A stylish, pulpy crime film; clearly influenced by BULLIT (Peter Yates, 1968) and THE FRENCH CONNECTION (William Friedkin, 1971) one of the several enticing collaborations between Enzo Castellari and Franco Nero (Keoma) , then one of the most popular stars and Europe, here handsome as always but with one of the worst dye jobs in the history of cinema.
The film co-stars Fernando Rey as a former drug kingpin, underlining the connection to FRENCH CONNECTION, now living out a retirement in luxury, devoting his attention to his hot-house, and the beautiful flowers that surround him adding to the colour and heat, evoking luxury and a certain corruption or degradation that recalls THE BIG SLEEP (Howard Hawks, 1946).
The film has brilliantly playful compositions that are always a pleasure to look at:
There’s a brilliant word-less opening, a tour de force of speed, chase, operatic use of zooms, brilliantly edited to convey excitement in motion:
The chase scenes, which might seem slow and clunky in the age of super-fast editing and CGI, seems to me more exciting than practically anything currently on-screen:
The images are elegantly composed to serve speed but usually also in a social context, here the crowd, a strike, as a place for the criminal to hide. Social context is interestingly deployed but both visible in the films and transformed into something else, real social problems here a background to action/spectacle:
The mise-en-scène is dazzling. Note here the frames within frames of every composition; then the way the reflection on water is itself used as a framed plane of action; and lastly, the use of colour to the focus the eye once the body falls into the water. I find it brilliant.
Another trans in Poliziotteschi:
Typical Castellari
A great popular success credited with popularising the poliziotteschi genre. Perhaps not a great work of art but certainly the work of an extraordinarily skilled director.
José Arroyo
