Out of the myriad mavericks and miscreants that populate the poliziotteschi—a genre of Italian crime films that flourished locally from the late 1960s to the early 1980s and subsequently attained cult status thanks in large part to the advocacy of filmmakers like Quentin Tarantino and publications like Nocturno Cinema—Luca Canali of The Italian Connection (1972) is among those most destined for immortality.
Incarnated by Mario Adorf, Luca exudes unruliness the moment he appears on screen. Bedecked with greased-back hair, gaudy suits, and a thick build, Luca manifests not so much slickness (or a certain ideal thereof) as a fumbling attempt at it, a performance of wealth and prestige that feels tenuous on account of its excesses. Despite his initially jaunty demeanor, Luca projects a vague sense of social precarity, an impression enhanced by various characters verbally demeaning him as a “nobody” compared to more “respectable” figures in the community. This class-inflected insult positions Luca as someone who is expendable and vulnerable to vicissitude, and it seems to be against this sense of insecurity that he adopts a compensatory attitude of defiance—at first implicitly in his forceful disposition and dress, later more explicitly when he becomes the target of assassination. As film critic Roberto Curti points out, the man’s hardheadedness is amusingly literalized in his fondness for heat-butting his opponents, a conspicuously burly, “unrefined” maneuver that establishes his tendency to fight back when pushed.
This tension between precarity and resistance reaches a boiling point in the film’s action centerpiece, in which Luca flies into a vengeful rage after his wife and child are murdered by those who are after him. This explosion of retaliatory violence is the logical and cathartic culmination of a waking nightmare in which the man’s vulnerability is exploited by forces beyond his control. The film’s opening scene depicts the start of what will become Luca’s cruel and systematic persecution: two American hitmen (Woody Strode and Henry Silva) are tasked with making an example of Luca for a crime that, we will learn, he did not commit. This assignment comes from the New York arm of an international crime syndicate, whereas Luca works as a low-level pimp within the Milanese branch of operations. Throughout the film, much tension emerges from the friction of cross-cultural contact and jurisdictional rivalry, of the boorish Americans asserting their authority on Italian soil; the stateside kingpin (Cyril Cusack) goes so far as to tell his men to lean into cultural stereotypes as a way of showing dominance (“Drink, leave big tips, put your feet on tables. They hate that in Italy.”) That said, the net effect of depicting this uneasy overseas coalition is to emphasize just how large Goliath is to Luca’s David, whose enemy is not merely local but transcontinental.
Through Luca, the film evokes the injustice of little people buffeted by institutional forces that have, in the age of globalization, achieved a new level of remove from and indifference to the everyday realities of “ordinary” citizens (even though he is technically a member of the criminal establishment, Luca’s subordinate rank and social precarity aligns him more with the general citizenry than his powerful higher-ups). This distrustful, critical attitude toward institutions—which recurs in various poliziotteschi vis-à-vis not only profiteering mobsters but also legal systems hampered by bureaucracy and corruption—infused much public sentiment in the decade of the genre’s flourishing. In 1970s Italy, a combination of rising crime rates, widening socioeconomic inequality, and an increasingly factious political climate (agitating factors include the student protests of 1968 and a splintering of the political spectrum into far-right and far-left extremist groups) launched the country into a period of seismic social and political tumult. An epidemic of kidnappings, terrorism, and other violent crimes spilled often literally into the streets, leading to a widespread sense of intense instability. Victims were often civilians, and it is the resulting sense of helpless rage at the defenseless commoner being made to pay for the selfish agendas and power plays of cruel and/or indifferent organizations that films like The Italian Connection seemed to channel and exploit. As film scholar Alex Marlow-Mann suggests, in the way they depicted and dramatized the kind of ripped-from-the-headlines violence that characterized the morbidly but aptly christened “Anni di piombo” (or “Years of Lead”), poliziotteschi situated their tales of violent catharsis within a recognizable sociopolitical milieu and, conversely, drew on existing societal tensions for their catharsis.
Catharsis of this sort abounds in The Italian Connection, and nowhere more so than in the set piece immediately following the murder of Luca’s family. As the van responsible for the hit and run peels away from the scene, a switch flips within Luca. No more half-measures and impotent protestations; someone was going to pay. Shuddering with grief and adrenaline, Luca hurtles after the murderer in a stolen car, all while wiping sweat and tears from his eyes. The film inserts a couple point-of-view shots of this wiping action, revealing a field of vision fogged over like a windshield as the silhouette of a hand passes in front, attempting unsuccessfully to clear up the view. This physical alignment with Luca’s perspective feels almost like a tongue-in-cheek declaration of intent, emphasizing just how fully the scene will pull us into the man’s frenzied headspace.
The ensuing pursuit, which features breakneck, rough-and-tumble driving through busy streets before shifting to a kinetic foot chase, is one of the best and most iconic poliziotteschi set pieces, and it evinces the film’s (and the overall genre’s) indebtedness to Hollywood actioners like The French Connection (1971). Other regularly cited poliziotteschi influences include Dirty Harry (1971) and Death Wish (1974), which present models for, respectively, the renegade cop and vigilante, two figures that recur across numerous poliziotteschi. That said, as film critic Phil Nobile Jr. observes, these Italian offshoots have, despite their links to Hollywood, “metastasized into their own, singular, bonkers genre,” and the Italian Connection chase scene is a case in point. Running seven minutes and featuring a bevy of vigorous, committed stuntwork (one segment in which Luca hangs off the side of a careening vehicle, clambers to the front, and head-butts his way through the windshield anticipates the daredevil virtuosity of Hong Kong’s golden age), the scene is a relentless, blistering display of brute force. Wider, more distant shots underline the realness of stunts—e.g., one car barreling into another, sending the latter into a tailspin as dislodged metal bits scatter across the pavement—while rickety handheld close-ups bring us uncomfortably close to the clamminess of skin, the heaving of fighting bodies, and the acute distress writ large across Luca’s face. These stylistic techniques generate a sense of intense physicality—both the physical reality of the world before the camera and our felt attunement with a physicalized camera that seems to yank us into the throes of the violence.
When yoked to the film’s (and the poliziotteschi genre in general’s) depiction and dramatization of familiar lived realities (as Noble Jr. notes, many films were shot on-location, i.e. in the kinds of urban spaces that were the historical sites of violent crime and conflict, a fact that would not have been lost to Italian viewers), this filmic physicality takes on a powerful social dimension. The film medium’s reference to real physical space becomes further coded as real historical space (not just “some” physical reality before the camera but a specific and recognizable one that, for Italian audiences at the time, would have been charged with emotional significance), a space into which the viewer seems to be pulled even further via both the narrative catharsis of Luca’s diegetic situation and action filmmaking’s visceral grammar. Within this palimpsest in which filmmaking style, physical world, and social reality are felt to be overlaid, the jolt of action cinema’s bodily address takes on a potent sense of social urgency and immediacy, seeming to erupt from and plunge back into the tactile volatility of a fraught historical moment.
The Action Scene is a column exploring the construction of action set pieces, but it also considers “scene” in the sense of field or area: “action” as a genre and mode that spans different cultures and historical periods. By examining these two levels in tandem—one oriented toward aesthetic expression, the other toward broader contexts and concepts—this series aims to deepen appreciation for and spark discussion about action cinema.