The Poliziotteschi Canon

In December 1969 a bomb went off in a bank on Piazza Fontana in Milan and killed seventeen people. The investigation blamed anarchists, then blamed neo-fascists, then produced decades of trials that convicted almost nobody, and Italy spent the following ten years watching its state fail to explain itself. That decade got a name — the anni di piombo, the Years of Lead — and it also got a film genre, because the Italian industry has always metabolised the national mood into product faster than anyone else.

Dirty Harry and The French Connection both landed in 1971 and gave the Italians a template to strip for parts. What came back was different in a way worth being precise about. The American cop films are about one man’s frustration with procedure; the poliziotteschi are about a country where procedure is a joke told by people who are in on it. The commissario in these films rages at something further up: he knows the man he arrested this morning will be released by lunchtime through a phone call he will never hear, placed by someone whose name will never appear in a file.

Roughly three hundred of them exist between 1971 and 1980. Most are terrible. These ten are the argument for the rest. The genre’s shape and its politics get the full treatment in the poliziotteschi, Italy’s answer to Dirty Harry; this is the watchlist.

The Di Leo bloc

Fernando Di Leo is the reason the genre deserves a canon rather than a shrug. He wrote for spaghetti westerns through the sixties, including uncredited work on A Fistful of Dollars, and he brought their moral flatness to the city.

Milano calibro 9 (1972). The best film in the genre and one of the best crime films of its decade anywhere. Gastone Moschin plays Ugo Piazza, released from prison, silent, immovable, suspected by everyone of having stolen 300,000 dollars he insists he never took. Mario Adorf’s Rocco beats people with terrifying enthusiasm; Barbara Bouchet dances; the prog band Osanna supply a score that lurches between menace and lament. The opening sequence — a package passed hand to hand through Milan, the camera never breaking rhythm, ending in a quarry with three people and a stick of dynamite — tells you the whole system in four wordless minutes. Di Leo’s real subject arrives in the last five, and it recasts Ugo’s silence completely.

The Italian Connection (1972). Adorf again, promoted to lead, playing Luca Canale, a small-time Milanese pimp marked for death by an American syndicate that sends Henry Silva and Woody Strode to do it. Silva and Strode are magnificent — a double act of bored professionals who cannot understand why this idiot will not simply die — and Adorf’s performance builds from comic bluster to the single most sustained rage in Italian cinema. The car-park chase, in which he runs down a man by driving a car at him through a scrapyard for what feels like a full minute, is the genre’s ne plus ultra of physical commitment.

Il boss (1973). Di Leo’s coldest. It opens with Henry Silva firing a grenade launcher into a private cinema and killing an entire mafia faction mid-screening, and it never warms up. Silva plays a hitman navigating a Palermo where the police, the politicians and the families are the same people wearing different jackets. The film was prosecuted in Italy for defaming the state, which is the most sincere review it ever received.

The cop as blunt instrument

Execution Squad (Steno, 1972). The starting gun, and the one everyone skips. Enrico Maria Salerno plays a commissario investigating a wave of vigilante killings and discovers, to his horror, that the vigilantes are police. Steno was a comedy director, and the film ambles where the later cycle sprints. Its value is the genre’s founding fear, stated plainly in year one and never really answered afterwards.

High Crime (Enzo G. Castellari, 1973). Franco Nero as a commissario in Genoa going after a drugs network, and Castellari discovering he can direct action. The film’s structure is a trap: every rung Nero climbs is answered by a hit on someone he loves, until the case stops being investigation and becomes attrition. Castellari shoots car chases with a genuine sense of weight — no undercranking, real Fiats destroying themselves — and the zoom-into-slow-motion he uses for violence became the genre’s signature tic.

Street Law (Castellari, 1974). Nero again, this time as a civilian engineer robbed and humiliated who decides to arm himself. It is the cycle’s most reactionary film and knows it; Castellari lets the revenge fantasy curdle by making Nero comically bad at violence, flailing, getting beaten, needing a criminal to teach him. The politics remain ugly. The self-awareness is real, and it is why the film survives.

Almost Human (Umberto Lenzi, 1974). The genre’s nastiest and best-acted. Tomas Milian plays Giulio Sacchi, a stupid, whining, cowardly kidnapper with no code and no competence, and Milian plays him without a single beat of glamour. Henry Silva is the cop. The film’s horror is that Sacchi kills constantly and pointlessly — he is a man who cannot stop making things worse — and Lenzi refuses him a single redeeming moment. Lenzi’s swerve from this material to the jungle is charted in Umberto Lenzi, from poliziotteschi to cannibals.

Violent Rome (Lenzi, 1975). The film that created the archetype. Maurizio Merli, moustachioed, blond, permanently furious, plays Commissario Betti resigning from the force to fight crime freelance. Merli spent the rest of the decade playing this man under different names, and his casting is a small joke on the genre — he looks so much like Franco Nero that producers used him as the cheaper option. Watch it for the shape rather than the depth.

The two odd ones

Revolver (Sergio Sollima, 1973). Sollima made three great spaghetti westerns and then this, and it is the genre’s most intelligent film. Oliver Reed plays a prison governor whose wife is kidnapped by people who demand he free one inmate, Fabio Testi. The two men handcuff themselves together and travel across Europe, and what begins as a hostage thriller becomes a study of two decent men being run by forces neither can see. Ennio Morricone’s “Un amico” plays over the ending, and Quentin Tarantino later lifted it wholesale for Inglourious Basterds. Sollima’s answer to the genre’s central question is bleaker than any shootout: the conspiracy does not need to be exposed, because nobody with the power to act on it wants to.

The Big Racket (Castellari, 1976). Fabio Testi’s commissario, stripped of his badge, recruits a squad of victims to fight a protection racket, and Castellari stages the result as a western. The set piece everyone remembers is a car being rolled down a hillside with the camera bolted inside it, spinning with Testi for ten unbroken seconds — a stunt shot without any obvious way of protecting the actor, which is precisely why it looks the way it does. The finale is a massacre and the film does not pretend it fixed anything.

The honest case against

A canon that ignores what these films are would be worthless, so: the cycle is politically indefensible for long stretches, and the defence usually offered for it is weak. The standard line is that the poliziotteschi only dramatise a public mood, and that the vigilante endings are diagnosis rather than prescription. That holds for Di Leo and Sollima. It does not hold for the Merli pictures, which are straightforwardly delighted by a policeman punching a handcuffed suspect, and which arrived in cinemas while actual Italian police were doing exactly that with actual impunity. Lenzi has a cop throw a man off a roof and the score celebrates.

The women fare worse. Barbara Bouchet and Florinda Bolkan are given about four minutes of interiority between them across the entire decade; the standard function of a female character here is to be threatened so a man can feel something. Almost Human stages a home invasion at a length that stops serving the film and starts serving the audience. Watch enough of these and you can feel the exact moment a director loses interest in his argument and starts shooting a punishment.

None of that cancels the good ones. It does mean the good ones are good in spite of the cycle, and that Di Leo’s reputation rests on his refusal of the very thing the genre sold — his cops are ineffective, his criminals are pitiable, and his endings deny the audience the beating it came for. The films worth keeping are the ones that noticed what the formula was for.

The craft under the sleaze

Three things make the cycle watchable half a century on. The first is the driving. Italian stunt teams of the seventies worked without CGI, without much in the way of safety rigging, and in real traffic — the chases have a scuffed, consequential quality because the cars are genuinely being wrecked and the streets are genuinely full of people. The second is the scoring. The De Angelis brothers, Morricone, Osanna, Luis Bacalov: these films get funk, prog and lounge instead of orchestral menace, which pushes the violence into a strange cool register the American films never found.

The third is casting, and it is where the genre’s ideology leaks. The heroes are almost always played by physically unremarkable men — Adorf is heavy, Moschin is middle-aged, Milian is short — while the villains are frequently beautiful. That inversion is doing political work. These films believe the well-dressed man in the good car is the enemy, and the crumpled man is the only one telling the truth, which is a poor guide to real policing and a fairly accurate summary of how Italians felt about their institutions in 1975.

The films are also, mostly, dubbed into English by people who never saw them, which flattens the performances into pulp. Watch them in Italian where the option exists; the English tracks did the genre real damage, a story covered in the dubbing of Eurohorror and what English tracks did to it.

Start with Milano calibro 9 and Revolver. If they take, the whole decade opens up. The genre’s respectable cousin — the same anger, awards, an art-house frame — is Investigation of a Citizen Above Suspicion, which won an Oscar for saying what these films said in car parks. Arrow and Raro keep the Di Leo titles in print. The murders in fashion houses were happening on the next soundstage, and the giallo canon is the sibling watchlist; the same crews, the same cars, a different reason to be afraid.