City Under Siege (1974)

Simply A Masterpiece

The performances transcend the film's tropes, grounding it in characters that feel more complete than this subgenre often produces.

Blistering performances.

It is neither dumb nor smart enough to be fun, and spends way too much time with its boring human characters.

CITY UNDER SIEGE is something of an atypical entry in the Italian polizia genre. Sure, it has all of the required trappings present in these filthy little crime films: there are rapes, violent robberies, shoot-outs, hostage situations, suicides, drugs, orgies, prostitutes, and squad cars racing down the streets with their tyres squealing and their horns blaring. These are all filmed perfectly well and give the film a classic '70s feel. Yet, on top of that, there's a main story of how vice, sleaze and corruption are rife in the city of Turin, and which shows how a middle-aged cop and his reporter friend attempt to clean up the rackets and get to the bottom of things.Inevitably it's a downbeat story, but there are nevertheless some highs, especially a uniquely original climax – I haven't seen the like anywhere else in this genre, and it's a good one. Enrico Maria Salerno (THE BIRD WITH THE CRYSTAL PLUMAGE) is well cast as the ageing hero, a cop with heart problems troubled by the lack of morals he sees everywhere around him. He really gets us on side from the beginning so that we end up rooting for him. His foil is sometime director Luciano Salce, who supplies a lot of cynical comic relief to the proceedings.The lovely Francoise Fabian pops up in a supporting role, leaving the viewer entranced by her beauty every time she appears. Weirdly, some of the film appears to have been played for laughs, and it's not sure whether this was true of the original, or whether it's the fault of the dubbing. It makes for a sometimes unwieldy combination of drama and chuckles. Director Romolo Guerrieri works hard, though, and in the end his efforts pay off. CITY UNDER SIEGE is unusual enough to be distinguishable from the dozens of other cops-and-robbers flicks filling Italian cinemas in the 1970s.

Yet another offbeat poliziottesco, this is actually an interesting satire – again centred around a particular Italian metropolis, Turin. Here, rather than having a tough young cop fighting gangsters or petty criminals, we get Enrico Maria Salerno as a middle-aged intellectual Police Commissioner who finds that the biggest threat comes from the city's decadent aristocracy (eventually exposing a drug/prostitution racket). His fine performance is matched by Francoise Fabian as the beautiful widowed mother of one of the suspects (with whom he shares a hesitant relationship) and film director Luciano Salce as a cynical and alcoholic crusading newspaperman (and Salerno's longtime associate).Still, the film's tone is undecided (alternating brusquely between broad comedy and heavy drama) and the narrative all over the place – encompassing not only Salerno's own failing health but industrial politics (in the figure of a crazed ex-FIAT employee) and the problems of immigrants (an irrelevant but moving sequence in which a young boy hangs himself because of poor grades at school and where Salerno tries to break the ice by communicating with the befuddled father in their native dialect). All the while, it also attempts to fulfill the requirements of the genre by depicting a hold-up at a jewellery which leaves the elderly owner dead, the rape/murder of a teenage girl, a train robbery which turns into a massacre of both cops and criminals, the attempted suicide of Fabian's son over a frame-up, the climactic raid on the brothel, etc.Ultimately, the film is overlong though it concludes with a couple of strong sequences: Salerno and Salce disrupting a social gathering by distributing pornographic material to the clearly embarrassed (but ever polite) aristocracy depicting their degenerate offsprings, and Salerno angrily showing Fabian the 'real' Turin – a city vaunted for its medieval relics, and to whose hedonism Salerno maintains the people are slowly reverting! Carlo Rustichelli's jaunty music often serves as ironic commentary on the proceedings but, for this reason, doesn't have the urgency of the typical poliziottesco score.

Rape, murder, suicide, armed robbery--an Italian city has it all in this odd police procedural from director Romolo Guerrieri. When a daughter of one of the city's ruling class is found murdered and raped, overworked and underpaid police detective Parrino (Enrico Maria Salerno from The Bird With the Crystal Plumage) is on the case--bad heart notwithstanding. The English language dub of this film is quite confusing at times and inappropriately (I think) emphasises comedic elements, and Carlos Rustichelli's score is a bit schizophrenic, too, with darker passages undercut by light hearted 'sex comedy' cues, especially in the early going. Nonetheless, this is a reasonably entertaining feature and never boring, as we follow our bedraggled hero and his reporter friend (Luciano Salce) on the trail of the killer.