I just ordered this DVD from CD Japan for 1990 yen (roughly USD 20). That's about as good as it gets for Japanese DVDs considering how outrageously overpriced they are with little if any extras on single layer discs. But I'll save that diatribe for another post.

I've read a lot of great reviews on this movie for quite some time and finally decided to get this title. I remember this DVD rolling out at the same time as Technica Di Un Omicidio (Professional Killer)," and "Giornata Nera Per L'ariete (Evil Fingers, The Fifth Cord)" and was included in the now out of print Koroshi box set.

I'd already picked up "Giornata Nera Per L'ariete" and was impressed with the quality of the title so I expect the same for "Assassination".

I'm curious about your thoughts on "Assassination" and would appreciate any feedback you can provide. Thanks!

http://www.cdjapan.co.jp/detailview.html?KEY=KIBF-127

If and when the moderator turns the search engine back on, there's a few comments on it and related films from a month or two back here. Short answer for now: I really liked it. The opening sequence alone is reason enough to watch. Part of the pleasure for me was the surprising revelation that Italians were making crime films like this so early (and other films in the series this belongs to provide further, enjoyable evidence: sometimes puzzlingly so: shots that one would assume imitate DIRTY HARRY of snipers and rooftops predate the Siegel by years). It's a quite different crime-genre than the later movies, however, though Silva is the same. Moody, be-boppy jazz predominates on the soundtrack (but also a wonderfully bizarre mixed bag of found rock, pop and schlock -including incredible arpeggiating elevator muzak- lovingly picked out by Robbie Potevin), and the visuals and storytelling are very much in line with POINT BLANK (same year: so the Boorman influence I assumed was at work here is an open question). That's all to the good: I love elliptical, pop comicbook visual narrative style. At its best, this one is in the Sergio Leone zone of hallucinatory achievement. And its New York is not really much more ersatz than Scorcese's: same movie references and eclectic soundtrack and archetypal mean street types: I love the Howard Hawks bowling alley, for example. Eventually (like within thirty minutes) the masterpiece trappings melt away to reveal what's basically a somewhat silly euro-noir on a B budget, but it remains very entertaining, and the relatively youthful Silva in one or two roles (it keeps you guessing) is fun to watch.

Excellent film that you have to pay careful attention to understand what's going on. I had to watch it a couple of times to truly understand the plot.

The Japanese DVD is a quality product. Nice transfer (although non anamorphic) in it's corrrect OAR.

It may be a little slow for the action crowd but an intriguing film nonetheless.

Highly recommended.

Good film. It was the partner piece to a film called THE FALLING MAN, also directed by Miraglia and starring Silva (which is available in a wildly different form as FRAME UP). Interestingly, THE FALLING MAN was originally intended to be directed by Franco Prosperi, the guy who made PROFESSIONAL KILLER (the other Japanese DVD) and a similar film called EVERY MAN IS MY ENEMY. I'd highly recommend all of these films!

Talking of sixties crime films, when you dig around there were actually a hell of a lot of them out there; especially if you push the boundaries a bit. ROCCO AND HIS BROTHERS, for instance, features a lengthy crime subplot (ok, this is an arthouse film rather than a polizioteschi, but the concerns and thmese are very similar). Pasolini's early works (as director and writer) were primarily concerned with youths drifting into the criminal underworld. Then you get films like ROME COME CHICAGO, WAKE UP AND KILL, MAFIA, GANGSTER 70... all from before the main genre bloom. Are there any other ones that have slipped past me..?

Matt B

The Alberto Lasttuada 'dramedy' MAFIOSO (ca.1962) with Alberto Sordi and Norma Bengell (happy 70th birthday, Norma!) has a long New York crime hitman episode that comes out of nowhere, and plunges what's been a comedy of manners about New and Old Sicily into darkest comedy-horror. I suspect this coup de cult-theatre is thanks to auxiliary story and script writers Marco Ferreri and Rafael Azcona because its bitter absurdity plays very much like one of their own projects (the title DILLINGER IS DEAD comes to mind, but I haven't seen it; I'm thinking of their black comedies of the day primarily). Filmically, it's in the 1967-1968 style, a Mondo tourist eye view of NYC, land of casual violence and racist paranoia, big buildings and Cadillacs, professional killers as lone existential guns, moody jazz...

There's also rock n roll phenom Adriano Celentano's auteur debut starring him and his rat pack "il Clan", SUPER RAPINA A MILANO (1964) which sounds like a Robin and the Seven Hoods type effort, fantasies of old Chicago and playing gangsters, but set in modern Milan and with a gritty underclass-upwardly mobile dimension. A flop, but it would get reformulated by Lizzani in BANDITI A MILANO/VIOLENT FOUR a few years later, which included one of the original Celentano clan-men in the new Volonte gang, Don Backy. Four years before SUPER RAPINA, there'd already been I SOLITI RAPINATORI A MILANO directed by Giulio Petroni (TEPEPA) and written by one of the folks who would write the Celentano, Mario Guerra. It's basically (from what I gather) a comedy-heist trading on the popularity of earlier such film SOLITI IGNOTI/Big Deal on Madonna Street, but switching the locale from Rome to Milan. The Celentano then added a more Sinatra-rock cool band of thieves, some mean streets background and sociology, and gunfights and standoffs, while keeping the crooks a likeable crew of ambitious rebels. Lizzani , in turn, upped the violence, made the mixed up kids into total nihilist terrorists under Volonte's tutelage, and ripped the headlines from the front page: cops helpless to defend Milan. I believe in those several films we get traced the prehistory of the "Violent City" movie...


Of course, ONCE UPON A TIME IN AMERICA would have been the ultimate of the early wave had it been made in the late sixties as originally planned.

I’d add Ring of Death with Franco Nero and Defeat of the Mafia to the list of late-60’s Italian crime movies worth checking out. For me, these and the ones mentioned above are much more rewatchable than those of the later 70’s; rather than wearing their influences too plainly on their sleeves they feel like an admixture of accumulated film knowledge up till then with earnest attempts to push the genre in a new direction. I tend to feel that since Point Blank, Assassination and Le Samourai all debuted so closely (Assassination opened 8/18/67 in Italy, Point Blank was 8/30/67 in the US and Samourai was 10/25/67 in France) there was something in the air/water/(sugar cubes??) that was inspiring artists simultaneously and maybe even forcing them into a creative one-upmanship in which the audience is always the winner.

In fact, unraveling the roots of these is frustratingly nebulous. Besides the earlier post-war crime dramas (both The Bandit from 1946 and Mario Girolami’s City of Violence from 1951 are essentially classical versions of storylines such as di Leo would later be famous for) and the working class crime stories (Death of a Friend, The Grim Reaper, etc) favored by the neo-realists there’s also the influence of the spy films and French crime films of the 60’s to take into account. Matt’s book is all you need to know about the spy film and essential reading for anyone interested in the period under discussion here; this was a gaping hole in film genre scholarship that’s now been plugged. The 60’s French crime wave (of films, that is) probably owes its temper and timbre more to Breathless than to Rififi, and you can sense a real continuum across the next couple decades (from Godard and Truffaut through Borsalino ((whose influence on the Italians is as great as that of Bullitt or Point Blank)) before finally petering out in the mid-80’s post-My New Partner) that at the very least contributed attitude and style to their Latin neighbors’ films. In my mind Boisset is the ultimate French crime director of the period, being a combination of Melvillian cool and Italian style and politicization (he worked on films for both Leone and Freda before directing his own), and in a fairer world he’d be as well-known as Lenzi.

There are more and more layers to this. Very interesting discussion!

As Bill suggests, it was all very much formational and freewheeling at this point, genre elements and situations from all over coalescing into quite different yet affiliated, and increasingly interesting, director-writer experiments and improvisations, popular but artistic.

I personally believe 1967-1968 or so is the climax of a great international boom of modernist art-inflected genre and genre-inflected art that started about a decade previous, pretty much the life span of "new wave", which helped set the tone but wasn't the only wave being surfed by any means. Leone and Boorman and Godard and Bergman and Melville to pick disparate seeming examples were doing variations of the same at the top of their form, all of them fusing 'ultimate' movie and 'last' movies (ultimate-last-latest western, gangster etc), be it in terms of the apocalyptic, the fashionable, the summation of structure and mythos of the classic forms in a self-conscious fractured sort of way that wouldn't have been conceivable a decade before.

That's art. What's most surprising and gratifying is how many 'ordinary' journeymen and apprentice types got caught up in the excitement and rose to the challenge with rsther extra-ordinary and imaginative work. Folks who got stranded in the outer reaches of 'trash' a little later (not that I don't like the results necessarily) turned in work well above what was demanded of them, delivering their little shot at greatness. I'm thinking of people like Giuseppe Vari/Joseph Warren who fired off a few inspired cheapies on a par with what Corman and associates were doing at the time, films like A PLACE IN HELL, a war movie from the same year of 1968 that's already framing South Pacific WW2 action in the Vietnam terms of both APOCALYPSE NOW and NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD.

This is the great lost period of eurocult. For those willing to shift their interests and attention spans and gore levels a little, there's a lot of movie gold in them hills (among other unsung genres, early psycho-erotica; the Bondian-Thomas Crownian super-heist movies)

Ah, the caper movies... It's very difficult to talk about the early crime films without veering into caper territory. The difference with all/most of these sixties films seems to be that, generally (-a-) the criminals are the central - sympathetic - characters (-b-) the settings are often rural / exotic rather than urban and (-c-) there's one strong narrative, rather than assorted plot strands unified by the fact that they all involve street scum! Then there's the style, which is simply streets apart.

I think something else to bear in mind is that the 'crime genre' was never as single minded as people portray it. OK, so there were a lot of post-VIOLENT ROME 'narked cop cleaning up the streets' type films, but there were also political thrillers (LA VIOLENZA: QUINTO POTERE, INVESTIGATION OF A CITIZEN), heist films (THE MASTER TOUCH) and giallo crossovers (WHO KILLED THE PROSECUTOR AND WHY). Each of these took their influences from slightly different places and strands of cinema.

There's a definite comparison with giallos, which were very different before Argento stamped his template on the genre: again, they often tend to be rural, tend to involve intrigue rather than pure psycosis and have a very disimilar look. Curiously - although I'm going way off topic here - a lot of the Spanish giallos of the seventies then use the sixties Italian model as prime influence rather than the seventies Argento variation. Wheels within wheels, and all that.

Matt B

This is the quite true, and it’s a somewhat unfair label since no such comparable label is used for Hollywood films, where “heist film” “mystery” “noir” and “cop movie” are all segregated. If anything, the catchall rubric “Italian crime film” is useful only as a testament to the diversity of influences these movies contain internally as well as externally. Despite both being called “crime movies,” GRAND SLAM and Lizzani’s THE TOUGH AND THE MIGHTY have about as many thematic or stylistic similarities with one another as DEATH LAID AN EGG has with GIALLO A VENEZIA. In the peak period James describes above, it seems genre wasn’t something to be adhered to, but understood thoroughly and rebelled against from the inside. Godard’s name continually pops up in interviews with genre directors (from all countries) of the period, and I see his influence in the oddest of places, like Petri’s QUIET PLACE IN THE COUNTRY, starting with its film-leader opening credits. Gerard Damiano even claims, “We thought we were Jean-Luc Godard” in an interview in the current documentary INSIDE DEEP THROAT, so the lure of genre on artistically-minded directors and the tug of art on genre-inclined directors must have been quite strong; Godard himself would adapt (or disfigure) Donald Westlake for MADE IN USA in ’66 and apparently do a spaghetti western with Volante (WIND FROM THE EAST, which I haven’t seen) in ’71. (And of course keep coming back to the genre later on with NUMBER TWO and DETECTIVE.) With this in mind it’s not hard to see how the small-world Italian film industry, where future directors (and their fathers, as in the Leone’s, Bava’s and Girolami’s cases) had apprenticed for years in the genre mill, must have been quite a fertile breeding ground to create the art-inflected genre movies that came of age in the late 60’s.

Also worth noting is how the quote above is also applicable to gialli, albeit to a somewhat more limited extent. I’ve always thought of the rural giallo (the apogee being Lenzi’s late-60’s movies with Carroll Baker) as a road not taken, a Betamax to Argento’s vhs. It could be they didn’t meet the increasing ante of sleaziness expected of them, or simply that a rapidly urbanizing Italian population preferred stories that reflected their contemporary lifestyle.

Speaking of INVESTIGATION OF A CITIZEN, the cozy Two Boots theatre in NY has a few screenings of this scheduled soon (3/6 and 3/20), so for anyone in the area, consider this a head’s up.

Just adding a couple notes and observations to the last couple posts.

Re: Godard. Two films come to mind. One's a pure travesty of a genre movie, contaminating it from within, and sort of working on its terms: ALPHAVILLE with 'Lemmy Caution'. I remember, from my parents and their artist friends commenting a little later, that what drew the most interest for many wasn't comic book references, but a) the marriage of pop and 'sophisticated' and especially B the use of real suburbs as the alienated future now: this imaginative low budget solution endlessly fascinated folks as much as listening to that crescendo on Sgt. Pepper by the Beatles a little later (believe it or not). And you can see instant influence in Petri's sci-fi TENTH VICTIM which does much the same thing while cherry picking the hottest styles and poses from ad-posters and magazines and Fellini-Antonioni .Meanwhile, Godard was himself contaminating the Italian international potboiler bestseller middlebrow Moravia movie (cf a dozen comparable films from the moment like Damiano Damiani's EMPTY CANVAS) with CONTEMPT, but that's only a waystation to the really 'ultimate' film that was most influential and typical of the 1967-1968 moment: WEEKEND. It's a a bit lost in the shuffle now (it's seemingly OOP, for one thing) but at the time this was considered the furthest out there, the boldest, brightest nihilistic thing on four wheels. The societal auto-destruction mass car rally-traffic jam road pic that dominates the first third tickled a lot of filmmaking imaginations, while being in tune with what others -like Petri- were already doing. It's very useful as a reference point, and much recommended.

Rural-crime or Giallo's a little vague for me as a concept. I know there's A QUIET PLACE IN THE COUNTRY, but what else is there? I'm mainly flashing on films that belong to one of the more rigid (though elastic) genres: Sicilian Giallo (a branch of Mafia film with elements of "The Family" but posed in terms of investigation and societal inquest: Pietro Germi's ancient IN THE NAME OF THE LAW establishes the type; the novels of Leonardo Sciascia and the film SALVATORE GIULIANO by Francesco Rosi modernize the rules and the style). There are numerous variations, but a bunch of set rules: ie: you must always open with plaintive, Sicilian dirge music over a panoramic shot of Palermo or Messina; there must be a conspiracy bigger than what the investigator from the North came to investigate (wheels with machinating wheels of Italian power), but often too murky to penetrate without loss of life; there should be a sexy widow who woos the hero and who is either held against her will by a local wiseguy like Gabriele Ferzetti; or working in collusion with him to bait the sucker-investigator etc, etc.

Are these the films you're talking about, something else?