The Violent Professionals (1973)

Save your money for something good and enjoyable

I like movies that are aware of what they are selling... without [any] greater aspirations than to make people laugh and that's it.

Good films always raise compelling questions, whether the format is fiction or documentary fact.

This is a coming of age storyline that you've seen in one form or another for decades. It takes a truly unique voice to make yet another one worth watching.

MILANO TREMA boasts some nice Milan location work and some very well-handled action sequences by Sergio Martino. The proceedings however get a little bogged down with a few too many subplots, unlikable characters, and lots and lots of talking about politics. Ernesto Gastaldi was one of the best of Italy's genre movie screenwriters, always able to inject some realism and dimensionality even into the small bit players. There's even some successful intentional humor, particularly during Luc Merenda's successful infiltration of a bank heist racket even though he's (a former?) chief of police.The car chases in this film really take the cake though as some of the best of the genre, and quite early in the cycle too. Footage from the chases popped up in numerous other crime films, particularly Umberto Lenzi's. Also, a lot of the same henchmen would pop up in film to film from here on out. While at first I was irked that the two bumbling goons (Claudio Ruffini and Sergio Smacchi) who get tasked with tailing Merenda around just disappear without any resolution, I was delighted to see teamed again (possibly as the same characters?) in such films as THE CYNIC THE RAT AND THE FIST.Granted, the success of this film, along with HIGH CRIME led to an explosion of Italian crime movies over the rest of the decade. The two films share much in common including featuring a fisticuffs- loving inspector using extreme methods to rid his city of crime to the tune of Guido and Maurizio De Angelis music. Oh yes, and Silvano Tranquilli appears in both, though his character here much less intimidating.

Not the best Italian mafia movie but certainly not the worst. Luc Merenda is a cop who, after his superior is assassinated, vows revenge. It takes a long time for him to exact his revenge in Sergio Martino's so- so thriller. There are a couple of exciting cars chases, a good performance by Merenda and a supporting cast that includes Richard Conte (in one of the many Italian production he appeared in during the 1970s). Martine Brochard plays a radical Merenda hooks up with. There are a lot of references to '70s Italian politics, but that adds little weight to this straightforward story of revenge. The music by Guido & Maurizio De Angelis does add a lot...it's heavy on the bass guitar. Giancarlo Ferrando did the cinematography.

There are good cops, there are bad cops… and then there also are awesomely barbaric Italian cops! Back in the early 70's, when the best scoring films in Hollywood were raw & violent crime-thrillers like "Dirty Harry" and "The French Connection", the Italian film industry immediately attempted to cash in on this trend and produced films that easily surpass the excitement-level of their American counterparts. The already hard-working local directors, who almost exclusively made horror films and westerns until then, like Umberto Lenzi, Fernando Di Leo and Enzo G. Castellari, suddenly also became specialists in the fields of outrageous car chases, deafening gunfights and aggressive personal vendetta techniques. Even though usually filmed on a tight schedule and wasting a minimum amount of budget, these crime-thrillers always are highly professional and technically superior films with impressively fast-paced camera-work and flawless editing. Sergio Martino joined the temporary hype as well, and – as it was the case with his splendid gialli-achievements – he delivered one of the absolute greatest efforts in the sub genre. His "Violent Professionals" has it all! The script is great and terrifically convoluted (courtesy of Ernesto Gastaldi – him again), the lead hero is immensely charismatic and merciless and the action sequences are so incredibly outrageous they're guaranteed to make your head spin. Practically all of these Italian crime-thrillers introduce heroic coppers who literally balance on the edge between right and wrong themselves. They're supposed to uphold the law and arrest criminals, but they rather act as judge, jury and executioner in one and prefer to kill a gangster rather than to bring him in for questioning. The opening sequence of "Violent Professionals" makes this perfectly clear, as the handsome and rough Inspector Giorgio Caneparo pursues a couple convicts through the Italian countryside after they escaped from a prison transport and killed several policemen and innocent civilians. Even after the criminals had already surrendered themselves, Inspector Giorgio guns them down anyway! This sequence is rather irrelevant to the rest of the movie's plot, but it's a terrific appetizer nevertheless and it gives you a good idea of the main character's personality. The actual plot revolves on the same Inspector Giorgio infiltrating in the organized crime network of Milan, because he wants to find and personally punish the bastard who killed the Milan police commissioner (and his own best friend). With his aggressive fighting style and vast knowledge of bank robbing techniques, Giorgio quickly gets himself noticed and he's soon hired as the getaway driver of one of Milan's most notorious mob bosses. The script isn't always waterproof, but the basic premise of "Violent Professionals" is compelling and engaging enough to keep you close to the screen throughout the whole playtime. The action is top-notch, with some of best car crashes/chases ever shown (the same ones actually feature in Lenzi's "Almost Human") and a whole lot of bloody executions. It's also an amazingly raw and relentless film! Poor, defenseless children and innocent hostages die just as brutally as the real baddies and you shouldn't count on a happy ending in which the hero walks towards the sunset with his loving girlfriend. Quite the contrary, Sergio Martino often captures a surprisingly gripping & melodramatic atmosphere here; especially in the sub plot centering on the affair with Inspector Giorgio and the drug addict informant Maria Ex. The De Angelis Brothers' score is one of the most enchanting ones I ever heard and it's perfectly appropriate for all the uneven differences in the film's tones. Luc Merenda is just as imposing and memorable as his fellow bad-cop actor colleagues Tomas Milian, Ray Lovelock and Maurizio Merli. Very much recommended if you're looking for thrills and suspense.

So far I've seen five of these 70's Italian crime thrillers, 3 of them being straight up, Don Siegel and William Friedkin-influenced "cop on the edge with an axe to grind" Dirty Harry rip-offs. Out of those three, all of which are great, this has got to be the one with the coolest story-line (the other two being "High Crime" and "Violent Naples," to give you an idea of the standard here). While it is neither perfect nor entirely realistic, it is action-packed, bloody and riveting, a cocktail of elements common to the genre. And this particular "cop-on-the-edge," played by Luc Merenda, is so on-the-edge that he "poses" as a pimp muscling in on prostitution rackets with the facility of an old pro, gets innocent bystanders killed without hardly batting an eye, and cold-bloodedly executes surrendering criminals in front of the entire police department!While he lacks quite the level of charisma and intensity delivered by Franco Nero or Maurizio Merli, Merenda holds his own. The primary reason he is able to do so here (the two secondary are Sergio Martino's competence in directing pulse-pounding action and the fact that the extremity I've come to expect from these films is as present here as anywhere) is the sucker-punch, no, make that downright subversive plot-line. Without giving too much away, suffice it to say that what appears to be shaping up into a slanted portrayal of fanatical domestic terrorists (not that groups like the Red Brigade need any slanting to look bad, just that dishonesty bugs me even if it's on the right side) proves later to be something entirely different. The ending of this film, while it would be typical in another context, blew me away.To top it off, you've got a killer score by the mad De Angelis brothers (if you've seen "Keoma," note that it helps that the only song with words isn't translated into English), and the only fatal car crash I've ever seen in an action movie where the car doesn't inexplicably burst into flames. Three cheers for this gleefully brutal mayhem-fest with the added plus of an intelligent plot!