(There Are Some Spoilers) Light hearted crime movie that seems to have a wedding music soundtrack, even though some dozen people are brutally killed in it,about a robbery ring in Rome who end up getting way over their heads when they rob big time US mobster Norman Shelly, Jack Palance, of 5 million dollars in cash, or did they?
Shelly has his hoods track down one of the robbers at a pool hall where he's savagely beaten to death. The head of the ring the Barron, Guldo Mannari, tries to have the cash fenced into Italian Liars and US Traverlers Checks but is ambushed, at the fences office, by undercover cop Nico Giraldi, Thomas Millan. After a ten minute slug-fest the Barron is arrested and cuffed and later sent to the hospital as bait to get the Shelly gang to kidnap him to find out where he hid the money, which in reality Nico and the Roman PD. Grabbed by the Shelly mob, disguised as hospital workers, they get the information that they want from the Barron who tells them that the money is hidden in this old abandoned iron factory. Nico and the Roman police set up an ambush there of the Shelly Mob and after a wild shoot out and car motorcycle chase, with Nico on the bike,Shelly escapes from justice to the US Embessy in Rome!
We then find out that Norman Shelly is not just an American mobster in Rome but a high placed and Senior American diplomat, Richard Russo, at the US Embessy there and has immunity from arrest as long as he's at the American compound. Even though Nico can't arrest Shelly/Russo right then and there but gives the big time hood/diplomat something to remember him by with a hard kick in the midsection. It's also reviled, like Nico suspected, that Shelly/Russo was actually in charge of the robbery gang that robbed him of his 5 million dollars which was the result of a ransom that mobster/kidnapper Shelly/Russo got a while back. This was done to have the money later laundered by the fence and returned back to him clean and unmarked.
Thomas Millan as Nico styled himself after the NYPD crusading policeman Frank Serpico in the movie "Cop in Blue Jeans". Nico had a giant poster of Al Pacino as Serpico in his shabby apartment. The girls and young women in the movie went completely Ga-Ga over him, like they would have done over the handsome and heroic Frank Serpico. Nico also has a pet white rat in the movie that he aptly named Serpico. There was also a sub-plot and love interest, for Nico, in the film involving young and pretty book publisher Signora Callani, Maria Rosaria, who's important Russian novel manuscript was stolen.
Nico being a former crook before he joined the Rome police Department got the manuscript back to Signora by using his long out of practice and dormant pick-pocketing skills.
