Free Hand for a Tough Cop (1976)

Notorious hood Brescianelli (Henry Silva) kidnaps a young girl with a kidney problem, and the eponymous tough cop, Antonio (Claudio Cassinelli), is given the titular free hand to track him down.  To that end, he busts former Brescianelli associate Sergio Marazzi (Tomas Milian), also known as Garbage Can/Monnezza, out of prison.  In turn, the duo enlists the help of three other hardened criminals, Calabrese (Biagio Pelligra), Vallelunga (Giuseppe Castellano), and Mario (Claudio Undari).  Time is running out.

Uneasy allies are nothing new in cinema, especially in the realm of Poliziotteschi.  Having them be cops and criminals is perhaps the clearest way of juxtaposing their differences and generating instant tension.  Likewise, it’s also the most expedient way of emphasizing their similarities.  Antonio is a cop in the Dirty Harry mold.  He was transferred to Sardinia because he’s so rough in performing his duties.  He’s brought back to Rome specifically for this case because he’s such a hardass.  The police can’t handle the situation playing strictly by the book.  In his first meeting with Monnezza, Antonio knocks the man out and kidnaps him.  Antonio is quick with his gun and his fists.  Procedure does not suit him.  He cajoles the trio of train robbers into helping him (he doesn’t tell them he’s a cop at first, and when he does, their commonalities make it almost a non-issue).  He allows a couple of jerks to rob a movie theater, with Vallelunga stating they’re “just kids having fun” (don’t worry, Antonio catches up to them later).  He also has no misgivings about letting Calabrese and his boys tote guns around Rome, shooting the place up and brutalizing everyone in their path.  At one point, Antonio leaves the sleazy Mario alone with a housekeeper, and the baddie is knee deep in raping her before Antonio stops him (and even this is practically accidental).  Further, he’s angrier with Mario for killing a person of interest than for attempting to rape an innocent woman.  Antonio is, in effect, the same as the crooks with whom he aligns himself.  Both sets are doing what they do, and they do it without hesitation, and what they do is basically the same (earn a living being thugs).  The only separation between guys like Antonio and worse criminals like Brescianelli is that Brescianelli is completely heartless.  Yes, all of them are willing to kill to get what they want, but only Brescianelli and his crew would stoop to endangering a child.  Everything else is fair game.

Monnezza is the outlier in the group.  He wants nothing to do with any of them, constantly complaining about the situation in which he finds himself.  Nevertheless, he’s also the hero of the piece, moreso than Antonio.  It’s Monnezza who finally finds the girl and prevents her death at Brescianelli’s hands.  Monnezza is a trickster character, a performer who lulls everyone around him into a state of ease.  His role as an actor is accentuated by his appearance or, I should say, appearances.  His hair is a massive afro, in combination with his scraggly beard, making him look like a bum.  He wears guy liner (or Milian just has incredibly dark, lush eyelashes), giving him a flamboyant air.  Monnezza also loves to appear in costume to deceive his enemies.  He dresses up like a telegram delivery boy, a priest, and a shepherd, to name just three, so he can either gain entry or information from people.  But underneath this, Monnezza is most assuredly a schemer and a man to be taken seriously.  After his brother is unsuccessfully targeted by Brescianelli, Monnezza pays a late night visit to the man who fingered him.  He plays a game with the guy, offering him two glasses of milk, one regular, one poisoned.  Yet even this is a pretense by Monnezza.  Outwardly playing the boisterous clown, he is shrewder than all the other characters in the film put together.

What I think marks Umberto Lenzi’s Free Hand for a Tough Cop (aka Il Trucido e lo Sbirro) as a superior Poliziotteschi is its self-consciousness.  People who don’t know better will think they have accidentally sat down for a Spaghetti Western, as the film opens with scenes from one (to the best of my knowledge, neither directed by Lenzi nor starring Milian, funny enough).  The film’s soundtrack even blares out a Spaghetti Western theme, and the title credits font is pure Spaghetti Western.  Only after a little over a minute of cowboys blazing hellbent for leather through Monument Valley are we shown that this is actually a film being shown to a bunch of convicts.  There is a shot of the film projector itself which holds for several seconds.  What Lenzi is saying, in other words, is that the crime story you’re about to watch is as much of a fantasy as the romantic, mythologized Old West of the cinema.  To that end, the characters and plot are generic (with the exception of Monnezza, the only one who understands that this is all a story, all bullshit, and unimportant except for his role to play in it).  By this time, audiences had seen enough Clint Eastwoods and Charles Bronsons and Maurizio Merlis to get the shoot first, ask questions later method of street justice with which this film is saturated.  This is also the reason why Silva’s Brescianelli is such a rattlesnake-mean son of a bitch.  The very act of casting Silva, having appeared in plenty of Eurocrime films by this point, is sufficient to flesh out anything and everything an audience needs to understand the character.  Free Hand for a Tough Cop is a puppet show, its genre being the stage, its characters the puppets.  But it’s Monnezza who pulls their strings, and it’s Lenzi who pulls Monnezza’s.

MVT:  The film’s self-awareness is its distinguishing factor.

Make or Break:  The full flavor of the film is captured within its opening minutes.  It is equal parts disorienting and engaging.

Score:  7.5/10

The Last Match (1991)

Cliff (surly Oliver Tobias) is the super-terrific quarterback of some unnamed football team, and as Fabrizio DeAngelis’ (under the super-terrific nom de guerre Larry Ludman) The Last Match (aka L’ultima Meta) opens, he somehow manages to pull a super-terrific win against another unnamed team out of his ass (not that any of this is shown in any coherent fashion), all while super-terrific Coach Keith (the ever-enthusiastic Ernest Borgnine) cheers him on from the sidelines.  Shortly thereafter, and for absolutely no discernible reason, some anonymous guy slips drugs into the handbag of Cliff’s daughter Suzy (the super-terrifically cute Melissa Palmisano), who has been vacationing in the Dominican Republic with her super-terrifically overstimulated boyfriend George (Robert Floyd).  Suzy is taken to the not-so-super-terrific prison governed by Warden Yachin (Henry Silva), and after Cliff kind of/sort of runs into nothing but red tape, he decides that his only option is to bust his little girl out.  In his football uniform.

Sports films are typically about the triumph of the human spirit.  It is less important that the protagonist emerges victorious in whatever athletic field in which they are engaged than it is that he/she overcomes his/her inner demons and character flaws to become a stronger person in the process (Exhibit A: Rocky).  Audiences love to cheer on the underdog, because they identify with the archetype.  Everyone feels like they’re up against seemingly insurmountable odds at some point or another.  Not being a sports fan, you would think that sports films wouldn’t appeal to me, but the plain fact is that they do, and this is because of what I mentioned above.  The best in this genre play to a broad audience that transcend the sports aspects.  

If anything, the actual sports in a sports film usually play like the fights in an action film or the finale of a horror film.  In the good ones, they are the delicious gravy on the meat of character development and thematic exploration.  In the bad ones, they are filler designed to distract you from the film’s innate shortcomings.  It’s kind of rare that we get a sports film where the athletes are on top and stay on top from beginning to end.  After all, where’s the excitement in that?  What’s the point if the protagonist(s) never have to rise above mighty hardships?  This, then, is the primary reason why The Last Match is a dud.  We’re told (but not until the film’s end) that Cliff’s team starts off poorly in every game, but they always manage to turn it around and win.  As previously hinted, the football games are edited in such a random manner (by Adriano Tagliavia, under the super-terrifically-on-the-nose pseudonym Adrian Cut; get it?), we never see Cliff’s team go through this supposed struggle, because we’re never one hundred percent certain what the hell is going on at all.  In fact, I would go so far as stating that the only shots that make any sense in these sequences are those of Coach Keith doing his coaching thing and those of the cheerleaders doing their cheerleading thing.  We have to take it as writ that Cliff’s team are all winners all the time, which is great if you bet on their games, but it doesn’t work for a film, even one that’s not strictly about football (despite the inordinate amount of time devoted to showing football games onscreen).

Football players are often likened to modern day gladiators; warriors who do battle on a field of honor (we’re talking theoretically here).  Consequently, they tend to be depicted in fictive works as large, scowling thugs (sometimes with a heart of gold, if the classic “Mean” Joe Green Coca-Cola commercial has taught us anything at all).  Nevertheless, this doesn’t really work on film, unless their purpose is as either henchmen or cannon fodder (and make no mistake, the majority of Cliff’s team are exactly that, though I don’t recall any of them getting so much as grazed by a bullet with one exception).  The sports film protagonist needs to have something with which viewers can connect, even if they’re not very nice people (Exhibit B: Raging Bull).  This is the secondary reason why The Last Match is a clunker.  Cliff, as essayed by Tobias, is one of the most miserable pricks I’ve seen as the protagonist in a film in quite a while.  He mildly tolerates everyone with whom he comes into contact.  He is aloof to the point of apathy, even when talking with his daughter, who we have to take it on faith that he loves since he goes through all this hassle to help her out (watch his non-reaction to the injury of one of his pals which is discovered, predictably, on the plane ride home, if the rest of the mountain of evidence in the film up to that point doesn’t convince you).  He is condescending, even to the people who are on his side (including, but not limited to, a perfectly wasted Martin Balsam).  When a character who previously gave Cliff shit (justifiably or not) suddenly pops up and says he wants to talk, Cliff instantly whoops the man’s ass (justifiably or not) rather than hear even one word he has to say.  While we certainly feel for Suzy to some extent or another, Cliff is nothing but a curmudgeon, the blunt, dull instrument this film uses to bang square pegs into round holes.

The film is also adamant in its depiction of the local populace.  The Dominicans in The Last Match HATE Americans (I don’t think any Dominican ever refers to any non-Dominican characters by their actual names; it’s always as “American”).  One of Suzy’s jailers states “nothing is denied you people in my country.”  Yachin basically tells Cliff point blank that he’s banging Cliff’s daughter and throwing it in his face simply because Cliff and Suzy are Americans.  Whether or not this enmity is warranted, the filmmakers waste even less time jumping to portray Dominicans as base creatures and their nation as a corrupt hellhole (though I don’t think it has to be Dominicans; I’m sure just about any non-white country/populace would suffice for the filmmakers).  Suzy is stripped and searched after her arrest, and we get reaction shots of the male guards ogling her like wolves eyeing up a lame deer.  Balsam’s character states, “Nobody of any importance ever comes to this godforsaken part of the world.”   A character wants Cliff and his pals to take his son out of the country with them, because he knows just how horrible it is living there.  We’ve definitely seen these sorts of attitudes before in genre films, but ordinarily they aren’t so pointed, so mean, as they are here.  

Finally, the film’s climax seems to miss its own point.  Even while we look forward to the assault on the prison, it doesn’t play out satisfyingly.  The only standout to the affair is that the good guys all wear their uniforms (which boggles the mind if they weren’t looking to be recognized and/or cause an international incident).  After all of the relentless dourness that comes before it, the film needed a win in this regard, but it’s as joyless as everything and everyone else in the film, and it robs it of what appeal it may have had.

MVT:  Borgnine gives it a lot of gusto, but he’s the one brightly over-ebullient spot in an otherwise moribund picture. 

Make or Break:  When Yachin receives his comeuppance, it’s anticlimactic in just about every respect.  Silva (and the audience) deserve better.

Score:  4.5/10

Matchless (1966)

The opening credits of Alberto Lattuada’s Matchless (aka Mission Top Secret) consist of shots (mostly closeups) of various beakers, flasks, and so forth churning with all manner of colored “chemicals.”  It’s a setup straight out of the Mad Scientists’ Playbook, though at the time this film was made, it would probably be more familiar from Jerry Lewis’s The Nutty Professor to the younger viewers in the audience (and Lattuada would most likely be more familiar to cinephiles of the time for something like his adaptation of Nikolai Gogol’s The Overcoat).  But I thought of neither of those during the film’s start.  My first thought was of Professor Julius Sumner Miller.  In my youth, our local PBS station, WVIA, would show a program called Science Demonstrations, and it was hosted by Miller.  On the program, he would wander around his low-rent lab set and give short lectures and demonstrations on physics (one of the first things he would say on each episode was, “…and physics is my business”).  The shows were informal and fairly crude, and most people who remember Miller at all probably do so because he had a distinctive look about him which was topped (quite literally) by a scraggly head of hair that would have made Mark Blankfield in Jekyll And Hyde…Together Again weep. 

However, my fondness for Miller goes a bit beyond the real-world trappings which most people view with a sense of kitsch or irony.  I truly admire Miller, because he was enthusiastic.  Here was a man who thrilled at the concepts of Newton’s Third Law of Physics, who delighted in the idea that water behaves as much like a lens as it does a hydrating element (The Professor appeared on the Canadian program Hilarious House Of Frightenstein, as well).  More than that, he was delighted to share his insights with people.  His desire was to inspire learning, to actively engage young minds and stimulate them to see the world through a new set of eyes, and he dismayed at the failures of our educational system.  “We are approaching a darkness in the land. Boys and girls are emerging from every level of school with certificates and degrees, but they can't read, write or calculate. We don't have academic honesty or intellectual rigor. Schools have abandoned integrity and rigor."  Now, I’m sure there those who would take the preceding statement as corny or archaic, but as Euripides wrote in The Bacchae, “Talk sense to a fool, and he calls you foolish.”   Frankly, I think Miller was right back then and even more so today.  But I also think that, if there were more teachers like Julius Sumner Miller, this would likely not be the case.  There is a difference between hearing and listening, and Miller was one of those people who got you to listen and thus to learn.

Journalist Perry Liston (Patrick O’Neal) is being tortured by the Communist Chinese for information as to why he is in their country (evidently not much).  Liston proves resilient, and the Reds chuck him back into his cell, which he shares with actual spy Hank (Henry Silva) and an elderly, moribund Chinese peasant who Hank wishes would die more quietly.  Perry shows the old man compassion, and in return the peasant gifts Perry with a very ugly ring.  However, the ring has the unique ability of making its wearer (but not his/her clothes) completely invisible for twenty minutes once every ten hours.  Perry effects his escape back to America (kind of involuntarily) and is enlisted by the military (including Boss Hogg himself, Sorrell Booke as Colonel Coolpepper) to steal a vial-stuffed briefcase from one Gregori Andreanu (Donald Pleasance).  But even with the help of artist-cum-spy Arabella (Ira von Fürstenberg) and his own distinct advantages, the job may not be as easy as it seems.

There is an interesting juxtaposition going on in Matchless, and it is one of sides; not sides as in planes which make up an object but sides as in “whose side are you on?”  We are introduced to the Red Menace villains of the piece as they torture Perry on a centrifugal motion device.  We then see they have given four soldiers plastic surgery to appear as WASPs for a Battle of the Bulge sort of infiltration of America.  After Perry is drugged by O-Lan (the gorgeous Elisabetta Wu), the film cuts to the same opening shot from Perry’s POV, and we assume he is on the same centrifugal motion device, about to be interrogated again by the Chinese.  Well, he is on the same device, but he is now in America, and he is being tortured and interrogated by the American military.  Coincidentally, the Americans also have four soldiers who have been given plastic surgery and are ready to be sent to infiltrate China.  This equation of the Chinese and Americans sets up a question of trust (and of brains, since neither side can come up with any ideas better than their enemy’s).  Both sides think and act exactly the same, and they distrust anything outside their basic purview. 

Even the agents working for America cannot be trusted by Perry as is setup in his encounter with O-Lan, and this will shade the relationship with Arabella to some degree (though her being an artist separates her in the viewer’s mind from the regulation-oriented military somewhat).  Hank is a venal opportunist who will betray his sworn allegiance for some money and a chance to save his own skin.  The Americans refuse to tell Perry what’s in the vials he is supposed to snatch (turning the case into a MacGuffin a la Kiss Me Deadly, Repo Man, etcetera, though we do see the vials rather than just an enigmatic glow), baldly displaying their distrust of a man they are entrusting to carry out an extraordinarily important mission.  Unlike so many other films in the Superspy genre, there is a cynical, antiauthoritarian streak going on in the film.  There is no beneficent government looking out for “the good side’s” best interest, just the same as there is no evil empire intent on dominating the world.  The two are one and the same; the only real difference being their map coordinates.  Essentially, all governments are bent, and the only person Perry (read: common folk) can truly trust is Perry. 

Perry’s invisibility schtick is also meaningful outside of its narrative function.  Whenever he uses the ring, he must be completely unclothed.  Thus, he is both well-defended as well as completely defenseless.  He is literally stripped bare, and this fits with O’Neal’s casual attitude toward everything that happens in the film, funny enough.  The invisibility also provides a counterpoint to the villainous Gregori’s outlook on the world.  Andreanu believes “in science and accuracy,” his estate populated by serving robots with clocks for heads (a play both on the idea of clockwork men and Gregori’s obsession with precision).  Also, when Gregori gets upset (despite his deep belief that he leads a “Zen” lifestyle), he insists on putting on a pair of sunglasses to make his eyes invisible to anyone who happens to be looking.  Perry, by contrast, takes everything off and goes with the flow of things, embodying more of the Zen philosophy than Gregori could ever buy or build.  The two symbolize the opposites of everything versus nothing, technology versus primitive, intellect versus instinct.  Perry wants to blend in, Gregori wants to stand out.

The film’s sense of humor is broad but never egregiously so (Hank watches The Man From AUNTIE on television, just to give you a taste).  Lattuada’s direction is solid, and his shot choices provide for interesting viewing, by and large (and there are healthy doses of tastefully enticing T&A throughout).  The Superspy elements are handled rather well, and the action elements (with the exception of a dull-as-shit car chase at the end) are tense and exciting (especially the central set piece at the bank).  At times, the film dips from the realm of Superspy/Super-Science into almost pure fantasy, but it never feels disconcerting.  In fact, I would argue that the film would have benefited by going just a step or two further down that road.  The visual effects, especially those involving invisibility, are surprisingly accomplished, and there are only a few times when an object appears to be just suspended on fishing line.  Matchless is a light adventure, nonetheless.  No one’s life will be changed by watching it for either good or ill, and as an entertainment I wouldn’t necessarily agree with the film’s title, but I would go so far as to say it isn’t joyless.

MVT:  Superspy films of this era have a certain flavor, whether they like it or not, and that Swingin’ 60s aesthetic is the thing I liked most about this movie.  The “Space Age” technology, the hiphugger fashions, the “everything’s a happening” attitude all add up into a decent little ambience package that fits the film nicely.

Make Or Break:  The Make for me was the first scene with Silva in the Chinese prison.  Here’s a guy who is so self-centered, he cannot bear having to listen to another man quietly drawing his final breaths because they’re keeping him awake.  It’s pure Silva doing what Silva does best, and it fits the odd-yet-blithe timbre of the picture.

Score:  6.25/10