The Tough Ones and the cathartic release of violent movies
Umberto Lenzi's poliziottesco explores The Years of Lead
The European outlook on crime and criminals has always fascinated me. Here in The States we tend to treat crime as this boogeyman which lurks just out of frame, waiting to pounce. Crime as a vague and menacing concept lives in the headlines and lurches to the fore every couple of years, without fail, as a prop used by both Republicans and Democrats to lure their constituents to the polls by the promise of somehow fixing the problem. For Americans, crime is the nebulous chaos which will undo everything we’ve all worked so hard for. Organized crime is regarded with a clutching of pearls so tight they’re reduced to dust in your hand. We have a little room for fantasy, though, and every couple of years some TV show comes a long like The Sopranos or Sons of Anarchy which gives people license to indulge their id but there’s still far more on the air these days that portrays cops as unconditional heroes and criminals as cartoonish forces of chaos that are actively out to get you.
Europe, though… Europe, man… I wish I understood what was going on over there. It likely has something to do with a thousand years of monarchies and two major wars that dramatically changed the shape of the continent. Being subject to the whims of kings and then bureaucrats for a dozen generations, adrift on the sea of fate will fuck with you. England manages to stay mostly in the mode standards set by the United States but France, Italy, and Germany have rich film histories that take a radically different approach to crime. Going back as far as the infancy of film, the French took their sordid love affair with nefarious criminals from the stage of the Grand Guignol theater and dedicated it to film in 1913 with the beginning of the Fantomas series. The Germans left their mark with a niche series of super-villain movies known as Krimi where good guy cops struggled to liberate foggy London-town from the clutches of a villainous criminal that would be right at home in the pages of Detective Comics. The police were the protagonists, obviously, but everyone was showing up for Doctor Mabuse. Italy, not to be outdone, covered all the bases and then some.
Poliziotteschi is the grittiest shit in the world and it doesn’t come without reason. I mentioned The Years of Lead in my writeup of Fulci’s New York Ripper, twenty years of vicious partisan street fighting. Fascists were literally killing communists and communists engaged in wave after wave of revenge killings as they struggled for party dominance in post-war Italy’s government. This sort of profound political instability and wildly oscillating ideological shifts trickled down to broader society in predictable ways. Unemployment and inflation rose sharply, so did crime. Organized crime seized on the chaos. Partisans robbed banks and armored cars left and right to pay for their war. Petty criminals engaged in purse snatchings that you commonly see in Poliziotteschi: Two guys on a motorcycle, a driver and a snatcher. The same cultural conditions that led to a decade of incredible and incredibly nasty horror movies also translated to a decade of wild cops and robber movies and Umberto Lenzi delivered a real banger with The Tough Ones.
The pattern of Poliziotteschi is almost always the same. There are gangsters surrounded by a cloud of petty criminals. There are cops who are out to stop them at any cost. The bad guys are bad. The cops are bad, too, but depending on the political leanings of the filmmaker in question, the anything-goes attitudes of the police is the source of nuance. At their heart, they’re all gunning for one of two models: The Godfather or Dirty Harry. The Tough Ones is basically Dirty Harry with the world’s most handsome psycho lone-wolf cop standing in for the craggy face of Eastwood. Their complaints remain the same: The only cure for crime is high-velocity lead and bleeding-heart liberals will be the death of us all when they plead with the courts to let every criminal go free because their dad didn’t love them enough.
Lenzi was a lifelong anarchist and his approach to making a cops and robbers movie is strongly indicative of his feelings about the police and related bureaucrats. In The Tough Ones everyone is constantly making things worse. Everyone. It’s actually kind of hilarious. The gangsters run wild on Rome. There’s a motorcycle purse snatcher waiting on every street corner. The social systems in place offer nothing but excuses and work against the police to free criminals in hopes of reforming them (which never happens). The brass just get in the way, punishing cops for doing their job. And the cops just want to put a bullet in everyone who looks at them funny. In any other Poliziottesco, Live Like A Cop, Die Like A Man, for instance, the psycho cops are played like badasses who get shit done. They’re cartoonishly villainous to the mildest of critical eyes but there’s an audience for that sort of performance both in earnest and ironically. By the end of the movie they’ve set Rome on fire, a small price to pay for justice. The Tough Ones, however, paints the entire scenario with the broadest brushes of catastrophe. Sure, the cops end up winning in the end but the cost is a pile of bodies and that’s not the end of it. Rome is a shifting landscape of crime. Gangs operate out of greed and desperation and the police flagrantly break the law. Everyone in The Tough Ones is simply acting out. This movie was released in 1975 at the height of partisan violence in Rome. There’s no conspiracy, no grand criminal plan, it’s just a rogue’s gallery of bad guys planting their criminal flag as soon as the previous criminal dynasty is wiped out.
The Tough Ones was released in Italy as Roma a Mano Armata which translates to Rome At Gunpoint, a way cooler name than the picture retitled for international markets. In some places, you can find it released with the title Rome, Armed To The Teeth, which is also about as badass as a movie title gets and badass it is. It concerns the police search for a French gangster who holds Rome, ahem, at gunpoint and the vicious and ambitious smaller crews vying for criminal supremacy in the city. The police effort is led by Inspector Tanzi, played by the painfully handsome Maurizio Merli. From start to finish, Tanzi arrests, beats, and torments the hunchbacked hood Moretto (played by Lenzi regular and all-around cool guy, Tomas Milian), who leads a small crew of bank robbers under the leadership of the aforementioned French gangster, Ferrender. Tanzi goes so far as to track Morreto to his sister’s house where he forces him to literally eat a 9mm bullet, a wild setpiece that comes back into play as the film eases into the third act. Moretto explains to an accomplice that he fished it out of the toilet after a difficult poo and intends to kill Tanzi with it. All the while, Tanzi is hamstrung by his superiors who’d like him to stop stalking and beating the crap out of his suspects.
In many ways, The Tough Ones is a by-the-numbers cops and robbers movie, with the terminally frustrated Tanzi outflanked by criminals and demoted by the brass, but Lenzi’s leftist point of view of cops and crime shines through in the way that the city’s condition is portrayed. The violence of real-life Rome at this time cannot be overstated. The regular, run-of-the-mill gangsters were subtle in the violent activity when compared to the partisans who killed with bombs and wild drive-by shootings that ended up killing their targets and everyone around them. Italian exploitation movies weren’t exactly the kind of place that you found subtle expressions of broader social ideas, but in The Tough Ones Lenzi seems to be expressing the frustrations of your average Roman citizen. In other Poliziotteschi the police are portrayed every bit as ultra-violent as they are in The Tough Ones, but the difference is that there’s a cool to it. There is wish-fulfillment. Deodato’s cops in Live Like a Cop, Die Like a Man, are murderous psychopaths, untethered and encouraged by the brass. They’re every bit as evil as the criminals but they have the consent of the state behind them. Here, the heroic Tanzi is every bit as unhinged but even by his own efforts he’s ineffective. Everyone is. By the time the credits roll everyone comes to terms with their own impotence with a grim realization that leaves them jaded. It’s a real trip. A third-act reveal about the gangster Ferrender, up to this point a faceless Keyser Soze type, demonstrates the foolishness of fighting the tide. Where most poliziotteschi are an exercise in black and white simple morality, Lenzi paints it all with a shrug of the shoulder and uniform shade of gray.
If The Tough Ones is anything it’s a ballsy, violent document of frustration. Everyone peeling off and killing each other gives the impression that Lenzi and writer Dardano Sacchetti are simply blowing off steam and giving the audience a valve to do so, themselves. In the same way that Death Wish and other New York vigilante movies of the era were a means for the beleaguered and very much under siege population of Manhattan to blow off Steam, The Tough Ones gives the people of Rome, regardless of which side of the partisan battle they were on, an escapist opportunity to blow off steam. There’s guns and fist fights for days and a crazy car chase shot from the same sort of low-angle, high speed shots that made Mad Max so memorable. It’s ostensibly Lenzi’s best picture and the soundtrack ain’t bad, either.