Cop Game (1988)

There once was a man named Vladimir Koziakin, and about this man’s personal life I know very little (read: nothing).  What I do know is that he produced one of the most entertaining, engrossing, and lovingly remembered books of my youth.  I’m of course speaking of Movie Monster Mazes, the 1976 tome that not only reinforced my love of monsters but also gave me new creatures to track down (if only their films would play on one of our stations; bear in mind this was back when we had maybe thirteen channels that could be tuned in on our television, and you were subject to whatever their programmers wanted to/could afford to run).  The premise is self-evident; there were fifty (“a panoramic journey through FIFTY (not Forty-Nine) FIFTY Monstrous Mazes!”) puzzles in the shapes of different cinematic fiends (as common as Godzilla, as obscure as The Monster of Piedras Blancas).  The accuracy on a few of the pieces would drive monster perfectionists insane (He spells Ghidorah as “Gidra” and calls Ray Harryhausen’s Ymir “Giant Ymu”), but I didn’t care.  I was too intent on running through the mazes (in pencil, of course, because the book cost ninety-five cents [!], and it’s not as if the book was easy to come by [that I recall]), erasing the lines, and doing it all over again (the erasures made their own permanent paths on the paper after a while, but the artwork was still attractive enough on its own to warrant paging through again and again).  There is a PDF of the book you can find online, the great tragedy of which is that many of the mazes have already been solved.  I’ve made it my mission in life to digitally remove all that and print each of these pieces to do again (and to share them with my monster-loving godchild if I can get him to lift his head up from his Nintendo DS or whatever the hell that thing is).  It’s good to have goals.  The relevance of this circuitous circumnavigation to Bruno Mattei’s (under the pseudonym of Bob Hunter) Cop Game (aka Cop Game: Giochi di Poliziotto), is that the film’s plot is so convoluted, you’ll almost certainly need to use the rewind button (the modern film viewer’s equivalent to a pencil eraser on a maze) to get all the way from start to finish with some idea of the plot intact.

During the final days of the Vietnam War, officers are being picked off one by one by former (maybe current?) members of the Cobra Force.  Enter special investigators Morgan (Brent Huff) and Hawk (Max Laurel) who are charged with getting to the bottom of this mess.  And they’re not afraid to break the rules in order to do it.

Post-Vietnam-War, movies set during almost any conflict tend to have a very dim view of the governments who send the soldiers off to fight in them as well as of war itself (though the latter notion in cinema has been around for much longer, it rose in prevalence around the time of this war and carried on ever after).  Typically this stink eye is focused on America, and there is far more anti-colonialist subtext at work (and not wrongfully so in both regards, I think).  Gone is the homogenized “rally round the flag, boys” depiction and attitude of good men fighting the good fight for a good reason.  Having the bloody footage of a war broadcast into homes on a daily basis not only peeled away the clean cut façade of warfare and changed the public perception of the men and women who fight, but it also forced filmmakers to steer toward more realistic portrayals of war time, even when the stories were fantastic in nature.  Things became grottier.  Characters became less idealized, and many began to lean far more to the dark side than to the light.  Italian filmmakers, combining the neo-realist movement developed and popularized by auteurs such as Vittorio De Sica and Roberto Rossellini with the sensational, primal elements which would quickly transform into a sleazy aura that became like a signature writ in giant, glowing, neon letters for exploitation hounds the world over, tucked into this new approach with gusto.  

Naturally, different filmmakers achieve different levels of success with this approach, and, if you know anything about Mattei you know he does his level best to hit all the right notes, though rarely do his compositions orchestrate the way I’m sure they were first envisioned.  I’m also quite confident that his motives were more monetary than artistic, and I have zero problems with this.  So, we get a lot of exterior shots of the Philippines standing in for Vietnam, and the footage from the streets adds the appropriate flavor to the proceedings.  The attitude is present with Hawk telling Morgan that he comes “from a country of assholes,” that America is “playing cowboys and Indians” in Vietnam, and most presciently, “After you get back home, you will forget all about me.  But I will still be here, drowning in a sea of shit.”  Shooman (Robert Marius) commands the Cobra Force, and is alleged to have destroyed a village full of women and children in bloodthirsty pursuit of the Viet Cong (a trope of Vietnam War films inspired by the infamous My Lai Massacre in 1968). 

Likewise, we get the populist components such as plentiful gun fights, chases, and brawls.  Hawk and Morgan break a suspect’s fingers to get him to talk (in broad daylight and full view of anyone wandering by).  What feels like a large chunk of run time takes place intercutting back and forth to scenes in a strip club (with French cut bikini bottoms and fashionably torn half shirts aplenty, but somehow no nudity) which feels more Eighties than anything else in this film, barring Huff’s dangly left earring.  Morgan and Hawk are flippant to their direct superior Captain Kirk (yes, really, and played by the late, great Romano Puppo) and everyone else they encounter, dress exclusively in street clothes, and don’t give shit one about any collateral damage they cause while doing their job.  The film does manage to balance these two perspectives (gritty, yet overwrought) fairly well, but it also piles on plot points nigh unto the breaking point.  In fact, once you add on the idea that a Russian spy named Vladimir has infiltrated the American armed forces, may or may not be a heroin dealer, and may or may not have had a hand in or is just spreading rumors about the village massacre and what any of this has to do with the initial murders, your head will be spinning, especially since the filmmakers don’t care about connecting scenes or ideas until it’s absolutely necessary.  Luckily, the aspects of the film that work (Mattei knows his way around action sequences, and there is a quasi-Noir angle that I enjoyed) do so well enough that the labyrinthine story and the writhing the script has to do in order to attempt resolving it become like frosting on the multi-flavored layer cake that is Cop Game.

MVT:  Huff loves giving everybody guff (yes, I made this sentence rhyme; sue me).  He is jaw-clenchingly anti-everything, so much of the joy in watching his character do his thing lies in how relentlessly hard-headed he is in every single way.

Make or Break:  Without giving away exactly why it’s so outstanding, there is a car chase in this film that I would attest can stand up to any in the history of cinema.  Okay, that’s an outright lie, but it’s so much damned fun, I couldn’t help loving every second of it.

Score:  6.5/10     

Street People (1976)

Let’s talk for a moment about some of the great sunken (facial) cheeks in cinema history.  Now, they can be of any nationality, but in my opinion, the best ones are from Europe, Britain to be more precise.  For my money, no one, but no one, had a greater set of sunken cheeks than Peter Cushing.  The same man who destroyed Dracula and reconstructed Frankenstein’s monster on a multitude of occasions also had a facial structure that could be as couthie as it could be menacing.  Sure, the indented cheek look has become indicative of the drug-addicted, zombified, and just plain dead (have a look at Lon Chaney’s iconic makeup for 1925’s The Phantom Of The Opera, if you doubt, and yes, I know the Phantom was not actually dead, but he was meant to evoke the look of a deceased person), but there was a time when the sunken-cheeked were held in a higher regard.  

Giving the impression of aristocracy, I always expect any (male) royalty to look like Mr. Cushing (even though according to Wikipedia, he was made an Officer in the Order Of The British Empire but was never knighted and therefore denied use of the honorary title “Sir,” a travesty, if you ask me) or Henry VIII (all chubby and beardy).  There have been runners up, to be sure.  Ernest Thesiger appeared as severe as the taut skin stretched across his skull.  Ron Wood looks like he belongs more in a chartered accountant office than behind a guitar.  But it is Roger Moore whose cheeks actually come closest to embodying the duality that Cushing’s did so effortlessly, I think.  For the life of me, though, I always think he’s sucking them in, sort of the cuckoo of the sunken cheek set.  Maybe it’s all in my head, maybe Moore’s cheeks are like that naturally, but I just don’t believe so. 

Mafia boss Salvatore (Ivo Garrani) receives a visit from nephew, lawyer, and polyglot Ulysses (Moore, whose British accent is explained with the exposition that he was sent to school in England) to go over some paperwork involved in finally making Sal’s business legit.  Meanwhile, a massive cross which was imported by Sal from Sicily is unloaded at the neighboring dock for the sake of the fishermen and blessed by priest and former pal of Salvatore, Frank (Ettore Manni).  That night, the crucifix is stolen from the dock by Nicoletta, Pano, and Fortunato (Fausto Tozzi, Pietro Martellanza, and the great Romano Puppo, respectively) and opened to reveal a cache of heroin with which the trio absconds.  Infuriated that someone would use something he was responsible for to smuggle drugs into America without his knowledge, Salvatore approaches capo di tutti capi Don Continenza (Ennio Balbo), who puts out the order to have the three scalawags caught.  Reaching out to frequent partner and Formula One race car driver Charlie (Stacy Keach), Ulysses sets about tracking down the heroin, the thieves, and the person behind it all.

Maurizio Lucidi’s Street People (aka Gli Esecutori aka The Sicilian Cross) is a sort of odd duck in the Eurocrime subgenre.  There is a lot of footage that genuinely appears to have been shot on location in California (predominantly San Francisco) and involving some complicated car stunt work (the car scenes apparently being the ones shot and directed by Guglielmo Garroni), which would seem to indicate that a decent chunk of change was spent in the production (although  I couldn’t locate anything definitive in regards to the film’s budget for this review).  The film also has a light, adventuresome ambience, which is only augmented by the interplay between Moore and Keach.  

By 1976, Moore had established his more tongue-in-cheek/campier take on James Bond in Live And Let Die and The Man With The Golden Gun, and his charming twofistedness bleeds into these proceedings.  By that same token, Keach had also established his gruff-but-endearing demeanor and sense of humor in such work as The Gravy Train (aka The Dion Brothers), and he is much more the rough side to Moore’s stiff upper lip.  Working against the film, though, is a script which is wildly convoluted and confused in keeping track of which characters are being referred to at any given time.  Granted, the version I watched is, by all accounts, the shorter of two by about thirteen minutes.  It’s within the realm of speculation that the protracted runtime clears up some aspects or constructs a more connected story, but since the longer of the two is seemingly the Swedish cut, I’d wager it’s just thirteen added minutes of hardcore pornography (just kidding).      

Anchored by the dichotomy between Moore and Keach, the film is filled with such juxtapositions.  The first and most obvious is that of the criminal versus the clergy.  Sal and Frank were close friends in Italy, but their paths diverged, so the two resent each other, though Sal still craves forgiveness and acceptance from his erstwhile amigo.  But as is typical in such films, it’s the priest who possesses the iron will to not buckle, no matter how he may feel about his friend deep down.  It’s interesting to note here that Frank really does feel nothing but contempt for Sal.  There is no redemption for the old Mafioso (at least in the eyes of this particular clergyman), despite his aim to reform and get out of the Organization.  As the search goes on, Charlie is placed as the street level everyman both in look and function.  He talks jive with an old drug pusher (trying to “get to Dream Street, Mama”) and his buddy Chico (Charlie threatens to spread the word that Chico is “a turkey deluxe”) who inhabits a strip club where the racer is well-known (the significance being that Charlie is a man who cannot control his desires/emotions like Ulysses can).  Of course, Ulysses is always meticulously dressed and always in control.  He is as skilled physically as Charlie, but his first weapon is his mind.  The two are further joined/separated by their motivations.  Charlie is doing this work simply for the bread.  He is mercenary in his actions.  Ulysses is also interested in the money, but he will work for free if it means his honor is threatened or he needs to take care of “a family matter” of one variety or another.    

   

It’s this sense of honor which is most at risk in Street People.  There is a pall of duplicity hanging over every frame of the film, and we expect every single character to have ulterior motives for what they do.  We expect them all to be villains at heart, and that they’re not (there’s really only one, to be honest) is an intriguing subversion of audience assumptions.  Even Ulysses is not completely honest with the people he claims to love like family, but this plot path ultimately just peters out and fades away.  When everything is revealed at the climax, though, it’s all so simple and relatively obvious, the whole excursion feels just a little like a waste.  That the film doesn’t hold together at its core isn’t the worst thing that could happen, since the individual elements/scenes work well enough in and of themselves that by the end credits, the film is not quite adiaphorous and in fact leans more toward satisfying than offputting.  But if you’re looking for coherence, seek it elsewhere.

MVT:  Keach’s onscreen portrayal of Charlie is just big enough without going too over the top.  His constant jabs at Ulysses (treating him with a sense of faux reverence and reminding him that he can be a pompous ass, a trait Ulysses seems to embrace) are an amusing way to define the relationship between the two.  Plus, any character that can talk as much jive as well as Charlie can has to be cool, right?

Make Or Break:  The Make is the scene where Charlie takes a car for a test drive around the streets of San Francisco (you can imagine what happens).  It’s funny, and well-shot, and impressive for what they accomplished onscreen.  It’s essentially a non-car-chase car chase scene, and it worked superbly for me on all levels.

Score:  6.25/10

 

Commandos (1968)

Sgt. Frank Rock and "the combat-happy Joes" of Easy Company (with nicknames such as Bulldozer, Ice Cream Soldier, Wildman, and so on) were created in 1959 by writer Bob Kanigher and artist Joe Kubert for DC Comics' Our Army At War #83 (though the Rock character had existed in a couple different variations going all the way back to that January's G.I. Combat #68). It's been debated that Bob Haney wrote the first appearance of the Rock in Our Army At War #81, drawn by Ross Andru and Mike Esposito, but that was more an early model for what would come shortly. Most, if not all, of the Sgt. Rock stories center on the eponymous character either teaching an object lesson (typically to a new member of Easy Co., where "nothin' ever comes easy") or being taught one (typically by a new member of Easy Co.). Rock liked being a sergeant. He liked being in the field with his grunts. He disdained desk jockey officers, and often pushed them to the point of flagrant insubordination. These tales can be a bit one-note, especially when read back to back, but let's face it; they were never intended that way, and for a kid rummaging through the comics at the local corner store, they were straight from heaven. With that in mind, I would like to simply say rest in peace and thank you to Mr. Kanigher and Mr. Kubert. You made it look easy.

The year is 1942. A ragtag group of soldiers have been gathered under Sgt. Sullivan (Lee Van Cleef) and his right hand man Dino (Romano Puppo) to execute the plan of Captain Valli (Jack Kelly). The Captain's "Operation: Torch" calls for the men to quietly take over an oasis in Africa currently occupied by the Italian army in the service of Germany's Army Corps Africa, where oil wells have been tapped to keep the enemy's Panzers on the move. The men put on happy faces and take in the Germans, including Oberleutnants Rudi (Götz George) and Heitzel (Joachim Fuchsberger, billed as Akim Berg), while trying to keep the remaining Italians, led by Lt. Tomassini (Marino Masé), from escaping and putting the sprags to the whole mission and maybe even losing the war for the Allies (okay, not really). 

At its core, Commandos (aka Sullivan's Marauders) is director Armando Crispino's Macaroni Combat cash-in on The Dirty Dozen. However, the script (co-written by Dario Argento from a story by Menahem Golan) takes some noticeable (and in its own way, distinctly Italian) departures from the American model. The set up requires the American soldiers to be fluent in Italian to pull off the sham (essentially a play on the Battle of the Bulge, where German soldiers masqueraded as Americans), but here the soldiers are generally indistinct from one another. There is no Franko, no Wladislaw, not even a Vladek. These men are a group, and aside from the more senior characters, it's difficult to tell them from the enemy. The only real exception to this is Aldo (Giampiero Albertini), who plays an integral part in the finale and summation of the film. It seems to me a shame to waste such talented character actors as Puppo and Pier Paolo Capponi, but there you have it. I suppose their colorful faces were enough for the filmmakers (and it should be said there's a certain value in that, as well).

Sullivan dislikes officers, as most cinematic non-coms are wont to do, but his animosity reaches levels of outright insubordination and physical menace that would have any other soldier shot. He has his reasons, of course, but his initial confrontation with Valli feels misplaced and uncalled for, at best. So of course, Sullivan will be proved correct. What's frustrating is the amount of vacillation that goes on with Sullivan wanting to alternately kill Valli and carry out his orders. It can be argued that this was intentional; an attempt to show the conflict taking place inside the sergeant, but the way it's handled by Crispino, it comes across as a matter of convenience. When it makes for dramatic conflict, Sullivan will defy Valli, and when it's time to kill Nazis, they're pals.

This defiance extends from Sullivan's back story. As a character, he is emotionally damaged; quasi-psychotic, even. He blames his traumatic experience on an officer who was willing to sacrifice his men to get commendations for himself. At multiple points, Sullivan becomes bloodthirsty, wanting to slay everything in his path. He projects his past onto the present, and in his mind, he is taking revenge for what happened not only to him but also to his platoon, which we must assume included at least a few close friends (of which we know Dino is definitely one). But there's a difference between sacrificing oneself and being sacrificed. Sullivan knows the difference. Valli does not, and while the end has a reconciliation of a sort between the two men (as it must for this type of film), it feels superficial and tenuous. Perhaps a non-resolution of the tensions between the men could have made for a more nuanced conclusion; a more realistic depiction of the eternal relationship between those who lead and those who are lead (the man on the ground understands the relationship perfectly, while the one above him can't grasp it on account of his perspective and distance from his subordinates, necessary or not). The filmmakers' representation of this, however, lacks the definition needed to provide a solid sense of closure by film's end. 

The production value of the film is quite high, and the film (an Italian and German co-production) puts every penny up on the screen. Crispino shows a deft hand at directing large-scale action (the most important aspect of which is maintaining a sense of space, I would argue), and the battle scenes are great to watch. He fills the frame when appropriate and focuses on individual acts when appropriate. By that same token, the director also shows an aptitude for directing the stealthy, quieter scenes which generate the suspense on which the entire film is structured. The acting is solid all-around, though it does veer off into the overwrought at several points (but let's face it; that's half the fun). Also of interest is the film's score by Mario Nascimbene, which consists largely of variations on Franz Liszt's Totentanz (aka Dance Of The Dead) and provides a layer of both foreshadowing as well as a bit of punctuation on the film. So, while the film is nothing all that original, it does have enough European flourishes to make it interesting for casual viewers and cinephiles alike. My recommendation is for you to commandeer Commandos for yourself and give it a spin (see what I did there?).

MVT: The whole movie is loaded not only with tense scenes but also with an air of tension overall. Crispino and company manage to make it just bearable enough to sustain interest, without becoming off-putting and stale.

Make Or Break: The Make is the scene when a certain soldier buries another soldier (I'm trying not to give away anything here). It doesn't quite attain heights of heart-string-pluckery, but it is effective. It also illustrates the film's larger theme slightly better than the very end, which was well-played but felt more like an afterthought than anything else, to me. 

Score: 6.5/10
 

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