Yikes, this is a nasty piece of work. Italian cop films of the 1970s (known in Italy as poliziotteschi) are generally rough around the edges, technically and otherwise, but this one is simply ferocious, as well as having a decidedly right-wing agenda. Henry Silva plays Commissario Grandi, but he's really just playing second fiddle to Tomas Milian's villain. Milian is Giulio Sacchi, a petty criminal in Milan who we first meet as he's taking part in a bank robbery. It turns out Giulio's also a coward and he kills a cop in a moment of panic. The gang he's with is furious with his cowardice and gives him the boot after a quick beating. Giulio then gets the bright idea to kidnap the daughter of a wealthy Milan businessman. He recruits two friends for the job, both of whom barely qualify as petty crooks. The kidnapping goes ahead with much unnecessary loss of life, and ends as badly as it starts.
The character of Giulio is the main attraction of this film. To say that he's a mad dog criminal is overstating his boldness; he's more of a mad weasel villain, albeit one armed with some low cunning. There's nothing that's too slimy for him to do, including killing a child and his own girlfriend. He's also self-pitying and bitterly resentful of the middle and upper classes. In short, the filmmakers have made him the bogeyman lurking under the bourgeois bed. When panicky middle-class Italians were decrying the violence of the so-called "Years of Lead" of the 1970s it was men like Giulio they were most afraid of: the urban poor armed with a gun and with a political chip on their shoulder. Milian gives a very good performance, turning Giulio into a violently criminal version of Ratso Rizzo.
The politics of the film are resolutely right of centre. The original Italian title is Milan Hates: The Police Can't Open Fire. Not very elegant, but it gets the point across. In this film the cops are helpless in the face of even a lamebrain crook like Giulio, and can only bring justice to the streets through vigilante action. The film ends with Commissario Grandi executing Giulio outside a bar and then turning himself in for murder. It's an appropriately bleak ending for a film that starts out nasty and then gets worse. By the standards of Italian cop films Almost Human looks good and has a neatly constructed plot. This isn't a film that's easy to like, but it probably gives an accurate reading on the zeitgeist of Italy of the '70s. In the trailer below the film is called The Death Dealer, but on DVD and most everywhere else it's known as Almost Human.
Philip D'Antoni isn't a name you hear mentioned often when the history of modern cinema is discussed, but he certainly deserves some credit for two notable contributions to film history. The first is the car chase. D'Antoni was the producer of Bullitt, The French Connection, and The Seven-Ups. Now there were certainly car chases before Bullitt, but they were usually done for comic effect as in It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World, or they were clumsily filmed scenes (lots of rear projection shots) of squad cars chasing bank robbers. In Bullitt and The French Connection the car chase became an action centrepiece, the equivalent of the cavalry charge in westerns and historical epics. D'Antoni's "modern" car chases looked and sounded real, and created a new kind of cinematic excitement. After The French Connection virtually no action film was complete unlesss it included one or more elaborately staged car chases.
D'Antoni's other addition to film history is the creation of a sub-genre I'd call cop noir. Cop noir begins with The French Connection. If film noir was all about doomed lovers, laconic private detectives, and moody cinematography, cop noir was about documenting the decline and fall of American cities and the institutions that make them function as seen through cop eyes. Cop noir looks raw, sounds raw, and shows big American cities torn apart by street crime, organized crime, drug addiction, poverty, and corruption. Hard on the heels of The French Connection came Dirty Harry, Across 110th Street, Busting, Serpico, The Taking of Pelham 123, Badge 373, and a score of similar films. Bullitt isn't cop noir if only because Steve McQueen looks great, acts cool, mostly keeps his temper, and has a supermodel girlfriend before there were supermodels. Compare and contrast with Gene Hackman in The French Connection and you'll see what I mean.
And that brings us to The Seven-Ups. The story has a pre-Jaws Roy Scheider leading a small team of N.Y.C. cops who go after villains wanted for crimes that earn sentences of seven years and up. Why seven years? Because it makes for a punny movie title. The film's title is a dud, but the film isn't. The Seven-Ups is essentially a sequel to Connection in everything but name. It has the same gritty look, Don Ellis scored both films, and it features possibly the best car chase of the three films D'Antoni produced.
The plot has Scheider's team investigating why some of the city's crime bosses are being kidnapped. It turns out Scheider's main snitch, played by Tony Lo Bianco, is using information he gets from an unwitting Scheider to target wealthy criminals for kidnapping and ransom. Things are further complicated by the fact that snitch and cop are childhood friends.Things don't end well for one of them. The story is original and engaging, and might have been even better if D'Antoni hadn't decided to direct this film himself. He had no experience at directing and it shows on occasion. A couple of sequences, notably a scene in a car wash, are clumsily handled and feature a variety of glaring continuity errors.
D'Antoni does redeem himself with the action sequences, which are quick, dirty and efficient, and the car chase, which is certainly as good as the one in Connection as well as being longer. D'Antoni the director also does a nice job with the actors, choosing an all-ugly cast of New York actors who bring a lot of verisimilitude to the film. And New York looks like, well, the New York you don't see in Woody Allen movies. This is Ratso Rizzo's N.Y.C.
If you like to remember New York as being mad, bad and dangerous to visit, check out The Seven-Ups. Spoiler alert: the trailer below shows way too much of the film's highlights.
