A young man (Chris Mitchum) gets out of prison to find that his mafia don father has been brutally murdered, and that the man that who did it (Arthur Kennedy)has also taken his fiancée (Malisa Longo). This sounds like the perfect set-up for a revenge movie, but this is actually a very atypical one. The young man had little respect for his gangster father and after years in prison is not all that desirous of revenge, but is drawn into it by his vengeful, invalid mother, his father's crooked business associates, his promiscuous former fiancée, and, above all, the utterly ruthless paranoia of the new don. This movie also takes the saying that "if you go seeking vengeance, dig two graves" to whole new extremes. The hero should have dug many, many graves since his vendetta gets practically everybody in the cast, sympathetic or evil, killed. Of course, digging graves is largely unnecessary since the evil don gets rid of most of HIS victims by putting them in an acid bath and turning them into soap for his soap factory (hilariously, he is therefore, afraid to use soap). This movie is VERY violent including graphic scenes of castration, a guy getting his face caved in with a rifle butt, ad infinitum. It was actually first released in the US as a horror movie called "Cauldron of Death".
What's interesting though, without giving away the end, is that the final revenge is strangely unsatisfying, and the movie ends up being more a tragedy like "Hamlet" than a revenge flick. It's more violent than your average American revenge flick, but also ironically a lot less fascist. Violence is not the answer to every problem and only begets more violence that ultimately stains the "good guys" as well as the "bad". (Also, even the ruthless don is humanized a bit in that he does seem to genuinely love his faithless mistress). Although certainly not all Italian crime/revenge movies are like this, I would still maintain that Italians seem to have learned something from their dark, fascist past that has been lost on many Americans.
But if all that's too left-wing for you, here's something that should appeal to ALL crime movie fans--the women. Barbara Bouchet does a sexy striptease that'll have your tongue unspooling onto the floor, but she also has an especially meaty role for a woman in one of these films as the protagonist's partner as well as his lover. Malisa Longo (whose body, uh, of work I was previously unfamiliar with) is a more the typical piece of meat (she's naked in every one of her scenes), but she does get to do some acting in her brief screen time. Ditto with future porn star Paola Senatore playing the protagonist's sister (who spends a hilariously amount of her time in bed with her husband)--I didn't even recognize her until the credits because I've never actually seen her actually ACT before. I would definitely recommend this one.
