Page 100 - Alternative Europe Eurotrash and Exploitation Cinema Since 1945

BLOOD IN THE STREETS
Beyond its depiction of contemporary social turmoil, another important and driving motif in Italian
crime/cop films is that of pain. Specifically, inflicting and receiving physical pain is central to this
cycle as a whole. Nobody is immune: not bystanders milling about on sidewalks or drivers just trying
to get their vehicles from one point to another. Even children and other 'innocents' are subject to
intense pain and random violence. These are films that depict Milan, Rome and Naples as ticking
time bombs, where every alley has a waiting thug with a blackjack in his pants and a stiletto in his
boot. Any café can become a bomber's target. Just getting into your car can be dangerous because the
backseat is likely to be occupied by a couple of psychotic kidnappers armed with pistols.
Whereas American cop films during the early 1970s addressed violence in the abstract, Italian
crime/cop films exploited different levels of violent behaviour whether enacted by a terrorist group or
the individual - and they raised the violence bar tenfold. In this sense, these films were more like Sam
Peckinpah's 1969 film The Wild Bunch (complete with spurting blood and the expression of pain)
than American images of the rogue cop from the 1970s. Indeed, even Dirty Harry's .44 rarely spilled
as much blood as was on display in the Italian cop films produced during the era.
This is because life in Italy's major cities during the 1970s was under the oppressive pall of random
acts of violence (be they by underworld gunfire or terrorist bombings at public establishments).
Terrorist violence found in Italy during the 1970s can be divided into two sections — left-wing
violence and Mafia violence. As Alison Jamieson has noted:

Left-wing violence derives from Marxist-Leninist revolutionary theory, is altruistic, symbolic
and has long-term aims; its targets are the representatives of a power system to be overthrown
in favour of a dictatorship of the proletariat. Mafia violence, by contrast, is immediate and
pragmatic, aimed solely at the pursuit of profit and the conservation of power and influence
for the clan. Rather than overthrow institutional authority, the Mafia prefers to erode and
suborn it; hence its essentially conservative nature.'

In that Italian crime/cop films echo these duel forms of violence, they also contain the necessary
presence of a third force of violence: the rogue cop resolutely beating his fists against the 'system' - a
system, which, for the most part, is exemplified by a passive police force. And, in these films, it was
actor Maurizio Merli who spearheaded the rogue cop persona in a more intense, furious and enraged
fashion than Hackman's 'Popeye' Doyle or Eastwood's Harry Callahan (although the American actors
and their characters were obvious influences on Merli).
Though stereotyped as brutal cop throughout his career, Merli had all the right tools to play
the part - dirty mop of blond hair, thick bushy moustache, unruly mutton-chop side-burns, rose-
lensed aviator shades, chipped teeth, clenched fists and a wardrobe straight out of Shaft (Gordon
Parks, 1970). Merli played a hard-bitten cop in at least twelve films from 1975-79. And according
to director Stelvio Massi, who worked with Merli in eight of those films (including Poliziotto sprint
(1977) and Poliziotto senza paura (1977)), the actor may have enjoyed his role too much - actually
smacking down stuntmen during fight sequences.

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