At his best, director Ferdinand DiLeo was on par with great Italian genre directors like Bava, Argento, Fulci, and Sergio Martino. But he was also kind of uneven, especially when he got too far from his comfort zone of violent crime thrillers. Fortunately, he isn't TOO far away here. This is kind of like a sex comedy/parody of a crime thriller. It has a typical strong DiLeo plot: a stewardess is offered $100 to deliver a letter and finds herself involved in a Neapolitan gang war between drug traffickers, and has to outwit both sides (and the police) "Yojimbo"/"Fisftul of Dollars" style. Naturally this isn't nearly as good as one of DiLeo's serious crime thrillers, but if you take it as an Italian sex comedy, it's a relative masterpiece. Italian comic Lino Banfi has a dual role as a police chief and a cabdriver, and even though I've seen more of his films than any non-drunken Italian peasant from the 1970's should, this and Sergio Martino's "Creampuffs" were the only two where I thought he was actually funny.
I thought this was my first DiLeo comedy, but I found out from the accompanying documentary that a DiLeo film I saw earlier, "Mr. Scarface". was also supposed to be a comedy; it was so badly presented on public domain DVD I had no idea (I just thought it REALLY sucked). Nocturno really deserves kudos therefore because their presentation here really makes this movie (they have also released DiLeo's "La Seduzione" and Sergio Martino's similar comedy/crime thriller hybrid "Suspicious Death of a Minor"). Bond girl Ursula Andress made this film during her late 70's "Sensuous Nurse"/"Mountain of the Cannibal Gods" phase when she was regularly throwing all her clothes to the wind. One of the guys in the documentary complained that she was "over-the-hill". Well, maybe compared to her 20- year-old self in "Dr. No", but compared to 99.9 percent of twenty year olds and pretty much 100 percent of forty year olds, she stacks up pretty well. (She's a lot sexier than Jack Palance in "Mr. Scarface" at any rate). The supporting cast includes Marc Porel from "Live Like a Cop, Die Like a Man", hulking African-American actor Woody Strode from DiLeo's "Manhunt", and, of course, Banfi. This is not Dileo's best movie by a long shot, but you could certainly do worse.
