The Italian cult-directors from the seventies were genius, but also as unstable and unpredictable as the weather in my home country. Take Fernando Di Leo, for instance. With "Milano Calibro .9", "La Mala Ordina", and "Il Boss", he directed three of the toughest and most relentless crime-thrillers ever made, and so I obviously expected for his "Colpo in Canna" to be just as violent and brutal in tone.
But what do you know, the cheerful musical tunes that accompany the opening credits immediately reveal that this will be a much more light-hearted and comical effort than usual from this director. "Colpo in Canna" is indeed a bizarre and wildly uneven mishmash of comedy (I even daresay slapstick), sexploitation, mafia thriller, and Poliziotesschi. These are genres/styles that are absolutely difficult to blend, and therefore it's probably the weakest Di Leo that I have seen (only "Avere Vent'anni" is worse).
The best way to describe "Colpo in Canna" is like a very loose interpretation of "Yojimbo" and "A Fistful of Dollars", with airline stewardess Nora Green (Ursula Andress) evoking a gang war between the two rivaling drug cartels in Naples and getting a lot of benefits out of it herself. The tone of the film is wildly uneven, and changes often and abruptly. After the jolly opening tunes, there's a nasty sequence in which Andress' character gets brutally beaten up by the gang led by Woody Strode. The middle section is soft in tone, and mostly features random footage of Ursula Andress having sex or parading around fully naked. I simply must state that she's amazing to gaze at! The actress who became world famous as the first Bond-girl in "Dr. No" was 39 years old in 1975, but her body looks as fit as that of a 25-year-old, and she certainly isn't too prudish to show it! The last half hour then turns into pure slapstick, with a (massively overlong) fighting battle between the members of the two gangs on a fairground, a (massively overlong) and unrealistic car chase in the streets of Naples, and too much screentime for comic relief actor Lino Banfi in a dual role as clumsy police commissioner and horny taxi driver.
Ursula Andress, who clearly enjoyed her whacky role as the floozy man-eating stewardess very much, forms the main reason for cult-fanatics to seek out this "Colpo in Canna", but admittedly some of the stunts and the fairground and the impressive torso of Woody Strode are highlights as well.
