Poor Mario Adorf. He just wants to pimp out his girls in Milan and give the cash to his ex-wife and his sickly young daughter. He's not a bad guy really, although he doesn't like it when guys try to rough up his girls. Mario's just getting on with his petty criminal life when all of a sudden he's being hunted down not only by the local crime boss, but by two hard faced American hit men too.
The hit men, Henry Silva and Woody Strode, have been sent to track him down and kill him in the most violent and brutal way possible as lesson from the US Mafia to those in Italy thinking of stealing heroin shipments. This might be all well and good, if in fact Mario had actually stolen anything. Instead the poor guy spends most of the film being hunted down like a dog while having no idea whatsoever why people want to kill him.
There's more pressure on Mario as the local don (Adolfo Celi) doesn't like the presence of two American gangsters on his turf and sends his men out to capture Mario. Every petty criminal in Milan knows that Mario's a marked man, so who can he trust? His hookers?
While this is a little thin story wise, the film itself is rather good. Henry Silva truly looks like a guy who would stab you in the face one minute then put the moves on your wife the next. Woody Strode is the straight man to all Silva's shenanigans, and Adolfo Celi nearly outdoes Silva in the hard-case gangster role, especially at near the end where the demented Mario finally confronts him. It's Mario Adorf that steals the show here as the clueless, but not helpless, Mario, as he jumps from being a flawed but caring father to a man who has been pushed about as far as someone can be.
Although the first half sets up all the characters and has a punch up or two, the film gradually gets more and more violent as you would expect, and of course it's standard practice to throw in a car chase too. This one goes from a car chase to a foot chase and even has Mario smashing his head through a windscreen in order to get at a gangster. From then it's non-stop until the gunfight in the scrapyard.
Funky soundtrack too. Loud, with it.
