1975, Italy. Starring Maurizio Merli, Richard Conte, Silvano Tranquilli, Ray Lovelock, John Steiner, Daniela Giordano. Directed by Marino Girolami. Written by Vincenzo Mannino.

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Enzo Castellari and Franco Nero, working with Dirty Harry as their inspiration, established the template for both the look and attitude of the genre that would soon become known as poliziotteschi, or simply enough, tough Italian cop films. High Crime remains one of the best poliziotteschi films, and one of the best action films of the 1970s, but it was in the wake of High Crime that the genre would find it's signature star and, eventually, it's star director.

As mentioned previously, Maurizio Merli was a good-looking young actor who experienced a bit of a career boost based on the fact that he bore a decent resemblance to megastar Franco Nero. As such, whenever someone wanted to make a sequel to or a quick knock-off of a Franco Nero hit, Merli would get the call. This first happened when Nero departed the popular "White Fang" adventure series and producers decided to carry on without him. Merli inherited the part, with producers hoping that after he grew some ragged mountain man scruff and threw on a frosty parka hood, no one would notice it wasn't Franco Nero until it was too late. When High Crime broke, it was only a matter of time before someone got the bright idea to port Maurizio Merli into the type of tough cop role that movie helped create.

Despite, at the time, not enjoying the same level of success as Franco Nero, Maurizio Merli was more than just some cheap knock-off Bruce Le/Bruce Li -- at least they didn't change his name to Franko Nero or Franco Niro or something. Merli was a solid actor with the same sort of rugged, dashing good looks. His moustache was at least as good as -- and quite possibly superior to -- Franco Nero's. But what really made him an excellent choice for the poliziotteschi genre were his eyes.

Now bear with me for a moment as I wax philosophic about ass-kicking Italian cops from the 1970s.


Although the character is often summed up simply as "the tough cop" or alternately "a cop on the edge," such simplistic descriptions conjure up, from our vantage point in the new millennium, a far shallower archetype that fails to embody or communicate the complexity that inhabited the character at its inception during the early 1970s. Keep in mind that in between the years of Dirty Harry and Inspector Belli, and where we stand now, we have a colossal wasteland known as the 80s and 90s, which took the basic concept of the good cop on the edge, drained it of any meaning, and transformed it into a bug-eyed, farcical lampoon; a stock character divorced from the vitality and meaning that it had when it was first created. After so many movies of that quality, we tend to think of them more than we think of the early progenitors of the character, when we mention the "cop on the edge," and it's easy as a result of our proximity to the low end of the bell curve, to forget that the character wasn't nearly so devoid of value, wasn't nearly as goofy and cartoonish, during the 1970s.

This purer, old-school "tough cop" is a far more difficult character to portray, and it takes a class actor to understand the role, then bring it successfully to the screen. It takes understanding that the character's toughness doesn't emanate entirely from his ability to box in the ears of young punks who deserve it; the toughness, rather, is rooted not just in the character's sense of two-fisted machismo, but also in the character's sadness. The poliziotteschi protagonist is the proverbial warrior with a broken heart. He has taken on the good fight, stood up for the world, and the world has broken his heart. It has shown him the ugliest of its many sides. It has ravaged and crushed him. And still, the warrior forges on, the sadness in his heart becoming a source of inspiration. He has seen the worst in people, but his compassion, buried under anger and gruffness and frustration, compels him forward. He is a cop on the edge because he must stand at the lip of the abyss and stare into it. He carries the weight of compassion on his shoulders, and no matter how often the world breaks his heart, he soldiers on, simply because he cares.

This is the mitigating factor for the poliziotteschi inspector and the poliziotteschi film in general. The cop on the edge is angry. He's bitter, perhaps even cynical. But these things are not his motivation. They are not the fire that keeps him going. It's his compassion, and his sadness, that keeps him on the street. It's easy to look at the poliziotteschi film and see little more than a glorification of brutality, vigilante justice, and right-wing paranoia -- aspects of the films that have always seemed difficult to square with the fact that many of the men writing and directing them were famously liberal in their views and presented us with cops with as much disdain for "the system" as the shaggiest of hippies. Sometimes, this dichotomy arose simply because the writer-director was goofing off, trying to make something so fantastically fascist that no one could possibly take it seriously. Other times, however, hints of fascism were disarmed to some degree by the fact that the poliziotteschi inspector wasn't fueled by a desire for authority or violence. He was fueled by an honest sense of justice and compassion for the victims, and in his quest to right the wrong, he sometimes lost focus on the lines of civility that should not be crossed. Often times, the poliziotteschi cop is as frustrated by and marginalized by the legal and political system as the thugs and terrorists he pursues. It is the sense of compassion for the innocent that keeps the inspector from tumbling over into the abyss and becoming what he has sworn to oppose.

Violent Rome attempts to tackle many of these concepts, though ultimately the end philosophical result is only partially developed and never fully sorted out. This was Maurizio Merli's entry into the poliziotteschi, playing Commissario Betti, directed by seasoned pro Marino Girolami -- who happens to be the father of Enzo Castellari. Action begins with a botched public bus robbery that results in chaos and, eventually, murder -- alerting the viewer before the credits have even finished of the two things this film is going to deliver in spades: mean, nasty violence and ham-fisted melodrama. For example -- the person murdered just happens to be a newlywed, and the other half of the union is waiting to meet them at the next bus stop. Violent Rome, obviously, isn't going to be a subtle film in how it presents on-screen action and violence or in how it shamelessly manipulates emotion and sentiment.

The crime introduces us to Merli's Commissario Betti, the picture-perfect poliziotteschi cop in a thick turtleneck, flared slacks, and a wide-collared trenchcoat. Like Franco Nero, he sports a bushy mane of blond hair and a thick 70s cop moustache the likes of which would make Tom of Finland swoon. As with most poliziotteschi, Violent Rome consists mostly of Maurizio Merli driving around and kicking ass. He'll box the ears of any hooligan with whom he crosses paths. Thieves? He'll beat your ass! Assholish drunken teenagers who turn to murder? He'll beat your ass twice then kick your teeth in. Rapists? He'll beat your ass three times, and then once more for good measure. Then he'll shoot you.

As is also always the case, his somewhat extreme methods bring him into conflict with lawyers and police superiors, allowing him to give the requisite "These are the only methods I know/Your system stinks and protects the guilty while letting the innocents die" speech that is de rigueur for all "cop on the edge" type films, but no one can deliver the speech like Maurizio Merli.

The street-level violent criminals chafe his hide plenty, but it's the decadent and corrupt officials sitting at the top, happy to let the world rot while they reap huge profits from the chaos with total disregard for how many innocent people are slaughtered in the process, that really steam Betti. Eventually, he encounters so much bureaucratic red tape and so many sleazy criminals protected by wealth and political connections that Betti simply hands in his badge and refuses to be an instrument of such a corrupt institution. In vowing to enforce the law, he thought he would be upholding justice. Instead, he was simply a cog in a machine that protected people with enough cash to buy protection while leaving everyone else hung out as food for the wolves.

He joins an organization of private citizens who are just as fed up with the lack of action by the officials. Merli and his vigilante group are pretty successful in kicking the ass of criminals the cops can't or won't go after. Of particular interest to the group is a circle of thugs protected by the politically and financially powerful families. But Merli cares not for social status. No amount of money can buy your way out of having him kick your ass. The actions of the group make them prey as well as predator. In a particularly nasty scene, the aging founder of the group is beaten mercilessly and forced to watch as a gang of thugs rape his daughter. Merli's best friend is exposed as an undercover and crippled. Merli himself becomes the target of frequent assassination attempts. But then, no one figured it would be an easy fight. If it was, the police would have done it.

Violent Rome is a brutal, cynical, often mean-spirited film populated by a wealth of despicable villains and set in a city where, apparently, every single street was the location of a shoot-out, mugging, or rape. It pushes the boundaries of on-screen violence and questionable taste even further than High Crime. The scene in which vigilante group Sartori (Richard Conte) is forced to watch his wife gang-raped is particularly evil, and this is the sort of movie that will let a crook gun down a group of singing school children simply because he hopes it will preoccupy the cops chasing him. Violent Rome is easily one of the meanest poliziotteschi, but the levels of naked violence it attains are so overwhelming so as to propel the film into a comic book like state where the violence ceases to have much more than a "holy crap, I can't believe they just showed that" impact. There's not enough time put into most of the characters to illicit any sort of emotional response from the brutality, so it exists more as a guilty Grand Guignol exercise in outrageous excess. Compared to High Crime, which managed to mix genuine sympathy for a character (the browbeaten commissioner) with highly effective cinematography and music to generate honest emotional involvement with the violence, Violent Rome comes across as a more over-the-top, but also clumsier study of the same territory.

Part of the problem is that Violent Rome lacks a cohesive narrative. There is, somewhere, an actual case, but the movie is structured as a series of disconnected and independent episodes that have, binding them together, nothing more than the fact that they serve to make Betti madder and madder. The supporting cast is half-heartedly developed as well, with no single quality foil ever emerging to plague Merli, meaning that it lacks the tapestry of involving characters that make better poliziotteschi compelling. And, most bald-face, Girolami shamelessly rips off the ending of his son's superior film almost shot-for-shot.

Violent Rome's weaknesses are evident primarily because the bar was set so incredibly high by High Crime. It was inevitable that most of the films rushing out of the gate wouldn't attain the loftly level of artistry and meaning that Castellari infused in his film. Violent Rome, had High Crime not existed, would be a solidly enjoyable and gritty action film. The direction is workmanlike, the acting is, for the most part, acceptable, and the script, while episodic, is still logical and engaging. The violence is so crazy, so mean, and so offensive at times, that almost becomes parody. Still, it's not a movie for those who are offended by a guy with a moustache and a gun beating the crap out of people.

What elevates Violent Rome is Maurizio Merli. His performance as Inspector Betti is phenomenal, and it has a lot to do with why this film was a huge success -- though gratuitous ultra-violence never hurts, unless, I suppose, you are the victim of gratuitous ultra-violence. Merli's Betti is an outstanding character, and he walks the line expertly between compassionate and devastatingly grim. Although the final scene is a direct rip-off of High Crime, it manages never the less to be very effective. High Crime sets the boundaries for what little success the poliziotteschi cop may enjoy. At the end of the movie, he has perhaps busted up the criminal ring he was pursuing, killed the chief villain, but other criminals wait in the wings to fill the void without pause. And the poliziotteschi hero stands on the street and realizes that, in achieving his goal, he has lost everything. Friends, family, hope -- he has had it all taken away from him, or he has sacrificed it all. Whatever may be the case, the end result is that he is left with nothing but his broken heart. Realizing this, often while staring at the grave of a loved one, he will sigh, let his shoulders droop for a fraction of a moment, then straighten himself, tighten the belt on his overcoat, and head back to the precinct to continue the fight.

Merli would continue the fight. Violent Rome, although a weaker film than High Crime, established Merli not just as a guy imitating Franco Nero, but as a megastar in his own right, who had taken a stock character and made it uniquely his own. Although what Betti does may be questionable, Merli's conviction in the character and his charisma as an actor make you believe, and they engage you in a way that the rest of the film never manages to do. As such, Violent Rome is not the best poliziotteschi, but it remains essential for a proper understanding of the genre because it introduces Maurizio Merli into the mix, and because, while not perfect, it's still a ripping good action film.

So now we have the template, and we have the actor who would become the face of the poliziotteschi film. What he needed now was to hook up with the right director. Although common sense would have you assume that would mean Maurizio Merli working with Enzo Castellari, common sense would be wrong in this case. Because the genre's best director would turn out to be a guy named Umberto Lenzi.

Continued...

Labels: Poliziotteschi, Stars: Maurizio Merli