Tomas Milian

Don’t Torture a Duckling

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Maciara after having been beaten up by the villagers

Which witch? That seems to be the question behind Don’t Torture a Duckling (Non Sevizia un Paperino in the original Italian), the film that made Lucio Fulci something of a name in his home country – the sex, the gore. It’s essentially a police procedural and sets off in a very familiar direction. A child is killed and a man has soon been arrested for the crime. But this arrest is too easy, too quick, and when another child is killed while the suspect is behind bars, it is suddenly clear that it cannot be Barra, the town simpleton and peeping tom. It must be someone else and Barra’s story about having buried … Read more

The Cynic, the Rat and the Fist

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Murizio Merli as Leonardo Tanzi

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 … Read more