Vicious and ingenious Italian policier featuring Harvey Keitel as O'Connor, an almost impossibly surly New York detective on the take, who smokes fine cigars while basking in his one prized possession--a Central Park West apartment paid for with drug dealers' money. In what must be a comment on O'Connor's tunnel vision, the apartment is almost totally unfurnished--it's as if O'Connor blew his whole wad on the place, and had none left over to make it liveable. Narcotics-division cops are getting slaughtered by a serial killer, and one day a scrofulous, pouty British geek (John Lydon--that's Johnny Rotten to you) shows up at the illicit apartment, confessing to the crimes. O'Connor is sure Leo the Brit isn't the cop killer--but the kid has seen his illegal crash pad, so now what?
The director Roberto Faenza has made what is surely the most explicit movie ever about the homoerotic subtext of the policier genre. The first two thirds are a fiendishly crafty minuet of sudden reversals; the last is a sadomasochistic folie a deux that's closer to Pinter or Genet than Don Siegel. Lydon is shockingly effective as the pettish punk (he ought to have a cat to stroke); Harvey Keitel seems Harveyish for a while, until you start noticing his hundred strokes of physical inventiveness. A Scotch glass smashed to bits shocks O'Connor with his own unconscious fury; a pair of chopsticks O'Connor doesn't know how to use turn into Saharan spears crudely crucifying a spicy tuna roll. Sizing up the averages, Keitel has the coolest resume of any contemporary actors--and O'Connor goes up in that gallery of scream-like-a-moose Harvey angst right next to Matthew the Pimp, the shylock-pianist from FINGERS, and that very bad Lieutenant.
