Poliziotteschi: the Italian cop film, 1973 to 1980

In Almost Human (1974) a small-time crook kidnaps an industrialist's daughter and the ransom drop comes apart in blood. Nobody in a Milan cinema needed the mechanics explained. In July 1973 the sixteen-year-old grandson of the richest private citizen in the world had been dragged off a street in Rome, and when the family dithered over the money the kidnappers cut off part of his ear and posted it to a newspaper. It arrived three weeks late, held up by a postal strike. When J. Paul Getty finally paid, he handed over exactly $2.2 million, the most his accountants could make tax-deductible, and lent the balance to the boy's own father at four percent interest. The poliziotteschi, the run of Italian crime and cop films that lasted from roughly 1973 to 1980, are usually accused of whipping up a panic. Most of the time they were a step behind the news.

The fear was not set-dressing

Italy called the decade the anni di piombo, the years of lead. It opens with the bomb in Milan's Piazza Fontana on 12 December 1969, which killed seventeen people in a bank at closing time, and runs through more than ten years of political murder from both ends. Left-wing groups robbed, kneecapped and kidnapped in the name of revolution. Neofascists planted bombs in stations and on trains and arranged for the left to take the blame, a manoeuvre the country learned to call the strategy of tension. It peaked in the spring of 1978, when the Red Brigades took the former prime minister Aldo Moro, shot his five bodyguards dead in the street, held him for fifty-five days and left his corpse in the boot of a red Renault parked halfway between the two party headquarters he had spent his career trying to reconcile.

Under the terrorism ran ordinary crime that touched everyone. Ransom kidnapping became a Calabrian industry, the 'Ndrangheta running hundreds of victims across the decade, some held for months in the Aspromonte mountains while the lire were counted. Bag-snatching off the back of a speeding moped, the scippo, was common enough to have earned its own word. This was who filled the cinemas.

The template was American, the anger was not

Two films from 1971 handed the genre its grammar. Don Siegel's Dirty Harry supplied the cop who is right about everything and despises the rules that stop him proving it. William Friedkin's The French Connection supplied the documentary grime and a car chase staged for real in moving traffic. Death Wish added the armed private citizen in 1974. Italian producers took all of it and ran it through a country more frightened and more furious than Nixon's America had ever managed to be.

They had a respectable local ancestor to ignore. Elio Petri's Investigation of a Citizen Above Suspicion won the Academy Award for best foreign film in 1971, and Damiano Damiani had been turning out sober pictures about the Mafia and police corruption for years. Those were films of denuncia, the cinema of accusation, made by the Italian left to indict the state. The poliziotteschi kept the outrage and binned the conscience: the same corruption, the same violence, with none of the guilt about enjoying it.

The cop is always right and the state is always the problem

The formula barely varies. A commissario knows precisely who the criminals are and cannot lay a hand on them, because a magistrate keeps releasing them, a lawyer keeps citing their rights and a superior keeps demanding paperwork. So he stops asking permission. The Italian title of Almost Human is Milano odia: la polizia non può sparare, Milan hates: the police cannot shoot, which is the entire political programme of the genre printed across the poster.

The politics are reactionary and there is little point pretending otherwise. Week after week these films argue that democracy is too soft to survive its own criminals and that the cure is a hard man licensed to hurt people. The Italian left called them fascist and had the drift of the thing right. What muddies the charge is that the same films are frequently as contemptuous of the ministers, the bosses and the courts as they are of the crooks. The rage points everywhere at once and settles into nothing more coherent than a fist. Live Like a Cop, Die Like a Man (1976) is the tendency with its mask off, a pair of grinning special-squad cops on one motorbike who torture and kill their way across Rome while the film declines to disapprove. Ruggero Deodato directed it a few years before he took a crew into the jungle for Cannibal Holocaust.

A moustache, and a man who played both sides

The face of the genre, literally, is Maurizio Merli's moustache. Blond, blue-eyed and permanently livid, Merli looked so much like Franco Nero that Roman producers cast him in 1975's Roma violenta as essentially a Nero they could afford, and he spent the next five years playing the same incorruptible bruiser, usually a commissario named Betti, in film after film. He punches his way through Violent Naples (1976), the sequel to that first hit, for ninety minutes and stops for almost nothing.

Tomas Milian was the stranger and the better talent, because he worked both ends of the genre at once. Cuban-born and Actors Studio trained, he was its definitive psychopath: his kidnapper Giulio Sacchi in Almost Human is a whining, vicious coward with no charm laid over the top, one of the great repellent performances in Italian cinema, and he is frightening all over again as the hunchbacked villain of Rome Armed to the Teeth (1976). Then he turned around and built the genre's most beloved hero, a filthy, dialect-spouting Roman street cop nicknamed Er Monnezza, the trash, who eventually spun off into a run of broad cop comedies that did as much as anything to soften the whole cycle into farce. Franco Nero (Street Law) and the former stuntman Fabio Testi (Revolver, The Big Racket) filled out the bench.

Fernando Di Leo could actually write

If the cycle has an artist among the craftsmen it is Fernando Di Leo, who worked uncredited on the scripts of the first two Sergio Leone westerns and brought to the crime film a hard economy and a real argument. Milano calibro 9 (1972) opens his Milieu trilogy, The Italian Connection (1972) is the second, and The Boss (1973) closes it. In Calibro 9 an ex-con walks out of prison suspected by his old gang and the police alike of pocketing a payoff that vanished, Gastone Moschin plays him almost mute and coiled, and two cops conduct a running argument over whether crime is a private sin or the inevitable product of capitalism. The prog band Osanna drives it. The Italian Connection hands Mario Adorf one of the great physical performances in European film, a Milan pimp on foot who runs down the car of the American hitmen sent to kill him and tears it apart with his bare hands. Those two hitmen, played by Henry Silva and Woody Strode, are the acknowledged model for the pair of chatty killers in Pulp Fiction.

Di Leo's Revolver (1973) is the saddest thing the genre made. Oliver Reed plays a prison warden whose wife is taken to force him to spring a specific inmate, played by Fabio Testi; he breaks the man out, the two are chained together for the rest of the film, and Reed grinds himself to nothing chasing people who were never going to give her back. Ennio Morricone scored it with a theme so good that Tarantino lifted it wholesale for Inglourious Basterds.

The chases were real and so was the danger

What still makes these films move is that so little in them is faked. Rome had a genre economy geared to shoot a feature in three or four weeks, and the car chases were run on live streets in Rome, Milan and Naples at genuine speed, often without permits and always without a computer to fix a mistake afterwards. Enzo G. Castellari, the best pure action director the cycle had, studied Sam Peckinpah closely and it shows in his slow-motion carnage. His The Big Racket (1976) holds the shot that everyone who has seen it describes to everyone who has not, a camera bolted inside a car as thugs shove it, and the cop trapped inside, end over end down a hillside. Umberto Lenzi, who directed four of the films named in this piece and the cannibal pictures besides, shot fast and mean and never once looked calm.

The sound of the genre is the De Angelis brothers, Guido and Maurizio, who cut pop records as Oliver Onions and scored a huge slab of Italian genre cinema in wah-wah guitar and funk bass. Franco Micalizzi supplied most of the rest, all urgent brass and chase-scene momentum. The music is half the reason a mediocre poliziottesco is still watchable: the plot may be nonsense, but the score never stops insisting that something is at stake.

Why it burned out

The genre died at about the pace it was born. Some of it was plain exhaustion. By 1977 the films were repeating themselves and knew it, and The Cynic, the Rat and the Fist (1977) already plays as late-period fatigue, Merli and John Saxon trudging through a Rome that has run out of appetite for the game. Some of it was Milian, whose Er Monnezza comedies dragged the cycle toward slapstick and let the fear leak out of it.

The larger causes sat outside the cinema. The Moro murder in 1978 was the high-water mark of the terror that had fed the whole thing, and as the anni di piombo wound down through the early 1980s the hunger for two-fisted films about ungovernable streets went with it. At the same time the audience simply stopped coming. Italian cinemas sold over five hundred million tickets in 1975; by 1985 they sold a hundred and twenty-three million, less than a quarter, as deregulated private television arrived in every front room and kept the seats empty. The industry that had knocked these films out by the dozen could no longer pay for them.

Maurizio Merli made his last real poliziottesco in 1980 and dropped dead of a heart attack on a tennis court in 1989, at forty-nine.