Fellini, Bertolucci, Antonioni, Rossellini, Leone. Everyone listed here is a) an iconic and generally well-regarded Italian film director and b) absolutely not the subject of this blog entry.
Instead I’m going to look at a very different sort of Italian filmmaker and the films they made, none of which are likely being considered for their own Criterion Collection release any time soon. (One of my alternate title choices was Italian Movies: The Not Exactly Criterion Edition) I’m referring to the trend in Italian crime films from the late 1960 into the mid-70s called Poliziotteschi.
Before I jump in with a quick summary of Poliziotteschi for the few readers who aren’t already fans of these decades-old Euro-crime thrillers I should add that most of the films mentioned here are available for streaming on Kanopy through the library.
My love of Italian crime films did not fully bloom until fairly recently. A few years ago, I started bringing home some Italian made Westerns (aka Spaghetti Westerns) from the library’s movie collection. Once those were exhausted, it was followed by a steady flow of Italian crime films (Poliziotteschi) and Italian horror-mystery (Giallo) from the 1970s. Italian crime film directors of the day wore their influences on their sleeves. They watched American films such as Bullitt, The French Connection, The Godfather, Dirty Harry, Serpico and Death Wish and I assume thought to themselves “Why not us?”
The Italian film industry of the time seems to have never met a single mini-trend in popular cinema it didn’t try to exploit and make their own. With mixed results. American films provided the inspiration, Italian directors provided the formula: Watch, imitate, repeat (It’s a small feat of linguistic contortionism that I have avoided using “rip off” here) until some level of financial success followed. Once they had a hit, like a stunt driver in their films’ obligatory car chase scenes, they kept the pedal to the medal churning out film after film in a movie-making-mill. Each trend was ridden remorselessly hard until it was bled dry financially and creatively. However, the fact is, the creative teams behind these movies put their own wonderfully unique stamp on the films that weren’t found in their American counterparts.
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