The Violent Professionals

Sergio Martino steps away from the giallo for a while and turns in one of the meaner entries in the Italian cop cycle. Luc Merenda plays a detective kicked off the force who goes undercover inside a robbery-and-murder gang to avenge the boss gunned down in front of him, and losing the badge is mostly a licence to hit harder. Martino shoots Milan cold and grey and stages the car chases and shootouts with a giallo craftsman's eye for a clean sequence. Richard Conte lends it a whiff of the American gangster picture the whole genre was busy rewriting. Fast, brutal and untroubled by second thoughts, the register the poliziottesco lived and died in.