This one is kind of all over the place when it comes to general tone, but it does feature one of the most complex bad guy character in Eurocrime, and that man is played by Tomas Milian, and Tomas Milian has the most ridiculous haircut I have ever seen. It's an afro so tight it looks like a gigantic blackberry sitting on his head.
Milian plays the philosophical thief and gang leader Trashy, who runs a restaurant in Rome as a front for his gang and his thieving lessons he gives out (under the acronym F.I.G.A, figa being the Italian word for fanny (UK meaning)). Trashy's not a bad guy. He's got a young kid to a neurotic wife and constantly has one-way conversations with the kid about how much he's changed his life. Don't expect me to tell you about them because look like they were cut for dubbed versions, so all we get is the Italian track for them.
On the other side of the crime coin is Luc Merenda, a hard case cop who knows about trashy but is much more interesting in bringing down the gangster Belli, who is far more violent than Trashy, and Franco Citti, whom he suspects of murdering a politician. Merenda, plus sidekick Massim Vanni who once again seems to be wearing the same jacket he's worn in several of these films now, do their best to bring all these bad guys to justice.
On one hand this film is full of the usual violence, gunfights, shootouts and such like, but then there's a lot of humour in it too, mostly down to Milian and his group of amateur and not very good thieves. His character is the most complex, and although the humour stays there until the last frame, its Milian who goes on the greatest personal journey as he learns that teaching young guys to steal can sometimes have dire consequences.
Not that Stelvio Massi skimps on the violence though. Both Merenda and the guy who plays Belli gun down a fair few people, so every fan of the old Eurocrime genre should get something out of this one.
