Tag Archives: Fabio Testi

The HEROIN BUSTERS/ LA VIA DELLA DROGA (Enzo, G. Castellari, 1977)

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Another Poliziotteschi by Enzo G. Castellari, a follow-up to THE BIG RACKET, just as sensationalist, just as sensational and also starring Fabio Testi. This one is clearly inspired by the French Connection fims and this time Testi plays an undercover cop trying to bust a heroin ring. The film begins with him buying drugs in Hong Kong, Amsterdam and New York before returning to Rome, where he gets busted, befriends a junkie in jail, and uses him as a conduit into the local dealers and couriers. David Hemmings narratively plays the detective who’s the only one in the know as to Testi’s true identity and purpose;  industrially he functions like Vincent Gardenia in THE BIG RACKET, as a box office hope of some Anglo-American exposure.

The film is beautifully shot with some dazzling panning zooms that involve very intricate framing knitted together marvellously in editing to maintain pace and usually ending on some striking composition:

An attempt at providing the sex the filmmakers think audiences wanted in that period is quite lurid but interestingly narrated. Are we being shown something actually happening behind a door or is it the boyfriends’s projected dream or a fear; or a combination of both?. See the exchange of looks the precedes the sex scene:

It features remarkable staging:

and marvellous set-pieces such as the one in the Rome metro, which must then have been in the process of being built:

A superb bike chase and shootout:

and some great stunts throughout, including this areal one:

The stunts remain so thrilling that they raise questions as to why the action sequences in contemporary action cinema usually aren’t. What is the effect of CGI on how audiences experience action/

Fabio Testi has a very particular ‘look’ in THE HEROIN BUSTERS, and I don’t remember anything quite like this from the 70s, flares yes, platforms yes, pointy collars yes, but those are for other people in this movie. He wears one outfit in the whole film — dressing or undressing the various components: knee-high boots with jeans and a long denim jacket tied in the middle with a thin scarf, lots of necklaces and a baseball cap. I don’t remember anything quite like it, like a Carnaby Street variant of 90s grunge. He’s supposed to play an undercover cop though everything about the outfit says ‘look at me!’

 

 

The ten years since Blow UP (Antonioni, 1966) had not been kind to David Hemmings:

The filming in front of things with characters in the background and the striking compositions seen in THE BIG RACKET are evident here too:

 

Every image is a pleasure to see, even in the most lurid contexts:

this film also features the on-location shooting seen in THE BIG RACKET, this time also as setting for spectacular set-pieces:

A real pleasure to see and I’m eager for more

 

José Arroyo

IL GRANDE RACKET/ THE BIG RACKET (Enzo G. Castellari, 1976)

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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?

Eavesdropping at the Movies: 260 – The Garden of the Finzi-Continis

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The winner of the 1971 Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film, Vittorio De Sica’s The Garden of the Finzi-Continis tells an aching story of doomed love within a wealthy Jewish community in Fascist Italy. The 1938 racial laws, enforcing the segregation of Italian Jews, have just been introduced, but the titular family’s titular garden offers insulation from the rising tide of fascism – for a while.

Mike finds the film’s love triangle somewhat banal, but is impressed with the subtly observed way in which the central characters allow themselves to remain comfortably ignorant of the increasingly hostile and dangerous Italy beyond their walls; comparisons to frogs in saucepans abound, not to mention the present-day normalisation of absurd corruption and violence in the Greatest Country in the World™. José is more keen on the romance, but still, the film’s sociopolitical side remains our focus. We consider the film’s use of physical space, the ways in which the Jewish characters can navigate it without being suspected by the racist public, but find themselves eager to retreat to safety as the film develops. We note that The Garden of the Finzi-Continis was made 25 years after the end of the Second World War, but 50 years prior to today: it’s now conspicuously an historical artefact that speaks to the time in which it was made, and whose proximity to the horrors it dramatises is necessary to keep in mind. And Mike reflects on his relationship with his Jewishness in this day and age, and how the film demonstrates that whatever divisions we may find among ourselves, to those who hate us, there’s no distinction.

It’s also Bonfire Night – well, the day after, but it’s a Friday evening so the festivities continue – and we celebrate by closing the window and trying to ignore the fireworks going off outside.

With José Arroyo of First Impressions and Michael Glass of Writing About Film.

 

Le tueur/ Killer (Denys de la Patellière, France/Italy, 1972)

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A narratively crude but visually elegant French cop flick, Le tueur is a fatalist noir that doesn’t psychologise and doesn’t explain. It’s told very leanly through a series of chases and shootings, often filmed on location, and well evoking the seedy underbelly of the Pigalle of the period, with its porn films, sex shops, shady cons. It’s got one musical motif, very effectively deployed throughout the film (and not to be confused with the dreary theme song at the end that sings out the themes of the film to us), and perhaps over-uses the zoom so characteristic of the period. Change is one of its themes, and we see it not only in the narrative  conflict between old and new styles of policing  but also in the film’s use of landscape and location. Le tueur is a document of Paris in the process of change, with the building sites that would become the Tour Montparnasse and the Forum des Halles used prominently and effectively.

Commissaire Le Guen (Jean Gabin) has spent seven years of his life catching ruthless killer Georges Gassot (Fabio Testi) only to find him judged mentally imbalanced and locked up in relative comfort. As the film begins Gassot, fakes his way through several tests and fights his way out of captivity. His brother François (Jacques Richard)is waiting for him outside and drives him away to the relative safety of Marseilles. However, Gassot can’t keep himself from going out of his hideout and into the city’s red light area, where he hooks up with Gerda (Uschi Glas), a prostitute from Hamburg but also gets spotted and returns to Paris with Gerda. François Tellier (Bernard Blier) puts pressure on Le Guen to catch him as quickly as possible and Le Guen, after seeing several of his ploys fail and only three months from retirement, places Fredédo Babasch (Gérard Depardieu) in jail so as to befriend François, who’s been caught, and help capture Georges.

Almost a century of cinema greatness in twenty seconds: Gabin and Depardieu share a shot.

            What’s unusual about Le tueur is that, as the title suggest, the protagonist is the killer. He’s not crazy but he’s ruthless. As the film begins we’re told that he’s fated to have bad luck. He knows it; even attempts to cut the bad luck line out of his hand with a knife; all he dreams of, dreams he shares with Gerda, is to get a bit of money and run off to a hot country. But it is not to be.

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Fabio Testi, is very handsome, very athletic, and very inexpressive. I found him perfect for the part. The film has Gabin, with watery grey/blue eyes that have seen everything and can hide as much as they reveal. His Le Guen is an old school strategist, not above trying to orchestrate events to get the justice he believes Gassot deserves and that the courts won’t grant him. There’s also Bertrand Blier as Le Guen’s boss, with his crushed hound dog face, every look an expression of disappointment and evocation that nothing good in the world will happen ever. In the last quarter of the film, Gérard Depardieu appears in one of his first roles, a live-wire whose every movement is energy, humour and hope. And in the middle, what they’re looking for, who they’re all chasing after is….a blank.

The world that this cypher, this bearer of bad luck, this dreamer who’s every attempt to realise that dream makes life more of a nightmare, is beautifully framed and lit for us by the great Claude Renoir in the Eastman colour that so vividly brings out certain blues and yellows and reds. Here, as is right, blue predominates. I’ve put a considerable selection of stills from the film, in chronological order, so you can appreciate, the compositions, the use of colour, the artful creation of this dark, blue, world that the film presents so well.

 

 

In spite of its cast and it’s look, the film has been accused of offering the same satisfactions as episodic television; a judgment I find harsh but understandable; how one appreciates this might depend on whether and how much one values lean spare storytelling and a relative lack of psychologising.

José Arroyo