I am here expanding upon my previous research on the Italian police dramas (known as poliziotteschi or polizieschi), which proliferated in the 1970s. I seek to illuminate these films’ complex engagement with the socio-political ferments of their era, and ask what this tells us about the reach of American popular culture in post-war Italy. I shall look at political and cinematic factors which contributed to the emergence of this violent filmmaking trend, before offering some conclusions concerning the poliziesco’s significance as both a space of transnational exchange and, ultimately, an expression of postmodern bewilderment: a peculiar breed of hyper-reality, which registers a hankering after narrative coherence in an era characterised by labyrinthine intrigue.

Firstly I must outline the most obvious – that is to say, the most culturally visible – factor in the emergence of these films: the arrival on the Italian market of internationally successful Hollywood cop thrillers, such as Dirty Harry (1971) and The French Connection (1971), as well as related crime or vigilante films (most notably Michael Winner’s Death Wish (1974)). These products of Nixon-era neuroses over social breakdown and urban violence, with their depictions of maverick crime-fighters refusing to play by the rules, were instant hits in Italy as elsewhere, and the narrative, thematic and ideological tropes of this trend were instantly replicated to cash in on a winning formula.

This, indeed, was a characteristic pattern of popular Italian cinema in the 1960s and 1970s, where numerous such cycles, or filoni, would proliferate in an incremental balance between repetition and innovation, all with an eye firmly on the perceived whims of the popular market which was of course frequently in thrall to Hollywood’s output. Consequently, though a handful of early examples had emerged prior to April 1972, it was with the Italian release of Dirty Harry in that month that the poliziesco trend really took off. Around one hundred such films would be released during the 1970s, and this film had a palpable impact both on the cycle’s recurrent plot devices and on its ideological outlook.

In Sergio Martino’s Milano trema – la polizia vuole giustizia (1973), for example, a rogue cop uses his own violent methods of law enforcement in defiance of an effete, impotent legal system which is failing in its duty to uphold the rule of law, letting rapists and murderers go free. Martino’s film is typical of the poliziesco cycle, which time and again pits the lone hero against a society overrun with street gangs, protection rackets, mafiosi and terrorists, along with assorted sadists, perverts and punks. In Milano trema, only the hero’s uncompromising methods are proved to work until, disgusted with the system he has defended, he discards his police-issue revolver, in an clear nod to the iconic final sequence of Dirty Harry (and, by extension, that of High Noon).

In other words Milano trema, along with a host of other polizieschi, replicates the narrative and ideological tropes of Don Siegel’s Hollywood blockbuster to the letter. Furthermore, Dirty Harry itself transposed key elements of the classical Western genre, which the poliziesco also inherits: the lone hero cleaning up a community threatened by lawlessness and savagery; an innate distrust of the institutions of state; and the righteousness of lethal force in defiance of a weak, cowardly codified legality, to name but a few examples. Add to all this the cycle’s ubiquitous testosterone-fuelled, high-octane car chases, which directly emulate the famous pay-off sequences of American ‘tough cop’ thrillers such as Bullitt (1968) and The French Connection, and we can see a wide-ranging network of overtly transatlantic citations converging in these films. Viewed from this perspective, it is tempting to see the poliziesco, and the Spaghetti Western before it, as operating in a parasitic relationship with the instantly-recognisable codes of Hollywood mythology.

With recent academic trends heralding a more inclusive approach to popular European cinema, however, more politically- and historically-grounded readings of these films have become prominent. Specifically, as research into Italian cinema begins to unburden itself of the yoke of post-war ‘neorealism’ and the country’s canonical auteurs, the poliziesco is increasingly included in an ‘alternative’ canon (see Barry, 2004 and Bondanella, 2009). Such analysis tends to highlight the poliziesco’s entwinement with the era of Italian history subsequently dubbed the anni di piombo, or ‘years of lead’: a period characterised by a wave of politically-motivated violence which scarred the national psyche throughout the 1970s.

Much has been, and is being, written on the relationship of cinema to this period, but I want to further point up a couple of aspects concerning the era’s representation which have particular relevance to this cycle of films and its ideological outlook: firstly, the perception of a broken society spiralling violently out of control; and secondly, the widespread distrust of officialdom and instruments of state.

The levels of urban violence in Italy during the anni di piombo were unparalleled in contemporary Europe. The years 1969-1980 saw over 12,000 incidents of politically-motivated violence – that’s three a day – and around six hundred terrorist groups of both left- and right-wing extremists were counted (Antonello & O’Leary, 2009: 1). The perpetrators were, in fact, relatively few in number when compared to the era of mass protest in the late 1960s, but the types of violent acts carried out tended to be, quite intentionally, highly visible and newsworthy: assassinations, bombings, bank robberies, shoot-outs with police and so on. Far Left groups in particular – the most notorious being the Red Brigades or Brigate rosse – thus sought to create a widespread sense that the status quo in Italian society was dysfunctional, to accelerate the course of history towards Marxist-Leninist revolution. Throughout the decade, as popular perception and public opinion became coloured by these upheavals, ‘law and order’ became an increasingly fraught issue in the media and, by extension, in election campaigns.

It doesn’t take a huge effort of will, then, to see that films depicting out-of-control street gangs, opportunistic protection rackets and psychotic political extremists might carry a contemporary, and local, imperative in such a turbulent period. Such uncompromising heroes as those portrayed by Maurizio Merli, whose laconically brutal persona appeared in no fewer than twelve polizieschi between 1975 and 1979, offered vicarious fantasies of law and order, with a tough, no-nonsense cop defying his superiors and dishing it out to petty criminals and terrorists alike.

Yet the poliziesco’s engagement with the anni di piombo goes deeper than a linear application of this tried-and-tested ‘tough cop’ schema, which can justifiably be criticised for a decidedly reactionary political outlook. More than depicting merely a weak officialdom, polizieschi go beyond simple fantasies of law and order, and explore the murky workings of power in the Italian state. These films repeatedly depict an actively malevolent, corrupt ‘system’, which is complicit with the heinous crimes against which our lone hero struggles. This surpasses the distrust of government and countercultural sentiment being expounded in Hollywood at the time, in such films as All the President’s Men (Alan J. Pakula, 1976), to articulate widespread misgivings about Italy’s political elite.

Such a proclivity towards conspiracy theory – known in Italy as dietrologia – was fuelled by a persistent opacity surrounding the instruments of state, and strong suspicions that the secret service was playing a role in aiding and abetting the atrocities of the anni di piombo in an attempt to foment the conditions for an authoritarian coup. The litany of unanswered questions, shady cover-ups and ambiguous culpabilities reads as a bloody run-down of the iconic events of these years: the bombings of Milan’s Piazza Fontana in 1969 and of Brescia’s Piazza della Loggia in 1974; the kidnap and murder of Prime Minister Aldo Moro in 1978; and the Bologna train station bomb in 1980.

The poliziesco’s investment in this discourse of conspiracy is explicit. In film after film, murky cabals of ruthless capitalists, evil power-mongers and corrupt public servants hide behind a veneer of respectability, invisibly pulling the strings of sadistic street gangs to provoke chaos in society. Fernando di Leo’s Il boss (1973) depicts politicians and police in league with the Mafia; in Sergio Sollima’s Revolver (1973), the hero is caught in an impenetrably faceless web of intrigue; while in both Enzo G. Castellari’s Il grande racket (1976) and Martino’s aforementioned Milano trema, the murderers and rapists whom the hero has chased throughout are revealed to be under orders from judges, lawyers, politicians and police chiefs.

The following two clips, both from Milano trema – la polizia vuole giustizia, epitomise the poliziesco‘s often eccentric approach to the events of the anni di piombo. In the first, we see a bank job reaching its bloody conclusion, carried out by a bunch of violent radicals (the tough cop hero, by the way, has infiltrated the gang and is here working as their getaway driver). In the second clip, we briefly hear the final revelatory admission to the hero by the chief of police that he has been the hidden crime boss all along. (I have spliced them together into one file).

So far I have mostly focussed on authorial intent; that is, on the opportunistic imitation of US cinema, on the fantasy narratives of tough cops, and on the acerbic critiques of governmental institutions. To conclude, however, I shall look at an inadvertent cultural significance which arises from polizieschi, and points to a more nuanced transatlantic relationship than is immediately apparent when viewing these films. Are they reactionary, parasitic facsimiles of the box-office giants emanating from the USA, fantasies of law and order, or conspiracy theory-fuelled paranoia? The answer is of course all three, and this, I think, is the most interesting point about these films. The narrative, iconographic and ideological tropes of US cinema are appropriated, and adapted to an Italian socio-political milieu.

The clips embedded above offer an exemplar of this point. Certainly, they directly register the controversies of the era which I have already summarised, both by caricaturing the professed aims of contemporary radicals to alter public opinion through violent action, and then by articulating the widespread perceptions of state complicity in a ’strategy of tension’ aimed at exerting authoritarian control over Italian society.

Returning to my earlier points about the influence of US cinema on this cycle of films, however, the modes of representation employed are significant: in particular, the filmmakers’ investment, firstly in the spectacular – the white-knuckle car-chase emulating such films as Bullitt (1968) and The French Connection (1971) – and secondly in narrative coherence and closure – the revelatory denouement or ‘twist’, laying bare and attaching a face to state complicity in unambiguous terms. These elements operate within a broader signifying practice whereby instantly recognisable tropes of American cinema are deployed as a means of viewing, dramatising and resolving neuroses surrounding extremism, terror and the individual’s relationship to societal power structures.

Fredric Jameson has described conspiracy theory as ‘the poor person’s cognitive mapping in the postmodern age… a degraded figure of the logic of late capitalism, a desperate attempt to represent the latter’s system’ (O’Leary, 2009: 54). Conspiracy theory, Jameson holds, aspires and pretends to know, to explain, but the narrative closure it seeks is a mere parody of authentic analysis of the individual’s complex relationship with political and economic systems. Viewed from this perspective, the poliziesco’s recourse to Hollywood iconography and genre convention can be read as an articulation of a collective need in Italian society: that of attaching a coherent narrative to an era of extreme cultural and political disorientation.

At one point in Lucio Fulci’s poliziesco Luca il contrabbandiere (1980), a policeman at the scene of a murder comments that ‘Italy is starting to look like America in the 1930s’. Given the poliziesco’s close relationship with Hollywood conventions, this highlights an important cultural convergence and hyper-reality in these films. Both the diegetic comment itself and the wider perception it implies are based on an ’America’ of the popular imagination – in this case one of prohibition, speakeasies and mob hits – lifted directly from Hollywood and transposed into the anni di piombo.

Polizieschi were by no means alone in this process of transatlantic negotiation. Indeed, they belong to a continuum of political engagement within popular Italian cinema of the 1960s and 1970s, which filtered unease concerning the operation of the modern state and attendant social breakdown by adapting US cinematic formats. Between 1967 and 1970, for example, an earlier trend within the Italian Western had carried overtly countercultural sympathies with condemnations of a corrupt, avaricious bourgeois society in such films as Sergio Sollima’s La resa dei conti (1967) and Faccia a faccia (1967), Giulio Questi’s Se sei vivo, spara! (1967) and Sergio Corbucci’s Il grande Silenzio (1968).

At times, even radicalised militants themselves viewed the events of the anni di piombo through recourse to Hollywood. The theatrical self-consciousness of the Red Brigades, for example, is starkly illustrated by the memoirs of activist Valerio Morucci. He continually frames his group’s deeds by reference to the bandits and sheriffs, the hitmen and the cops and robbers from the many Westerns and films noirs which so fascinated him (Tricomi, 2009: 21).

Both protagonists and commentators, therefore, were seeking to interpret the era’s complex and bewildering events through the application of simpler, binary and instantly recognisable ready-made paradigms from US cinema. Polizieschi partake in this pre-existing trend as expressions of a peculiar hyper-reality. Jean Baudrillard’s comments on the exhibitionism of terrorism (2001) seem nowhere so apt.

The anni di piombo were more than just a series of violent events. The period became a locus for national trauma, which had a profound impact across Italian cultural life. The critically-lauded contemporaneous works of Elio Petri, Francesco Rosi and Marco Bellocchio are widely studied for their commentary on the anni di piombo and the attendant intrigues surrounding state complicity. While equivalent responses within popular Italian cinema have more often been ignored or dismissed, the poliziesco is just one example of such formulaic cinema addressing the political controversies of the day.

Far from straightforwardly reactionary polemics, they are repositories of cultural memory and sites of popular trauma, within which conflicting strands of politics and culture meet. Their ideological and cultural eccentricities are an organic product of the turmoil and confusions of their era. By their very nature as playfully trans-cultural undertakings, these films register a certain kind of ‘Italian-ness’: one within which Americana has of course become an ever-present factor, but also one which has taken possession of this iconography in a diverse, at times complex dialogue.

This article is based upon research undertaken for
Kiss Kiss Kill Kill: A Symposium on the Forgotten Spy Film of Cold War Europe
The University of Hertfordshire
September 18th 2010

Works cited

• Antonello, Pier Paolo and Alan O’Leary (2009), ’Introduction’, in Pier Paolo Antonello and Alan O’Leary (eds) (2009), Imagining Terrorism: The Rhetoric and Representation of Political Violence in Italy, 1969-2009 (London: Maney), pp.1-15.
• Barry, Christopher (2004), ‘Violent Justice: Italian Crime / Cop Films of the 1970s’, in Ernest Mathijs and Xavier Mendik (eds), Alternative Europe: Eurotrash and Exploitation Cinema Since 1945 (London: Wallflower), pp.77-89.
• Baudrillard, Jean (1988), America, trans. Chris Turner (London: Verso).
• Baudrillard, Jean (2001), ‘The Spirit of Terrorism’, trans. Rachel Bloul, Le monde (2 November).
• Bondanella, Peter (2009), A History of Italian Cinema (London: Continuum).
• O’Leary, Alan (2009), ‘Moro, Brescia, Conspiracy: The Paranoid Style in Italian Cinema’, in Pier Paolo Antonello and Alan O’Leary (eds) (2009), Imagining Terrorism: The Rhetoric and Representation of Political Violence in Italy, 1969-2009 (London: Maney), pp.48-62.
• Tricomi, Antonio (2009), ‘Killing the Father: Politics and Intellectuals, Utopia and Delusion’, in Pier Paolo Antonello and Alan O’Leary (eds) (2009), Imagining Terrorism: The Rhetoric and Representation of Political Violence in Italy, 1969-2009 (London: Maney), pp.16-29.

Limited to selecting just twelve films for review from the vast array of Italian Westerns, my choices may raise eyebrows. This was my intention; for what good is an appreciation of genre cinema if we its audiences do not actively subject the received canons therein to constant scrutiny? Less a “top twelve” than a desire to look again at aspects of this oft-homogenised filone, it is to be hoped that the chapter will offer something new to academic study of popular Italian cinema, as well as sparking debate amongst fans. The contributions, in chronological order by Italian film release, are as follows:

Christopher Frayling: Per un pugno di dollari / A Fistful of Dollars (Sergio Leone, 1964)

Dimitris Eleftheriotis: Johnny Oro / Ringo and His Golden Pistol (Sergio Corbucci, 1966)

Iain Robert Smith: Django (Sergio Corbucci, 1966)

Austin Fisher: El Chuncho, quién sabe? / A Bullet for the General (Damiano Damiani, 1966)

Robbie Edmonstone: Se sei vivo, spara! / Django Kill! (If You Live Shoot!) (Giulio Questi, 1967)

Mimmo Gianneri: La resa dei conti / The Big Gundown (Sergio Sollima, 1967)

Austin Fisher: Faccia a faccia / Face to Face (Sergio Sollima, 1967)

Phil Hardcastle: I giorni dell’ira / Day of Anger (Tonino Valerii, 1967)

Daniel O’Brien: Ehi amico…c’è Sabata, hai chiuso! / Sabata (Gianfranco Parolini, 1969)

Eleanor Andrews: Lo chiamavano Trinità / My Name is Trinity (Enzo Barboni, 1970)

Iain Robert Smith: Keoma (Enzo G. Castellari, 1976)

Robbie Edmonstone: Mannaja / A Man Called Blade (Sergio Martino, 1977)

Sergio Martino’s Mannaja / A Man Called Blade (1977) is about as entertaining a death-rattle as one might hope to encounter, but a terminal gurgle it remains. The Italian Western phenomenon had persisted, in a variety of guises, since 1963. The precise make-up of this “Spaghetti” canon is still a matter for debate, but the 450-plus films therein attest to a remarkable longevity in the context of popular Italian cinema of the era where genres, or filoni, more often ebbed and flowed with the perceived whims of popular taste. As George Harrison knew only too well, however, all things must pass.

Martino’s film is commonly placed as a footnote to the more celebrated “twilight Spaghetti”, Keoma (Enzo G. Castellari, 1976), and indeed there are numerous points of similarity. Such was the formulaic, incremental nature of filone cinema, however, that pejorative accusations of imitativeness in the Italian Western are trite to the point of tedium. Certainly, Mannaja bears many tried-and-tested Spaghetti hallmarks (childhood flashbacks revealing the hero’s revenge motive, the corrupt capitalist hiding behind a cloak of propriety, the lone warrior caught between rival factions, to name but a few), but Martino tweaks these to fit a decidedly apocalyptic agenda, which warrants critique in its own right. From amidst this network of citations, it is the easily-overlooked sub-plot in particular which stands out for its defiance of audience expectation and its symbolic farewell to this most irreverent, and lucrative, of Italian genres.

Beloved by fans and critics alike, Tuco Benedicto Pacifico Juan Maria Ramírez (AKA “the Rat”) was lifted straight out of the Commedia dell’arte and granted a celluloid apotheosis by the collaboration of Sergio Leone and Eli Wallach in Il buono, il brutto, il cattivo / The Good, the Bad and the Ugly (1966). Tomas Milian would subsequently embrace the archetype with the guileful clowning of Cuchillo Sanchez, forever one step ahead of the dim-witted authorities (see La resa dei conti / The Big Gundown and Corri, uomo, corri / Run, Man, Run (Sergio Sollima: 1967, 1968)). This grubby, and perennially on-the-run, vagabond would become an enduring, and endearing, characteristic of the picaresque Spaghetti variant: a loud-mouthed comic foil, by turns hindering then assisting the filone’s near-ubiquitous cool, taciturn bounty-hunter.

The relationship between Mannaja (Maurizio Merli) and Burt Craven (Donald O’Brien) is a clear echo of this cat-and-mouse pairing: the reserved superhero and the rude mechanical respectively. When Mannaja lets Craven escape early on in the film, the hero’s fond smile and the good-natured banter indicate a repetition of this familiar motif. Yet already there is injected a more macabre element than is evident in the earlier Tuco / Blondie double-act. Mannaja’s very first scene is a horror-inflected pursuit through dense fog, punctuated by a haunting refrain, claustrophobic tight close-ups and frantic point-of-view shots from the terrified prey. Where Blondie (Clint Eastwood) merely leaves his partner in a pickle with a wry grin, Mannaja maims Craven with a carefully-aimed hatchet which severs his hand in centre-frame close-up. The Spaghetti Western’s mischievous humour is turning sour even at this early juncture in the film.

As the denouement approaches, Craven’s return to the narrative signals a further continuation of the Tuco / Blondie schema, when the vagrant arrives in time to save Mannaja from an elaborately sadistic death at the hands of the diabolical Valler (John Steiner). The hero’s slow recuperation, nursed by his down-to-earth partner, not only echoes Il buono, il brutto, il cattivo, but also resonates all the way back to Per un pugno di dollari / A Fistful of Dollars (Leone, 1964). Even when Craven proceeds to betray Mannaja, it merely promises a repeat of the comic distrust, perpetual back-stabbing and loose loyalties which pervade the “Dollars” trilogy, and recur throughout the filone’s development. After all, Blondie spares Tuco at the eleventh hour while, in La resa dei conti, Jonathan Corbett joins forces with his erstwhile prey Cuchillo. This “Blondie”, however, has had enough. Maurizio Merli – 1970s Italian cinema’s coolest and most ruthless cop temporarily transposed to the knockabout world of the Spaghetti Western – is not about to put up with any more bullshit from this irksome little perp.

T.S. Eliot’s apocalyptic vision of Western civilisation is chillingly evoked by the cry of the British bartender calling time on vivacity, merriment and laughter. Merli’s Mannaja is, I will concede, a less accomplished poet, but his declaration of intent to Craven is equally terminal, both for the character and for the Western filone: “It’s time, Bert.”

Time indeed. Time to end the irreverent burlesque. As Craven is dispatched, it is perhaps apt that it is a star of the poliziesco – a bleak, uncompromising filone which, by addressing the fraught issues surrounding violence in Italian society directly, began to challenge the Italian Western’s place as the nation’s foremost popular genre as the 1970s wore on – who arrives as the executioner in this his sole Spaghetti foray.

At the end, as Mannaja rides away, the theme tune offers a final valediction for this behemoth of cult cinema genres: “Now the time has come to leave.”

È finito.
Buona sera Tuco. Buona sera Sergio.
Arrivederci. Buona sera. Buona sera.