop-film fans elsewhere? All I know is that The Cop in Blue Jeans, a do-over of the Ravelli character template, makes things much simpler for viewers.

Emergency Squad is a dynamic, efficient story dominated by its two male leads. The revenge angle makes Milian a more interesting cop than he'd play later, and Moschin brings some of the same power he brought to Milano Calibro 9 to a less sympathetic role. As always, the music of an Italian genre film is of interest. The culprit this time is Stelvio Cipriani, and he contributes a jauntily melancholic main theme, adding rock elements to it as the story builds momentum. It gives the movie an incongruously romantic, sentimental quality. That happens often with Italian films, but it works particularly well here because it creates the sense that Ravelli approaches revenge as if it's the consummation of a longterm passion.

You'd be unhappy, too, if Gastone Moschin pulled your car over.

The screencaps come off an English-only copy that's part of Pop Flix's Big Guns Collection. For a cheapo public-domain (?) edition it looks pretty good. The Italian trailer comes from YouTube, uploaded by trailersdaculto, and features toplessness, sacrilege and hippies.

COP IN BLUE JEANS (Squadra Antiscippo, 1976)

Tourists in 1970s Italy considered it their lucky day, and perhaps the highlight of the entire trip, if they managed to catch a glimpse of a man defecating in public. Japanese visitors especially, according to Bruno Corbucci's film, were so fascinated by this picturesque slice of la dolce vita that they'd drop everything and forget their surroundings in order to take snapshots. Unfortunately, once an eccentricity becomes a trend, the criminal element takes notice. Highly organized snatch-and-grab gangs would send men out in broad daylight to drop trou and squat near hotels or wherever foreigners congregated. While the cameras flashed, the pseudo-pooper's fellow perps swooped by with practiced efficiency, relieving the tourists of their luggage before the decoy had zipped up and buckled his belt. For native victims, the plans were less elaborate: flour in the face in the marketplace, for instance. Or they dispensed with advance preparations entirely, simply snatching or grabbing on their motorcycles. Even dogs got into the act -- for what reward, who can say?

Crime ruled the streets of Italia '70, but the law-abiding public had a strong fictional line of defense in a host of tough cinematic cops who formed their own film genre in this land of genres. Among these mighty men was Inspector Nico Giraldi, a very plain-clothed detective in the Anti-Theft Squad. As played by Tomas Milian, the Lon Chaney (Sr.) of his time and place, Giraldi is an amiable grotesque. He doesn't hide his influences; his apartment is festooned with Serpico posters, and he has a little white rat of the same name -- no reflection on the historical Serpico, one hopes. He also has a bird named Callahan, but unlike the rat the bird stays home. But if Giraldi wants to be Serpico, he ends up reminding me more of Mick Belker, the feral cop on Hill Street Blues. His slovenliness is a sight gag in keeping, from what you might have noticed, with this film's essentially comedic nature. It makes him an unlikely ladies' man; having scored with one woman he had earlier saved from rape, he sleeps in his wool cap and socks and three layers of sweaters. Why? "I'm afraid the heat'll get turned off." It makes you grateful that Smell-O-Vision did not get more popular.

Tomas Milian as popular series character Nico Giraldi, making his debut in Cop in Blue Jeans. Blame the lousy picture quality on a cheapo DVD set that includes better copies of three Umberto Lenzi cop films.

As a comedy cop movie, Squadra Antiscippo is aimed at a more mature but not really more sophisticated audience than Bud Spencer's Flatfoot series. It doesn't have a very strong storyline and is easily distracted from it. Giraldi's main agenda is to bring down the fences who finance the muggers, but he finds time to settle a mild personal feud with a pickpocket who leaves heckling messages on his answering machine. His hunt for fences puts him on the trail of the Baron, the leader of a robbery gang that appears to bite off more than it can chew when it nabs four billion lira (in dollars) from American gangster Norman Shelley (Jack Palance). We've seen what this remorseless man is capable of; earlier he had put an underling to death by carbon monoxide poisoning by locking him in a car. Terrifying, no? So now it's a race between Shelley and Giraldi to see who can catch the Baron first, and if the Cop in Blue Jeans wins that race, his troubles may just be beginning....

The most surprising thing about this film is that it inspired ten sequels over the next eight years, culminating in a film known in English as Cop in Drag. Squadra Antiscippo is a mostly uninspired film with nothing I haven't seen done better in other Italian cop films. The action highlight is when Giraldi chases some muggers up several flights of stairs from doorstep to rooftop of a tenement on his motorcycle, while the climactic battle between Shelley's men and the Squad is utterly by-the-numbers. I may not be getting the full Milian performance due to a weak dub, but Nico Giraldi is pretty drab compared to the monstrous villains he played in several Umberto Lenzi films or his spaghetti western characters. As for Palance, I'm surprised he even bothered dubbing his own voice. He gives a perfunctory performance, but the writers didn't exactly give him much to do. I hope he was paid well for having to sell Milian's knee to the nads in a climactic scene at the American embassy. The liveliest thing about the film is the score by Guido and Maurizio De Angelis, which features a free-jazz saxophone writhing through the action scenes. Like nearly all Italian films from this era, it at least sounds good. But if you're looking for hardcase tough-cop action in the Italian manner, look elsewhere. And if you're looking for more lighthearted tough-cop action, look elsewhere too.

But do the film the courtesy of examining its Italian trailer, uploaded to YouTube by xploitedcinema: