High Crime

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.