Along with Fernando DiLeo and Sergio Martino, Enzo Castellari is one of the Italian genre directors whose work has really been rehabilitated lately thanks to people like Quentin Tarantino. And, however, you feel personally about QT, it's hard to fault his tastes. Castellari, whose father (Marino Girolami) and uncle (Romolo Guerreri) were also respected Italian directors, made many films in many genres, including Westerns ("Any Gun Can Play"),gialli ("The Cold Eyes of Fear"), and horror flicks("Sensitiva"). His two most famous films were "The Last Shark", which never shown in the US because of an injunction brought by the makers of "Jaws", and "Inglorious Bastards", which Tarantino recently (and very loosely) remade. This movie is not one of his more famous, but it is definitely one of Castellari's best.
Fabio Testi plays a cop who is taking on a big, mafia-connected protection racket that is shaking down businesses all over Italy, and using disgruntled left-wing university students, including a tough female ( ) to do it. Frustrated by the limitations of the law, Testi eventually puts together a gang of victims of the racket including Vincent Gardenia, a small-time crook who lost his nephew to the gang, an Olympic champion skeet shooter who lost his wife, and perhaps most touching, a restaurant owner who went crazy after the gang raped his young daughter and she killed herself. Together they plan an improbable, but not entirely unbelievable, campaign to take down the entire racket.
This movie has a lot of the elements of a police thriller, but also of a rape-revenge/"Deathwish"-type movie. I wouldn't really call it "fascist" though because it really doesn't glorify violence (not too many people are left alive by the end of this). The protagonists, especially Testi's character, are flawed, three-dimensional, and vulnerable rather than being just a heroic super-cop types. And this has downbeat, noirish elements like some of the early American police thrillers of that period (i.e. "Dirty Harry", "The French Connection", "Deathwish"), but that were definitely lost by the happy-fascist Reagan era. These aren't self-righteous, fascist crime fighters, but decent people driven to extremes in a violent, decaying society. Of course, as an action movie this is still very entertaining, but the realistic violence and three-dimensional characters always keeps it from simply degenerating into another cop-worshipping cartoon. Recommended.
