Hey! This is one of those late sixties Dirty Dozen rip-offs disguised as a Eurocrime film just to confuse me. Sure it's all about bootlegging and the tommy guns and zoot suits, but it's about five guys who break out of jail in order to infiltrate an enemy stronghold in a suicide mission. That's the plot of every sixties Italian war film ever made. Except Eagles Over London.
Let's look at our Dirty Five then - there's George Eastman as Irish, dubbed by a guy who is probably from Hampshire but read about Irish people one time. Then there's a mysterious guy who looks like Richard Harrison but isn't, Gaetano Cimarosa playing a...knife guy or something, and two other fellows, one an explosives expert and one of which is black so therefore Irish hates him. That's your crew - what you gonna do?
Wait - I forgot about the hooker lady they rope in to pretend to be starting a new job at the fortified bootlegging place they are supposed to be destroying, because instead of the usual Nazi citadel these neer-do-wells are roped in to attack, this time around they are working for a rival bootlegging firm led by Luciano Pigozzi (there's not enough of him in this film if you ask me). According to Luciano, there are only three bootlegging operations in the US and he wants to wipe the others out. He even has a high tech map hidden behind a picture for reasons that were lost on me.
As usual, there's a lot of fannying about before we get to the big battle at the end, so the film is filled with double crosses, a comedic bar fight, and an awful lot of racial tension between Irish and the other fella, but it really is just Battle of the Damned, Five for Hell, Churchill's Leopards all over again. Not the best.
