After decades of lurking in relative obscurity outside of Italy, the poliziottesco genre has seen quite the resurgence over the past two years thanks to Arrow Video’s Years of Lead and Rogue Cops and Racketeers releases, as well as the Criterion Channel’s more recent tribute to six crime thrillers by director Fernando Di Leo. These films—all made and set during the extended period of heightened violence, social and political upheaval, and booming crime rates of Italy’s Years of Lead—have their fair share of gonzo car chases, perilous kidnappings, and gritty shootouts. Yet the films collected in Severin’s new box set, Violent Streets: The Umberto Lenzi/Tomas Milian Collection, reach new heights (or depths) of depravity and sleaze, plunging the viewer headfirst into the scuzzier end of the poliziotteschi pool.
Bringing together five of the six collaborations between Lenzi and actor Tomas Milian, this box set, in addition to offering a glimpse at a more reactionary brand of poliziottesco film, attests to Milian’s skill at embodying unhinged and extremely reckless masculinity. From his excessively impulsive psychopath in Almost Human, to his mischievous, amoral cop in Syndicate Sadists, to his bizarre twin crooks in Brothers Till We Die, Milian displays a fearlessness that’s perfectly in tune with Lenzi’s deeply cynical, nihilistic view of a society on the brink of collapse. Where Di Leo acknowledges elements of social inequity that have contributed to this social unrest (poverty in Southern Italy, for one, plays a key role in Caliber 9), Lenzi remains more deliberately apolitical, content to revel in the filth that surfaced as increasingly weaponized criminals and widespread mob violence were met with vigilante justice and the fascist tactics of a police state.
The poliziottesco film’s obsession with criminal brutality and rapidly escalating violence is most fully embodied in Lenzi and Milian’s first and best collaboration, 1974’s Almost Human, in which the latter’s character, Giulio Sacchi, is so chained to his animalistic impulses that he kills even when it clearly goes against his own self-interest. Within the film’s breathless opening minutes, Giulio, while waiting for his cohorts to finish robbing a bank, shoots a cop who simply asks him to move his car, then kidnaps a child, leads the police in a high-speed car chase, and stabs one officer who catches him stealing coins out of a cigarette machine.
Milian and Lenzi jump wholeheartedly into the sleaze gutter throughout the duration of the film, particularly in the notorious scene where Giulio strings up a trio of naked bourgeois victims to a chandelier and spins them like a roulette wheel before shooting them down with a machine gun. There’s an overwhelming sense of despair and desperation undergirding Giulio’s excessive violence that isn’t merely the result of psychopathic impulses, but a hopelessness that grows in a society that treats its lower-class citizens as disposable. Like Di Leo’s 1972 film The Italian Connection, Almost Human ends with its criminal protagonist gunned down in a pile of trash—an ambiguous image that invites both right- and left-wing readings.
Given how over the top Milian is in Almost Human, it’s jarring to see him so much more restrained in 1975’s Syndicate Sadists. This film sees Milian on the other side of the law, playing a righteous biker with all the cynicism and disaffected cool that Elliott Gould brought to his roles in Robert Altman’s The Long Goodbye and Peter Hyams’s Busting. Inspired by Sergio Leone’s Fistful of Dollars, Syndicate Sadist finds Milian’s Rambo playing two crime families against one another, and while he’s far less violent and maniacal here, his mischievous meddling causes widespread death and destruction. And Rambo’s most memorable line from the film perfectly sums up the nihilistic worldview of both this film and Almost Human: “You start from a hole, you feed yourself through a hole, you shit from a hole, you finish up in a hole.”
Free Hand for a Tough Cop, from 1976, features Milian in a bad afro wig, wearing eyeliner, and, at least in the English dub, sounding like a Joisey mafia goon. Even though his performance as Monnezza (roughly translating to “garbage can”) is meant to be comedic, Milian’s near-constant mugging is grating, while the storyline of cops using vigilante tactics to track down criminals who’ve kidnapped the daughter of a wealthy family is built of plot points better handled in the prior two films. Monnezza returns in 1978’s Brothers Till We Die. But here, his grating presence is mitigated by both a stronger story of betrayal and revenge and the inclusion of his twin brother, the hunchback Vincenzo, who first appeared in Lenzi’s 1976 film The Tough Ones, and whose relentless pursuit is vengeance is as hilarious as it is blood-curdling.
The Cynic, the Rat, and the Fist, from 1977, also recycles elements of Lenzi’s earlier films, namely Syndicate Sadists’s tale of a man pitting two crime bosses against each other. But unlike Free Hand for a Tough Cop, this film folds enough compelling surprises into the mix that prevent it from playing like reheated leftovers. Milian, as the slimy up-and-coming crime boss Luigi “The Chinaman” Maietto,” and John Saxon, as Luigi’s ruthless nemesis, DiMaggio, are aces, but the film belongs to Maurizio Merli. As Tanzi, an ex-cop who the Chinaman attempts to assassinate and who, after surviving, convinces the press to announce that he died, Merli, with his clean-cut good looks and good-guy charm, makes a perfect foil to his demented co-stars. Next to Almost Human, it’s the most purely entertaining film in the set and a distinct reminder that Lenzi’s films live or die on the strength of their scripts and performances.
Image/Sound
Severin Films has scanned each of these five films uncut from the original camera negatives. Only Free Hand for a Tough Cop, The Cynic, the Rat, and the Fist, and Brothers Till We Die are listed as 2K scans, but all five transfers are equally impressive. Most notable is the naturalistic color balancing, especially when it comes to skin tones, and the exquisite detail and textures present in the images, which display all the grit and grime that one expects from the Italian cityscapes that are practically supporting players in a poliziottesco film. Grain distribution is even and there’s a nice wide range of colors throughout. Both English and Italian dubs are included for each film, and while you’re stuck with some, to put it kindly, mediocre Foley work, the dialogue is clean and the groovy scores sound fantastic in the 24-bit stereo audio tracks.
Extras
In the first of two audio commentaries included on the Almost Human disc, screenwriter Ernesto Gastaldi talks about the cultural context in which the film was made and how terrorist attacks from both right- and left-wing extremists led to widespread chaos and confusion throughout Italy in the 1970s. Particularly enlightening is his discussion of Italy’s film industry in the 1970s and the international nature of so many productions at the time.
Across the second commentary track, Mondo Digital’s Nathaniel Thompson and Troy Howarth also talk at length about Italian cinema in the ’70s, including the hybridization between the giallo and poliziottesco and the directors and actors who worked in both genres. The Almost Human disc also includes separate archival interviews with Umberto Lenzi, Tomas Milian, Ernesto Gastaldi, and Henry Silva, who discuss everything from the preproduction and casting process to the genesis of the film’s story and the spontaneity of its production.
The remaining four discs each include at least four interviews a piece, with Lenzi speaking about each of the productions and his experiences with various actors. Of the other interviews, two of the most interesting are with actor Corrado Solari, who touches on his work with Sergio Leone and Elio Petri, and actor Bruno di Luia, who focuses on his extensive work as a stuntman. The interview with Nino Celeste, the co-cinematographer of Free Hand for a Tough Cop, is also interesting, namely for his detailing of the bizarre circumstances around him being fired from the film after a producer tricked him into using expired film stock for a couple scenes.
A trailer for each film is included on its respective disc. There are also CDs with the remastered soundtracks for Almost Human, Syndicate Sadists, The Cynic, the Rat, and the Fist, and Brothers Till We Die. Especially of note among the various other odds and ends is the extended bank robbery scene from Free Hand for a Tough Cop. And the cherry on top is the sturdy and sleek packaging with the detachable top, ensuring that all the discs contained within will be safer than anyone who happens to come face to face with a gun in any of these films.
Overall
Even by the standards of the poliziotteschi, these five collaborations between Umberto Lenzi and Tomas Milian are truly gritty and wild.
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