High Crime
High Crime is a 1973 film from Italy, Spain and France, directed by Enzo G. Castellari, running 93 minutes. reelscum files it under poliziotteschi.
- Year
- 1973 · 1970s films
- Runtime
- 93 min
- Director
- Enzo G. Castellari
- Updated
- 29 Oct 2026
- Obscurity
- cult (44/100)
- Also known as
- The Marseilles Connection · High Crime
Defined in the glossary: Poliziotteschi
Castellari's breakout in the genre, and Franco Nero furious for ninety minutes.
Enzo Castellari's first real poliziottesco and the film that pointed the whole cycle at Genoa's docks. Franco Nero plays a narcotics commissioner who goes after a drug syndicate with more anger than sense, and watches the case, and everyone near it, get ground up by people too powerful to touch. Castellari stages the chases with the Peckinpah-studying eye that would define his crime films, and Nero plays the whole thing at a rolling boil. The politics are the cycle's usual furious muddle, contemptuous of the courts and in love with the very brutality it condemns. One of the pictures that set the template every moustachioed Roman cop movie copied.
Trailer
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The cycle in depth
- Poliziotteschi: the Italian cop film, 1973 to 1980
A moustache, a Magnum, and total contempt for the courts.
Filed alongside
The Big Racket
Castellari's best. The car-rolling-down-the-hill shot is famous for a reason.
Almost Human
Tomas Milian as a repellent psychopath. Deeply unpleasant, very good.
Street Law
Castellari's Death Wish. An ordinary engineer, brutalised and ignored, arms himself.
Rome Armed to the Teeth
Maurizio Merli punches Rome for 100 minutes. Politics: incoherent.
The Italian Connection
Mario Adorf on foot versus a car. Best chase in Italian cinema.
Shoot First, Die Later
Di Leo's dirty-cop picture, and the rot goes all the way home.
Live Like a Cop, Die Like a Man
Two cops who are clearly the villains. Ruggero Deodato, before the jungle.
The Boss
Di Leo's most cynical crime film. A mob enforcer navigates a Mafia war where everyone is corrupt.
Revolver
Di Leo's saddest. Oliver Reed, and a Morricone theme that hurts.
The Violent Professionals
Martino sends Luc Merenda undercover and off the leash. Prime cop-on-a-rampage stuff.
Violent Naples
Merli takes his no-mercy cop routine to Naples. Fast, brutal, and politically incoherent as ever.
Cops vs. Thugs
Fukasaku again, arguing the two categories in the title are the same.