A randomly comprehensive survey of extraordinary movie experiences from the art house to the grindhouse, featuring the good, the bad, the ugly, but not the boring or the banal.
Director Fernando Di Leo's adaptation of Ukrainian-Italian author Giorgio Scerbanenco's novel Caliber 9 is one of the great crime films of the 1970s. It was di Leo's second treatment of Scerbanenco. The first was I ragazzi del massacro (approximately, "The Massacre Boys"), a collaborative adapation by Di Leo and three other writers of a Scerbanenco police procedural. It's about the investigation of the gang rape and murder of a Milan night-school teacher by a classroom of sweathogs fueled by a bottle of aniseed. Commissario Lamberti (Pier Paolo Capponi) wants to find out who instigated the attack. He interrogates the boys one by one, constrained from striking them but using an aniseed bottle as an interrogation tool, forcing some to drink from it, pouring the contents on others, or on the chair they have to sit on. Several students finger one Fiorello Gassi as the ringleader but Lamberti has his doubts. Gassi sets off his gaydar (and the kid's sandals are apparently meant as a clue for the audience) and seems too sensitive and fearful to author such an atrocity. Lamberti goes gentle on him compared to his treatment of the other boys, but it does him little good. Eventually Gassi will fall off the roof of the building where the boys have been confined. Jumped or pushed? None can say.
Accompanied by Livia Ussaro, the boys' guidance counselor (Nieves "Susan Scott" Navarro), Lamberti looks up adult acquaintances of the boys in search of clues to the ultimate responsibility for the crime. It becomes clear that some of the kids were involved in international smuggling, but the boys remain a wall of silence. Lamberti and Ussaro hope to get answers by separating one of the boys, Carolino Marassi (Marzio Margine) and softening him up with tender treatment. They buy him new clothes and treat him to big dinners. Carolino seems to respond to this TLC but takes advantage of an errand to run away -- straight to the mystery person the Commissario has been after all along.
After a violent showdown with a malevolent mentor, we see the crime again -- having gotten a taste of it at the very start of the picture -- through Carolino's delirious flashback, in which he is almost as much a victim as the doomed teacher.
As much a juvenile-delinquent film as a procedural, Naked Violence raises old questions about the causes of delinquency, hoping to give them new urgency by magnifying the scale of the crime. For Lamberti, the case becomes an almost obsessive quest to pin down the personal responsibility for the evil; for him, why must boil down to who. Capponi's intensity holds the episodic first half of the picture together, while Margine's performance as Carolino shapes the second half. Despite the decent acting, the film often feels hamfisted, particularly whenever Silvano Spadaccino's overblown fanfare blasts out as each kid steps in for his first interrogation. This isn't an action picture like Milano Caliber 9 or Di Leo's related crime films, and the only time the director really shows off is during Carolino's climactic, horrific flashback. Otherwise it's a more modest movie, apart from the retroactive (if not immediate) campiness of the ultimate villain. The revelation of this rather ludicrous figure undercuts much of the horror the film aims at. The crime seems more unsettling if it remains ultimately motiveless and unfathomable, while the discovery and defeat of a master villain offers more reassurance than audiences got from Di Leo's bleak crime films. The filmmakers may have intended reassurance rather than horror, but the effect is still inferior to what Di Leo would achieve later, though Naked Violence remains a gradually compelling experience for patient viewers.
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.
Fernando Di Leo regarded the trilogy of films for which he's best known as a director -- the "milieu" trilogy of Milano Calibro 9, Manhunt and The Boss-- as films noirs, continuing the American tradition's humane portrayal of criminals as tragic or sometimes sympathetic personalities. Those films stand out in stark contrast to the more popular Italian genre of polizieschi movies, in which criminals are usually portrayed as subhuman scum. But wherever Di Leo's heart lay, he still had to pay the bills. So after collaborating with two other writers on the story, he wrote the script for a tough-cop movie that would be directed by Ruggero Deodato, the jungle-terror specialist who would go on to make Cannibal Holocaust. You can tell that neither Di Leo nor Deodato has his heart in the project. That is, they don't seem to share the sincere conviction that drives the best of Italy's cop films. Instead of making a straight story of righteousness combating crime, they tried for black comedy, the joke being that the cops are barely better than criminals.
In fact, we learn that a computer profile of our heroes, Fred (Marc Porel) and Tony (Ray Lovelock) identified them as classic criminal types. It remains a mystery to their boss (Adolfo Celi) why they ever became cops. The answer, as revealed to us by implication, is that being cops empowers Fred and Tony to be thugs and bullies by siccing them on other criminals. You don't hear the sort of righteous indignation from these guys that you'd hear from Maurizio Merli, the mustachioed polizieschi icon, in films by Umberto Lenzi and others. They seem to fight crime just for kicks.
Di Leo and Deodato do what they can to stack the deck early, starting things off with a brutal and fatal mugging by two purse-snatching motorcyclists. These goons drag a bag's desperate owner until she brains herself against a streetlamp. After this atrocity, Fred and Tony ride into action. We're supposed to be angry enough at the muggers to stay interested in what proves an interminable motorcycle chase -- but when I describe the first action scene in a movie as interminable, you know we're in trouble. Fortunately, it ends with a wake-up call for the audience. The chase proper ends when the muggers ride their bike into the back of a truck, one of them dying on the spot, the other thrown out into the street. He's badly injured, but might have survived had not Fred or Tony -- to be honest, I don't remember which is which -- snaps his neck.
Our heroes are basically police terrorists. Their tactics range from thwarting a robbery by assassinating the perpetrators before the fact to annoying the local crime boss, "Bibi" Pasquini (an unenthusiastic Renato Salvatori or Rocco and His Brothers fame), by torching the luxury cars parked outside his high-stakes gambling den. They have two overriding mandates, to bring down Pasquini and get laid. They spend their office time harassing an openly contemptuous female officer, while intercourse proves an essential element of their interrogation technique -- at least when they interrogate attractive young women.
The big joke that develops toward the end is that their two objectives threaten to cancel each other out -- cancel them out, I should say. The climax sets them up in a deathtrap, from which they're too interested in their own climaxes to escape. Which will come first: la petit mort or the Big One?...
Basically, we're dealing with Starsky and Hutch with a license to kill. If that makes Uomini si nasce any funnier, more power to you. To me, it looks like writer and director didn't really have their heart in the comedy, either. The problem is that Porel and Lovelock aren't that funny. The whole joke of the film is that they're violent idiots, but comedy is neither Di Leo nor Deodato's strong suit. They come up with an absurd target-practice sequence in which Fred and Tony leap and roll through a series of ditches, repeatedly firing at cans located dangerously close to each other (the cops, not the cans). Like the motorcycle chase, this goes on too long before it turns into a proper action scene, and the creators clearly have no idea of how they might keep it funny. They get a little closer to the effect they want at the climax. Audiences will inevitably ask if our heroes can really be this stupidly horny as they scene drags on -- but whether it all pays off depends on how you want it to pay off, and I suspect a large part of the audience is bound to be disappointed.
And he strikes!...like Thunnn-derr-balll!
Live Like a Cop, Die Like a Man is newly available as a Netflix streaming video, along with an impressive number of Italian genre titles. This one is most likely not the highlight of the group, but Italian action fans who have a clear idea of what kind of film this is might still find it entertaining on an undemanding level. Even I got a little kick from seeing Adolfo Celi get to play a badass policeman, but whether that justifies 93 minutes of your time is not for me to say.
This is the first film from Fernando di Leo that I've seen since I examined his great "Milieu" trilogy of crime films last fall -- Milano Calibro 9, Man Hunt and Il Boss. Those three films in their violence, cynicism and deromanticized view of organized crime stand comparison with the great Seventies crime films from the U.S. and Japan, but they don't quite prepare you for Mister Scarface. This later film is more of a comedy-drama, but di Leo has trouble maintaining a balance of comic and deadly-serious elements.
The opening sets us up for a revenge storyline as we see Jack Palance betray and kill his partner in crime. He earns the "Scarface" name for what really looks like a small wound suffered here as the partner throws a glass bottle at his head. The victim's son witnesses it all and with a dreamlike calmness walks past his father's body toward Palance as the killer collects his loot. The boy grabs a gun and gets the drop on Palance, who raises his hands almost mockingly. He knows that the gun is empty. He slaps the kid aside and goes his way.
"Mister Scarface" doesn't really seem worse for wear after his prefatory disfigurement. The film could well have been called "Mister Cigarette Holder" instead.
In the present, we're introduced to Tony (German actor Harry Baer), a hard-working enforcer for Luigi, a local loan shark (legendary Hollywood dud Edmund Purdom). It looks like Tony is being set up as a Terrence Hill sort of comic hero. As he tries to collect for his boss, he displays acrobatic fighting skills and a sort of wit -- about half of one. When one recalcitrant debtor tries to fend him off with a whip, he quips, "You may be Marquis de Sade, though I don't swing that way." The English dubbing is mostly adequate, but other odd phrases turn up. Later, Scarface, aka Signor Manzari, tells Tony, "You seem to like playing the fool." Tony answers, "It breaks my day." Throughout the early part of the film, Tony fights with his fists exclusively, which worried me. It'd be a lame crime film if no one got shot.
Tony befriends Rick (Al Cliver), a former minion of Manzari who's been beaten from the ranks for allowing himself to be suckered at cards in Luigi's club. Investigating the scene himself, Scarface writes a 3,000,000 lira check to cover his losses, but later refuses to cash it for his creditor. Luigi and his gang fear Manzari ("Just looking at him, my asshole twitches," says Vincenzo Napoli, a flamboyant oldster who becomes the primary comic relief), but Tony, looking for a shortcut to advancement in the gang, vows to get the money from Scarface. Rick helps him figure out a scheme; they hire an actor to join Tony in playing finance ministry auditors who demand to see Manzari's books. The panicky Scarface agrees to the suggestion to bribe the government men. Bribe in hand, Tony gives Luigi his money, but doesn't let his boss know that he and Rick have kept 7,000,000 lira for themselves.
Luigi didn't expect to see the money and isn't happy to. He knows that Scarface will take it out on him, especially when Tony was dumb enough to leave the original check with Manzari so he'll know exactly where his money went. Fearing the heat, Luigi skips town while Manzari's gang tears up his club. When an unfaithful minion, Peppi, learns of the extra 7 million, he realizes that Tony, an enemy who humiliated him in an earlier fight, must have the loot. Peppi kills his cowardly boss and, instead of hunting Tony down himself, allies himself with Scarface. Manzari's men kill the actor but Tony and Rick, with Napoli as advisor and intercessor with the saints, prove a tougher proposition as the film grows steadily more violent and lethal.
Edmund Purdom cashes in just as the film becomes a bit less comic.
What does all this have to do with the early murder and the boy who lived? My first assumption was that, Tony being the apparent main character, he must be the boy grown up into a life of crime. But Tony's too much the happy-go-lucky sort to be an avenger. That leaves Rick, but di Leo does just about nothing to build up anticipation for the inevitable revelation. When it comes, in the middle of a climactic showdown between our heroic trio and Manzari's gang at an old slaughterhouse, it leaves you wondering. Was Rick's stint in Scarface's crew an attempt to get close to his enemy in order to take revenge. It seemed like nothing of the sort at the time. Di Leo does so little with the revenge storyline that you could believe that whether Rick or Tony would be the avenger might have come down to a coin flip. For a story element introduced at the start of the film, it seems a lot like an afterthought, and it really is superfluous, adding nothing to the film.
Al Cliver has his revenge. So?
We're dealing with something far below the level of di Leo's earlier trilogy, but the film has its moments. Most of these are later action scenes, including Tony leading a foot chase through the streets of Rome as well as the big finale at the slaughterhouse, which includes machine guns, a dude on a meathook, motorcycle jumping, gigantic walkie-talkie antennae and an exploding car. Also, few di Leo films, it seems, are complete without a nightclub scene with some hot nearly naked women dancing, and in this respect Mister Scarface does not disappoint. Nor is it lacking in the music department, as Luis Enriquez Bacalov contributes a tense score that never succumbs to comic temptations.
My copy of Il Padrone della Citta is a crappy fullscreen edition that's one of five films in Pop Flix's cheapo Mafia Kingpin collection, which also includes three widescreen Umberto Lenzi cop films and Bruno Corbucci's Cop in Blue Jeans. I don't know if better copies are available, but regardless of condition, as long as you don't expect something with the power of Il Boss or Calibro 9 and you like Jack Palance, you should find Mister Scarface a mildly entertaining trifle for an hour and a half.
There's no trailer on line, but oneinchpunch77 has uploaded an American radio spot to YouTube.
It's been claimed that Fernando Di Leo's use of an interracial team of hitmen in La Mala Ordina(aka Man Hunt) inspired Quentin Tarantino's casting of Samuel L. Jackson and John Travolta in Pulp Fiction. If so, then is it possible that the climax of Inglourious Basterds begins with the opening of the third film of Di Leo's so-called "Milieu" trilogy? Consider: a mystery man sneaks into a building where important men are arriving. His destination: a projection booth where he cows the projectionist into compliance. The mystery man is Henry Silva. The projectionist pleads for mercy.
Projectionist: Jesus, don't shoot! Silva: He won't....Only he doesn't like skin flicks. Projectionist: Jesus, my god! Silva: He's not coming, so just keep quiet!
An elite audience of criminals has gathered to watch porno films. "That goes to show that not all Swedes are natural blonds," one comments as they watch the unseen show. Above and behind them, Silva sets himself to work. His weapon is a grenade launcher. He fires into the screening room.
He fires three times more, then uses a fifth grenade on a guard who comes running in at the wrong time. This is carnage above and beyond Di Leo's two previous films, and a police official will later equate the violence with the Vietnam War. "I'll bet they'll be using tanks soon," he remarks. This sets the tone for Il Boss, a devastating deconstruction of the crime film genre, dispensing even with the one sympathetic protagonist you can find in either Milano Calibro 9 or La Mala Ordina.
Silva plays Nick Lanzetta, a hitman and orphan who was for all intents and purposes adopted by Don Giuseppe Daniello, an underling of Don Corrasco (Richard Conte). They've sent Nick to destroy Don Attardi, who collaborated with interlopers from Calabria in selling hard drugs in Sicily when they were only supposed to pass through on the way to foreign parts. It turns out that I was wrong in assuming that all three Milieu films took place in Milan, since Il Boss plays out in Palermo, where, ironically, the Sicilians despised elsewhere in Italy look down on the Calabrians. That attitude extends to the Palermo police, represented by Commisario Torre (Gianni "Sartana" Garko). The Calabrians, represented by gang leader Cocchi, despise the Sicilians in return.
Cocchi: We're just rag-ass peasants to you! I know, if a man has nothing, Commisario, life is very simple. So my men will take risks that you'll never take. They've nothing to lose. Torre: Bravo, Cocchi, bravo! Apparently you've become Maoist.
Again, Di Leo introduces social and political context that's often absent from crime or poliziotteschi films. On this occasion, he also overturns the tough-cop archetype of the poliziotteschis, since Garko's cop, who comes on strong as he interrupts the mourning for the porno movie victims, turns out to be a piccione, an informant for Don Giuseppe and Don Corrasco. It amused me to see the actor I identify with one of the ultimate badass spaghetti western heroes playing a complete weasel, a twisted authoritarian who blames the current chaos in Palermo on the government's exiling the old Mafia leaders. "It's just that there's no discipline," he argues at one point, "We need order, even if it's Mafia order." Adapting a novel, Il Mafioso, by Peter McCurtin, Di Leo subverts the typically reactionary stance of Italian cinema cops by putting an explicitly reactionary cop on the side of equally reactionary crime bosses.
By the time Di Leo is done, all ideas of authority and loyalty are pretty much dashed. The main plot of the film involves the kidnapping of Don Giuseppe's daughter Rina by Cocchi's men as revenge for the movie bombing. Cocchi wants Giuseppe to give himself up in return for his daughter, and the old man is willing, but Don Corrasco forbids it. Compromising in any way with Cocchi is unacceptable; that goes for paying ransom as well. This is when Corrasco tells Giuseppe that "family doesn't matter." But which family is he talking about? Isn't the Mafia made up of families? Indeed, the Mafia family takes precedence. "Nothing is yours," he tells Giuseppe, "not even your daughter, not when it endangers your family and the organization." After sending Giuseppe away, he instructs Nick to kill Giuseppe, his surrogate father, if he attempts to negotiate separately with Cocchi. In time, Giuseppe will urge Nick to disregard the order. Despite Nick's assertion that "Don Corrasco is God," Giuseppe insists that Corrasco has no right to dismiss Rina's likely death as "the will of God." He finally convinces Nick to see things his way and to set up a ransom payment, or so we think until the time of the scheduled rendezvous, when Nick kills Giuseppe as ordered, along with Giuseppe's right-hand man. In this scene, Silva conveys the death of a man's soul; you can see the self-loathing in his eyes as he embraces his victim and his own betrayal of the nearest thing he ever had to real family. Just as Mario Adorf successfully portrayed two different characters for Di Leo in Calibro 9 and Mala Ordina, Silva accomplishes the same feat in Mala Ordina and this film.
Meanwhile, Rina has also been betraying her father's honor. He's paying her way through college, where she's become a frivolous student radical, a drug user, and a tramp. It takes little more than one glass of booze to get her fraternizing with her captors, notwithstanding their threat that "you're gonna get laid until your feet come." Apparently that would be fine with her. And when Nick finally rescues her, after killing her father and pocketing his ransom money, she just as carelessly shacks up with him in his dismal porno-papered bachelor pad in a relationship of bodily satisfaction and mutual contempt. "You just screw baby, don't think," he advises her. He's disgusted by her lack of feeling when he finally tells her that her father's dead, but she answers with contempt for a father who was nothing but a criminal. Family really does mean nothing.
As Rina, Antonia Santilli submits for inspection, but from then on its pretty much consensual all the way.
Nor does it mean anything to Don Corrasco, who yields pretty quickly to political pressure to make peace with Cocchi by throwing Nick under the bus and setting up Torre to kill him. That guarantees that family will finally mean nothing to Nick, since the film will climax with his outright rebellion against the Don. But there are betrayals yet to come beyond the climax, and never has it been so bleak a moment when a movie closes not with the word "Fine," but with "Continua."
Gianni Garko negotiates with Richard Conte (above) and Henry Silva (below), not exactly from a position of strength in either case.
Il Boss is a soul-crushing film, and I mean that as a good thing. It's a movie of nihilistic moral cruelty that indicts cops, criminals and civilians alike, leaving no one for audience identification unless the audience suffers from collective low self-esteem. Our putative hero is really a scumbag, but who's any better? At least in Nick's case you can see that he was brought up in a certain quasi-moral system built on certain premises that are suddenly all kicked out from under him. None of the conventional escape routes in genre fiction (the police, the love of a good woman) are available to him. He can only keep doing what he's been doing, which is to exterminate all the brutes until somebody maybe takes him out someday. The fact that Nick is the only one of the trilogy's protagonists to survive gives us an idea of the larger point Di Leo is making.
The story of Il Boss is hellish enough, but why not include a literal metaphor for Hell in the form of a fiery furnace in which the mobsters deposit victims, dead or alive?
Luis Enriquez Bacalov is back after skipping La Mala Ordina with a score that's less classical but more forceful and percussive to fit the brutality of Il Boss. As usual, the location work is outstanding and the action sequences get to the point without overstated choreography. There's nothing here to compare with the amazing chase scene in Mala Ordina but the overall effect is more overwhelming than the earlier film, which fizzles a little once the chase is over. In closing, Il Boss is just about equal to Milano Calibro 9, though the two bookend films of the trilogy differ profoundly in tone. Calibro 9 is really a classical noir with pulp vitality, while Boss is like the Ran of the Italian crime genre in its despairing portrait of moral chaos. Having now seen all three films, I can say more confidently that the Milieu films deserve mention alongside Coppola's Godfather films and Kinji Fukasaku's Battles Without Honor and Humanity series, not necessarily as equals in quality but as a like-minded project of deromanticizing the crime genre, and perhaps with a similar, possibly unintended effect of re-romanticizing it for the next generation. They definitely set the standard for all other Seventies crime films from Italy, and any enthusiast for Italian cinema should enjoy all three.
Here's the Italian trailer again, which rightfully boasts of Di Leo's past work and promotes Il Boss as if it really was the culmination of a trilogy rather than the open-ended affair the film itself claims to be.
Playing an exuberant thug who ends up the last man standing, Mario Adorf nearly stole Milano Calibro 9 from the incredible Gastone Moschin and earned himself the starring role in Fernando Di Leo's follow-up film, the second of what is called the "Milieu" or "Italian Mob" trilogy of films set in Milan. The effect, and you'll excuse a Classic Hollywood analogy, is as if, on the strength of The Glass Key, someone cast William Bendix in a starring role in a film noir, only it's the 1970s and you can have lots more violence, and hippies, too. Adorf might be more accurately described as half Bendix, half Al Lettieri. He has Lettieri's disheveled brutishness, but some of Bendix's sympathetic luggishness as well. Both qualities serve him well in this film.
Adorf plays Luca Canali, who gets some buildup in a pre-credits sequence before we actually meet the man. A New York mafia don is sending two Italian-speaking hitmen, army veterans both, to Milan to kill Canali, a local pimp suspected of stealing a major heroin shipment. The hitmen are Henry Silva as Dave and an alarmingly hirsute Woody Strode as Frank. They're instructed to make Canali's death as publicly gruesome as possible, and to behave like "the Italian idea of Americans" in the meantime, i.e. like asinine boors. This comes naturally to Dave, but Frank's a little too straightedge to follow these instructions exactly. He appears to require his maximum concentration just to spit out his lines. Strode and Silva both did their own dubbing, as far as I could tell, but this didn't come naturally to Strode, and his is an awkward performance, as if he were understandably self-conscious about that stuff on top of his head that usually isn't there.
Frank: "I don't want to interfere with your sex life, but if the women come after you, keep your hands in your pockets!"
We're then introduced to the infamous Luca Canali strolling through a Milan park with one of his whores. He gets into a scrap with some punks and bitch-slaps a few of them before the police show up. He gets in a few extra love taps on his last victim and tells the cop that he was trying to revive a poor man who had fainted. There's a slapstick quality to the first half of the film as long as we're encouraged to think of Canali as little more than a clown. At the same time, his portrait gets rounded a bit as we encounter his estranged wife and their sickly daughter. Di Leo is also patient enough to indulge in some character time for Dave and Frank, the former trying to score with hippie/disco chicks with little success, except when he throws money around. He finds out some info about Canali, but one of the hippie chicks, Trini, takes a moment to call Canali, who's been trying to recruit her (though not very forcefully), and tip him off that he's a wanted man. But she prefers her free-love existence in some sort of commie commune where every night seems to be an orgy combined with political indoctrination. Luca doesn't understand her life choices, but he's more affectionate toward her than he is to his current, cynical squeeze. She says Trini's a whore already, but Luca defends her honor. These are details that date the film but add to my enjoyment of it as a historic document of bad fashions and bad Euro-pop music.
The local Don (Adolfo Celi) doesn't like Dave and Frank running loose on his turf, so he sends his own men in search of Luca, ordering them to take him alive for delivery to the Americans. This leads to a Three Stooges-style battle in a lumber yard in which two goons slap our hero around, pull his nose, yank his tie, and force him to smell a rose until he can't stands no more.
"Stop and smell the roses, you son of a bitch!" Not actual dialogue from Manhunt.
This approach gets nobody nowhere. It humiliates the Don before the Americans, who kneecap the goons who let Luca get away. To show that he's even more hardcore, the Don then kills the goons. The stakes grow more severe as Luca's friends and loved ones are endangered in the effort to bring him to ground and he grows steadily more confused by the intensity of the manhunt. While Milano Calibro 9 worked on our uncertainty over whether the hero had or hadn't committed a big robbery, we become convinced fairly early in La Mala Ordina that Luca is innocent. He honestly hasn't got a clue why so many people are after such a small-timer as he. No one has ever taken him seriously before, most of Milan taking him for a softy and a weakling. But he's discovered resilience and resourcefulness in keeping ahead of his pursuers, and after the Don's men go after his family, he discovers the motivating power of rage. The movie climaxes in a furious car and foot chase through the city as Canali picks up the trail of vengeance.
Unfortunately, Di Leo can't top the chase scene in the half-hour he has left to tell his story. He takes the film in potentially interesting directions but doesn't develop them as fully as he could have. Luca hides out overnight at the hippie orgy house, for instance, but we never see what could have been his interesting reaction to the sexy radicalism surrounding him. We do get a too-protracted showdown between Luca and the Don, in which the old man at first talks Luca out of shooting him and then back into shooting him, that nearly stops the film dead. By the time we return to Dave and Frank, it's like an afterthought, and while Di Leo comes up with some violent business during the final battle in an auto graveyard, it still seems anticlimactic compared to the big chase.
La Mala Ordina (called Manhunt on VideoAsia's Thug City Chronicles set, but also known as Manhunt in Milan, The Italian Connection, Black Kingpin (!), etc) isn't as good as Milano Calibro 9, but it still has a lot going for it. While the previous film was based on a novel, this film still has a novelistic quality, at least through the first half, in its eye for social detail (not to mention the abstract sculptures Di Leo's art directors are fond of) and its willingness to let the actors do stuff beside advancing the plot. The music by Armando Trovaioli is funkier and brassier than the score for the previous film, and works best during the big action scenes. Among the actors, Silva really seems to be enjoying himself, and Adorf justifies Di Leo's confidence in him by giving a great performance that keeps you rooting for Luca Canali from the beginning to the literally gripping conclusion.
While these films along with Il Boss form a trilogy of Milanese crime films, there's no continuity to them except the reappearance of Adorf in La Mala Ordina and the return of Silva in a different role in Il Boss. I'll be watching the third film later this week, with a review to follow, but it seems likely already that Di Leo's Milan films are the nearest thing Italy produced to the crime sagas that Francis Ford Coppola produced in the U.S. and Kinji Fukasaku produced in Japan in the 1970s. I don't think I'll regret saying now that the trilogy should be required viewing for any fan of international crime cinema.
Here's an English language trailer (for "Manhunt"), uploaded to YouTube by JohnnyRedEyes.