A good place to start if you’ve never seen one of the “poliziotteschi” films popular in Italy in the 1970s, The Cynic, the Rat and the Fist (Il Cinico, l’Infame, il Violento) is one of a series of movies actor Maurizio Merli made with director Umberto Lenzi, both leading lights of the genre that took over when spaghetti westerns lost their box-office allure.
The action is set during the so-called “years of lead” of political turmoil in taly and centres on Inspector Leonardo Tanzi (Merli), a decent cop who handed in his badge in the previous outing for Merli and Lenzi, The Tough Ones. But his life as an everyday freelance sword of justice is interrupted when he hears that his nemesis, the Chinaman (Tomas Milian) has broken out of jail and is out for his blood. After two of the Chinaman’s goons wound Tanzi in an attempted assassination, an ideal opportunity presents itself: for Tanzi to fake his own death, leave the scene of the potential crime and retire quietly to Switzerland.
This is, of course, no sort of option for a man of action like Tanzi, who soon returns to Rome from exile and sets about getting his revenge by pitting the Chinaman against American criminal blow-in Frank Di Maggio (John Saxon) in a shakedown that is as elaborate as it is long-winded. And fairly unnecessary, since the two men are plotting against each other anyway.
So, dock a couple of points for narrative drive. Milian and Saxon are a nicely matched pair of actors and the screenplay hands them scenes fleshing out their bona fides as proper badasses who like nothing better than a bit of torture and Bond villain cosplay. This doesn’t help the narrative drive much either but it does at least give Milian and Saxon something to do beyond scowl manfully.
Back to Tanzi, the man’s man who joshes with old comrades with a John Wayne-style punch in the face, treats women as useful for sex but not much else and is always ready to break a door down or crash through a window when he’s not offering macho reaction shots to camera – thoughtful Tanzi, steely Tanzi, virile Tanzi. With his moustache, dark glasses and a medallion resting in his copious chest hair, Tanzi is almost the spitting image of Will Ferrell and with barely any adjustment at all this film could be remade as a Ferrell comedy along the lines of 2010’s The Other Guys.
It’s highly enjoyable, in other words, with its fussy revenge plot really its only crime against the narrative arts. Lenzi is known for getting his films off to a fast start and does so here, with opening moments involving bag-snatching and a motorbike hurtling through the streets of Rome. From here a series of lively scenes shot bright and clean. And the action is well done too, with nicely choreographed fight sequences – one on a commuter train is particularly gnarly – in which Merli demonstrates that tight pants and action are not mutually exclusive (got to be some lycra in there).
If you’re a Brit and you have ever seen an episode of The Sweeney, you’ll recognise the vibe (Franco Micalizzi’s strutting theme music is highly reminiscent), though it also isn’t a long way from the likes of Kojak – the streetwise cop who’s also a bit of a sage and role model.
Umberto Lenzi and Maurizio Merli made a string of these poliziotteschi together, and though Merli played almost undifferentiated versions of the same policeman, this was the last outing for Tanzi, an uncomplicated cop with no psychological backstory or current hangups who goes to work in the morning determined to rout out injustice and to hell with the consequences. What a long way we are from Inspector Tanzi these days.
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© Steve Morrissey 2024
