Saw Enzo G. Castellari’s IL GRANDE RACKET/ THE BIG RACKET last night, my first POLIZIOTTESCHI – originally a disdainful term, like SPAGHETTI WESTERN – to describe popular homegrown crime films influenced but seen as derivative of American Crime movies. This one is about racketeers brutally extorting small businesses around the Piazza Navona with some very evocative on-location shooting.
The film is beautifully shot by Marcelo Maclocchi, one of those ‘every frame a painting’ type of movie, but also one where this type of aesthetic is least likely to find a home, a bombastic action movie, crude in characterisation, with melodramatic situations taken to loopy heights ( see the nun in the car bit). The contrast between the artistry involved in creating the look and movement and the crudeness in the writing of ‘themes’ and character is quite startling.
This would rank quite high in my list of most violent movies I’ve seen, not because of what it shows, we’ve seen it all before — and much more graphically — but because of the relish with which it acknowledges moral and psychological violence and punctuates scenes with their transgression. It’s a film in which it’s not enough to rob, kill, rape and pillage, you’ve then also got to see the relish with which the goons urinate on their victims as relatives watch.
How to Agitate a Mob:
Clearly influenced by DIRTY HARRY and DEATH WISH, it was accused of being fascist when first released. It is about a cop (Fabio Testi) so frustrated in his work by corrupt higher ups that he enlists the victims of the racketeers to fight gangs (there’s a bit of THE DIRTY DOZEN in this as well). I think the politics are a bit more complex than this (there is a scene of horrors an unruly mob may inflict when manipulated by gangsters). It’s also seen as a reflection of the YEARS OF LEAD in Italy, that period of gang wars and kidnappings in the 70s where it seemed to some that Italy was becoming a failed state and again, though it would be too simple to see it as pure reflection there are definitely elements of that context that feed into the film and are interestingly mediated by the narrative.
The reason to see it now is that it’s thrilling to see both for the way it stages action and for the way it films it. The action scenes are super and must be amongst the most beautiful and thrilling every filmed. Characters are often shot through something, framed in the background, always in movement to or away from the camera, as stuntmen do incredible things over-head or on the side, actions and their effects immanently evoked, a clear sense of what’s at stake in each deadly beat.
THE FAMOUS CAR ROLLOVER SCENE:
Other things that caught my eye: Vincent Gardenia is wonderful as a jovial gangster and lightens up every scene he’s in; one of gangsters is a woman played by Marcella Michelangel, even more evil and chilling than Mercedes McCambridge in TOUCH OF EVIL; her character doesn’t just want to watch, she wants to do. Lastly, and superficially, has a crime film ever featured as many gorgeous men as this one?
