1976, Italy. Starring John Saxon, Lee J. Cobb, Thomas Hunter, Renzo Palmer, Lino Capolicchio, Rosanna Fratello, Antonella Lualdi, Giacomo Piperno, Guido Celano, Alfredo Zammi. Directed by Stelvio Massi.

There's somethin' about John Saxon. No one can really describe it. Something, however, makes the man cool. It's easy to look at Bruce Lee or Maurizio Merli or Eddie Deezen and immediately recognize what makes them cool beyond belief, but John Saxon defies easy explanation. He's not bad looking, but he's not a knock-out of a man. He's looks sort of tough, but in the way your uncle who is big on hunting and fishing might look tough. It's a very regular guy kind of tough. Most of his movies kind of suck, and the ones that are good usually feature him in a supporting role as a minor villain or minor cop whose only job is to show to say, "Well, I'm stumped!" so the main actor looks all the more cooler when he figures things out.

And yet every time I see John Saxon's name in a movie that isn't one of the Nightmare on Elm Street films, it makes me happy. Maybe it's because Saxon's toughness is a very achievable, realistic brand of toughness. Well, up until the point where we're supposed to buy him as a kungfu bad-ass and fighting equal to Bruce Lee in Enter the Dragon. But disregarding that, there's nothing unrealistic about most of the characters John Saxon plays. He is the "everyman" tough guy, and so we can all identify with him. In a similar vein, Henry Silva is very often the everyman villain.

Like Henry Silva, and like many B-team action stars during the 1970s, Saxon spent a fair amount of time over in Europe, or more specifically, over in Italy, kicking as much ass as could be kicked in Italian cop films of the era. Cross Shot sees him in one of his rare starring vehicles -- he was almost always a co-star, sidekick kind of guy or criminal who was not as bad as the main criminal. Cross Shot also sees him fulfilling every single "cop on the edge" stereotype you could possibly think of. The chief comes down on him. The newspaper editor rails against his "questionable methods." He gets to give one of those, "you're system protects the guilty and punishes the innocent" speeches. In short, Cross Shot offers you everything you could possibly want from a generic cop movie, and manages to be pretty good while doing it.

Saxon stars as Inspector Javocella, your standard issue tough cop who would rather beat a confession out a criminal than wait for the judicial system to screw everything up and let the guilty go free. These cops never see to realize that half the time, the reason the guilty go free is because the cops who arrested them beat them up. If they stopped beating defendants up, maybe not so many would get released because the cops beat them up while they were in custody. I don't know. Just a theory. I'm no criminologist.

Javocella's arch-nemesis is the standard-issue bleeding heart newspaper editor who maybe cares about people, or maybe just wants to sell newspapers with sensational stories about police brutality. I've often wondered how many cities actually have heated wars going on between police inspectors and the newspaper editors. I guess as many as have mobs who are looking to tear down the old black community center so they can build a shopping mall. Ever wonder why these mobsters would want to be building a shopping mall in the middle of a burnt-out, crime-plagued ghetto? Sometimes I think they only used that as an excuse to pick fights with local black karate schools.

Anyway, you also have Dante Ragusa, a blind, aging crime lord who is looking to prove he's still nobody to mess with. And you have his chump son who desperately wants to prove to his domineering father that he can be a good criminal and uphold the family honor in all matters relating to drugs, prostitution, extortion, and murder. His name is Nino, and he just can't do a damn thing right. You may think it's hard to try and impress your parents by playing soccer when your father was a famous European soccer player, but imagine trying to impress your father when he is a guy who rules the criminal underworld with a iron grip and slaughters all those who stand in his way. Now that's pressure. If the Ragusas would sit down and simply talk about their feelings, maybe even throw on a little "Cat's in the Cradle" by Harry Chapin, things would be better between them.

Against his better judgment, Don Dante sends his twit of an offspring on a simple mission: deliver a letter of approval from a crooked senator allowing them to build a shopping center in some new part of town. No word on whether they had to face off against a black karate school or vigilante group led by an ex-football player, but I think we can assume they did. I always thought mobsters did stuff like smuggle guns and drugs, or just go around killing each other. But what I have learned in the movies, and what is probably true in real life, is that they spend most their time opening shopping malls and getting construction permits. Hell, whole episodes of The Sopranos dealt with the Mafia guys running a crooked sporting goods shop so they could get discount nylon jogging suits. Who would have thought that the preferred fashion of the men who rule the underworld would be unsightly lavender jogging suits? Those guys from the 1920s who wore those sharp suits and wingtips must hang their heads in shame.

Meanwhile, a young dreamer who wants nothing more in the world than to make enough money to marry his sweetheart and get out of the city decides to join some guys in a bank robbery. This is a pretty common thing in these movies. Personally, when I've needed money, I always took a job at Toys-R-Us or a movie theater. It was mundane but easy work, and very low risk. I don't know how these lazy dreamers in the movies are always stumbling across gangs of bank robbers looking for the last member of their team, or why they accept the offer, or why the robbers would offer something as important as a spot on a bank robbery gang to some lazy nobody who spends most of his time staring out at the ocean and saying, "You know, someday I'm gonna make it." Come on, if you were going to rob a bank, would you look for hardened professionals, or would you grab the first hippie with an acoustic guitar and a head full of dreams that you ran across on the street?

Naturally, the bank robbery goes terribly awry, because no one in the history of film has ever successfully robbed a bank or pulled off "the big heist." Face it, if the combined forces of Frank Sinatra, Dean Martin, Joey Bishop, Pete Lawford, Sammy Davis Jr., and Henry Silva couldn't successfully pull off a heist, what chance does some bum off the streets have? In the confusion of the botched robbery, the young guy, Antonio, panics and ends up killing a rookie cop. The robbers split up, losing all the money in the process, and Antonio ends up hijacking the first available car.

Well, what are the chances that it's going to be poor Nino Ragusa's car? That guy just never gets a break, does he? Nino gets chewed out for being an idiot, Antonio is freaked out and on the run, and John Saxon strolls onto the scene to look grim and angry. He vows to catch whoever killed the young cop -- oh yeah, and this other woman the rest of the robbers killed when they threw her out of a moving car right into the path of the car behind them. Just so we can bring everyone together into one pissed off little family, the newspaper editor shows up to write obnoxious articles about how ineffectual the cops are, which allows Saxon to rail on about how they're damned if they do, damned if they don't and so on and so forth.

Antonio escapes to the country and hides out in the abandoned shack of some relative. He knows the cops are after him, and since he is sensitive, he's distraught over the fact that he killed a man. Maybe he should have taken a different job than "armed bank robber" if this was a concern. Luckily, he has a gorgeous, understanding, level-headed girlfriend to comfort him. It would be much harder to cope if you were wrought with angst and guilt and came home every night to Judy Tenuda.

Antonio soon figures out that he has come into possession of Ragusa's letter from the senator, and soon after that finds out that Nino and his thugs are trying to kill him. Having Nino after you is not so scary, but some of these other thugs have mustaches and sunglasses, so you know they mean business. Antonio jumps from dodging John Saxon to dodging mobsters out to kill him and retrieve the briefcase. The only friend he has is the newspaper editor, who is trying to exploit the situation as much as he trying to help Antonio stay alive. The editor figures if the mob doesn't kill Antonio, the cops will do it as revenge for their fallen comrade. They devise a number of plans to meet, and each time John Saxon sneaks around and follows them, so you'd think they's stop about the ten thousandth time they have a secret meeting interrupted by John Saxon stepping out of the shadows to yell at them.

Finally, Antonio agrees to give himself up to the newspaper editor, who will then take him to the cops. Why they have this meeting in a dark, isolated alley is beyond me. You'd think if you were being chased by mobsters and were going to turn yourself in, you'd just do it at the police station instead of in a back alley full of snipers. This really makes no sense at all. Of course, John Saxon is also hiding in the shadows, waiting to arrest Antonio. This upsets Antonio, though I can't figure out why. He was going to turn himself in anyway.

Well, they go ahead and do all this on the deserted street full of mob hitmen. Antonio gets it in the back, Saxon gets the hitman, and as Antonio dies in the street, he hands over the letter from the crooked senator, giving Saxon enough evidence to put Dante Ragusa away once and for all. The newspaper editor blames Saxon's violent methods for the death of poor Antonio, even though it was the mob who shot the kid, and it was the editor's stupid idea to meet in the alley instead of somewhere safe. The film ends with Saxon and crew confronting Ragusa, who immediately goes into "I'm a sick, frail old man" mode as most mob bosses do. He'll probably get off with a slap on the wrist.

While Cross Shot is not the most violent or action-packed of the many poliziotteschi film, it's still a solid thriller with generic but interesting characters and a plot that keeps you glued to the set. You figure Antonio will probably get it in the end -- those innocent youths gone wrong always do -- but they make the journey there interesting, and by the end you're hoping that maybe he'll make it out alive after all. John Saxon is suitably grim and frustrated as the cop on the edge, though he doesn't pull it off with as much sympathy as Maurizio Merli. Of course, no one plays that part like Merli did in Violent Napoli. Although he doesn't really break and new ground with the archetype, John Saxon plays it convincingly and plays it well. In other words, he is good as always.

The supporting cast all do well in their respective roles. Antonio and Nino Ragusa are both interesting characters with whom we can sympathize. Antonio was a lost kid who got caught up in situations that quickly spiraled out of control and turned violent -- a very familiar situation for a lot of people in Europe during the 1970s, when crime and terrorism skyrocketed, and everyone felt like society was going down in flames. Nino, on the other hand, is a wretch of a human who is insulted and degraded by his father at every turn. All he wants to do is impress his dad, to hear his father say that he did good. It never happens, of course, because Dante Ragusa would never utter a kind word and has no respect for his weak-willed son. "You've never even killed a man!" he scoffs. Nino, like everyone else in the film, is desperate for some resolution to his alienation. In many ways he reminds me of the character Nick DiSalvio from Across 110th Street -- a middle-aged mobster who has really gotten nowhere in his chosen profession. Everything DiSalvio got, he got when he married the boss's daughter, and everything Nino Ragusa has, he has because his dad is the boss, sort of like George Bush Jr. Weird to think of middle management mobsters having identity crises and struggling to make something of themselves, but I guess business is business.

The newspaper editor is also a fairly typical but well-played character. He's careful not to go too over-the-top with his liberalism or take it to the extremes the character is often taken, at which time they become utterly absurd in their crusade. Here, he wants to protect the people, to stop the violence, but he's also not above exploiting it to sell papers. However, by the end he seems willing to risk his own life to help Antonio. Like Javocella and Ragusa, the editor is an ass, but not a totally irredeemable human being. The politics of Italian cop films are always a confused mess best decoded with a Rosetta Stone and secret ring found in a jar of rich, chocolaty Ovaltine. Cross Shot is interesting in that it doesn't make any calls one way or the other, but instead shows yuoth pulled asunder and destroyed by the many conflicting trens and demands of society.

Finally, you have Antonio's girlfriend. She doesn't do a whole lot other than stand by Antonio in his hour of need, but she's worth noting because she serves a much greater purpose than simply being a person to be held hostage during a Mexican stand-off (which doesn't happen to her). Like the women in John Woo films, she is representative of a sort of even-headedness, a chance at redemption men could have if only they'd stop yelling and shooting at each other all the time. She's the only one that comes across as being sane more often than she's insane, and her subtle though pervasive strength makes her a memorable character in a genre where most women are nothing more than victims or gratuitous nude shots.

All in all, the concentration on the drama over the action make this one interesting and worth checking out. Don't worry, though -- there's still enough action to keep you satisfied, including a particularly harrowing car chase in which a woman's head is crushed by an oncoming car, and a run in between Antonio and Nino in a deserted parking lot. John Saxon's action consists primarily of killing people or beating the shit out of them during interrogation.

It's no Violent Napoli, but it's still a pretty good film. It generates a fair amount of tension and sympathy for its many characters, and it has a decent amount of that ol' poliziotteschi brutal violence. It's a good way to ease yourself into a genre that has no easing in about it, and a good way to get a look at John Saxon getting to do more than follow someone else around. Not the best, but a good entry into the genre.

Labels: Director: Stelvio Massi, Poliziotteschi, Stars: John Saxon, Year: 1976