For several months, the publisher Elephant Films has had the good idea of offering on DVD – Blu-ray some titles representative of a certain Italian detective cinema. A category of films which will experience a little success from the end of the 1960s. The title given to the collection, “The Years of Lead”, seems to want to link the genre to the situation that Italian society was then going through, prey to a general feeling of insecurity linked to the development of political and villainous violence.
Three new titles, three rare works, have just been published, which will allow us to appreciate the qualities of Saturday evening cinema always crossed by a few inspired outbursts. The first of these is slightly earlier than the time in question. Technique of a murder, released in 1966, is by Frank Shannon, pseudonym of filmmaker Franco Prosperi. American actor Robert Webber plays a New York hitman whom a mafia organization sends to France to eliminate a traitor.
He is assigned a young apprentice assassin (Franco Nero) whom he is supposed to train in the profession. A variation on learning and the relationship between master and disciple, the story, filmed with a certain elegance, combines dramatic twists to end on a disillusioned note. A typical work of what transalpine post-Hollywoodism was at the time.
Brutal and ill-mannered
Gang War, by Umberto Lenzi, dates from 1973. It is the beginning of an era during which Italian crime fiction will become brutal and ill-mannered. We follow the journey of a gang leader who controls prostitution in Milan. He is threatened by the ambitions of another gang led by a Frenchman (Philippe Leroy). Antonio Sabato plays the main character, Salvatore Cangemi known as “Toto”, a poor Sicilian who became a pimp to escape the poverty of wage labor and factory exploitation.
He is a sort of monster devoid of all scruples and prey to fearsome attacks of rage. The film acclimates traditional gangster narratives (The Godfatherby Coppola, could be one of the somewhat overwhelming sources of inspiration for the film) in the foggy climate of the Lombard capital and looks at his characters with a sort of coldness which accentuates their inhuman dimension.
But, indisputably, the best title of the three is Death was last night, produced in 1970 and which did not see a commercial release in France at the time. It is signed by the talented Duccio Tessari, to whom we owe a fun peplum (The Titans), an excellent western (Ringo Returns) and above all a fantastic action film with Alain Delon (Big Guns, available on Blu-ray for a few weeks). The film is the adaptation, more faithful to the spirit than to the letter, of a novel by Giorgio Scerbanenco, The Milanese kill on Saturday (reissue Babelio, 2011), of which he restores the pesky and desperate melancholy.
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