The Poliziotteschi: Italy's Answer to Dirty Harry

In 1972, two American films were doing enormous business in Italian cinemas. Dirty Harry had arrived from Don Siegel with Clint Eastwood explaining that the law protects the wrong people, and The French Connection had arrived from William Friedkin with Gene Hackman proving that a police procedural could be shot like a documentary and edited like a panic attack. The Italian industry watched the receipts and did what it always did, which was to build a filone — a current, a cycle, a run of pictures chasing whatever the last hit had proved.

What came out of that machine over the following eight years is usually described as an imitation, and the description flatters the American originals. The poliziotteschi took Hollywood’s chassis and dropped it into a country that was, at that exact moment, conducting a live experiment in state failure. The cycle is the most politically legible crime cinema of the 1970s, and it got that way by being made too fast and too cheaply to bother lying.

What was actually happening outside the cinema

The context is not decoration. Italy in the 1970s was living through the anni di piombo, the Years of Lead: a decade of political violence running from the Piazza Fontana bombing in Milan in December 1969 through to the murder of the former prime minister Aldo Moro by the Red Brigades in 1978. Armed groups operated on both the far left and the far right. Kidnapping for ransom became an industry, particularly in the north. Bank robbery rates climbed. The general sense that the state could neither identify its enemies nor protect its citizens was the ambient condition of Italian life, reported daily on the front page.

Harry Callahan’s frustration is philosophical — a screenwriter’s proposition about liberal jurisprudence, argued in a city where the institutions plainly work. Commissario Betti’s frustration is a wire-service item. The Italian films had a rotten system to keep up with.

Di Leo and the crime film as class analysis

Fernando Di Leo is the cycle’s serious artist, and he got there by refusing the cop almost entirely. His so-called Milieu trilogy — Milano calibro 9 (1972), La mala ordina (1972, released in English as The Italian Connection) and Il boss (1973) — is filmed from the bottom of the criminal hierarchy looking up.

Milano calibro 9 opens with a wordless sequence of a package of money moving through a chain of couriers across Milan, cut to a Luis Bacalov score performed with the Neapolitan prog band Osanna, and the sequence tells you the film’s entire thesis before a line of dialogue: crime here is a supply chain, and everyone in shot is an employee. Gastone Moschin’s ex-convict is a man who has done his time and wants his wages. Mario Adorf plays the muscle. Barbara Bouchet dances. The film’s cruelty is administrative.

La mala ordina is the one Quentin Tarantino has repeatedly cited, and it earns the citation with Henry Silva and Woody Strode as two American hitmen who are, in structure and function, the prototype for a pair of chatting professionals in a black suit and tie. Di Leo’s argument across all three pictures is that the bosses are respectable and the men who go to prison are poor, which is the sort of thing the Italian left was saying out loud in 1972 and which Hollywood crime cinema of the same year was translating into opera.

For the version of this argument that got an Academy Award, look at Investigation of a Citizen Above Suspicion — Elio Petri’s 1970 film about a police chief who commits a murder and then dares his own institution to notice, which won Best Foreign Language Film and demonstrated that the respectable end of Italian cinema was making the same accusation as the drive-in end.

Merli’s moustache and the problem it carries

The cycle’s face is Maurizio Merli: blond, moustached, permanently furious, introduced as Commissario Betti in Violent Rome (1975) and repeated across a run of near-identical roles for the rest of the decade. Merli’s Betti punches suspects, ignores warrants, and is proved right by the plot every single time.

This is the cycle’s genuine liability and it should not be waved away. A great many poliziotteschi are, in their politics, reactionary: they argue that procedure is a luxury, that magistrates are cowards, that the answer to political violence is a policeman willing to commit some. Made in a country where the far right was conducting a bombing campaign, that argument had a constituency. Critics at the time said so, loudly, and they were describing something real on the screen.

The cycle’s defence is that it is too incoherent to be propaganda. Umberto Lenzi’s Almost Human (1974) hands the film to Tomas Milian as Giulio Sacchi, a kidnapper of such squalid, whining incompetence that the film becomes a study of criminal stupidity, and the cop chasing him is an afterthought. Lenzi’s own Rome Armed to the Teeth (1976) puts Merli and Milian in the same frame and lets the villain out-act the hero by a wide margin. Enzo G. Castellari’s The Big Racket (1976) is a vigilante picture whose vigilantes are ruined people, and it knows it. The films kept accidentally sympathising with the wrong characters, because the actors playing the wrong characters were better.

The craft: what no permits buys you

Here is why these films still move when their American models have aged into film-studies texts.

The Italian units shot in real traffic. A poliziotteschi car chase is a stunt driver in a Fiat 124 or an Alfa Romeo Giulia going through a Roman street that has been closed for approximately nobody, with an operator hand-holding an Arriflex out of a window and pedestrians reacting because they are actually reacting. The zoom lens does the work a dolly cannot afford, snapping in on a face mid-sprint. The cutting is fast because the coverage is thin. Nothing is stabilised, and the instability reads as urgency.

Then there is the sound, or rather the absence of it. Like every Italian production of the period, these films were shot silent and post-synchronised, which meant the location could be chaos. It also means the scores carry an unusual weight. Bacalov’s work on Milano calibro 9, the De Angelis brothers’ driving cues, the wah-wah and Hammond organ that became the cycle’s signature — the music is doing the atmospheric work that live sound would have done, and it is doing it at volume.

The economics enforced the aesthetic. A film shot in five weeks with a zoom lens and no sync sound trades taste for immediacy.

The kidnapping picture, which had a waiting list

One sub-strand deserves separating out, because it is where the cycle stops resembling anything American.

Ransom kidnapping was a genuine northern Italian industry in the 1970s, run at scale, with the Anonima sequestri operating out of Sardinia and Calabria and hundreds of cases logged across the decade. Wealthy families kept the phone answered. The state eventually responded by freezing the assets of victims’ relatives to stop the ransoms being paid, which is a policy that tells you how normalised the crime had become.

So when Lenzi builds Almost Human around a man who snatches an industrialist’s daughter, he is filming the thing his audience read about at breakfast. The film’s horror is procedural: Sacchi is a chancer who has watched the successful kidnappers on television and concluded that the job looks straightforward. Everything that goes wrong goes wrong because he is stupid and frightened, and people die anyway. There is no American crime film of 1974 willing to make its antagonist that small.

The same realism runs through the bank-job pictures. The gangs in these films are improvisations: four men with a Beretta 92 and a stolen car who have decided that today is the day, and the poliziotteschi’s characteristic tone — a kind of exhausted contempt for everybody in frame — comes from that.

The floor of the cycle is very low

The honest reckoning: for every Milano calibro 9 there are five pictures that exist because a producer had a lead actor free for three weeks and a title that rhymed with a hit.

Dozens of these films are functionally interchangeable. The same Roman streets, the same warehouse punch-up, the same scene where the commissario is suspended by a superior in a good suit, the same zoom onto a screaming witness. Some run on outright plagiarism of the previous month’s success. The cycle produced roughly two hundred films in eight years, and a generous count of the ones worth a modern evening reaches perhaps twenty.

That ratio is the filone system working as intended. It funded Di Leo and Castellari by selling the other hundred and eighty, and anyone recommending the cycle owes you that arithmetic up front.

Where it went

The cycle burned out around 1980, as the filone system that fed it turned to the horror boom that followed Dawn of the Dead and, eventually, to television. Castellari made The Inglorious Bastards in 1978 and lent the title to a much later admirer. Milian went to Hollywood. Merli died in 1989, at 49.

The influence is easier to hear than to see. Tarantino’s debt is explicit and often stated. Nicolas Winding Refn’s Drive runs on the cycle’s rhythm section. The whole modern taste for a crime film that is grubby, propulsive and structurally pessimistic about institutions traces back through here as surely as it does through the anti-glamour American crime film of the same years.

Start with Milano calibro 9 — it is the cycle’s best film and its clearest statement. Follow it with Almost Human for Milian at full throttle and The Big Racket for Castellari’s staging. Then set them beside Dirty Harry’s American descendants and notice which set of films believes its own hero. Eastwood’s San Francisco has a system that could be fixed by removing one obstacle. Di Leo’s Milan has a system that is working exactly as designed, for the people it was designed for. Only one of those cities still looks like the news.