Nick the Sting

aka Gli Amici Di Nick Hezard

The dirty rotten American businessman Robert Clark (Lee J. Cobb) spends most of his business life doing extremely illegal deals. His newest one is a little insurance fraud. He hires a burglar to steal highly valuable jewelry from his own villa to get at the insurance money and be able to sell the valuables later on. Usually, that's the sort of theft we here approve of, but Clark also kills the burglar, just to be sure he isn't talking.

And that's not safe enough Clark. He also puts the small-time conman Nick Hezard (Luc Meranda) in possession of a piece of the stolen jewelry, so that the police and the insurance company will blame the whole business on Nick and unknown accomplices. Then it's just the little business of murdering Nick and his fence and Clark's perfect crime is done. Too bad for Clark that he doesn't kill Nick, but a friend of Nick's.

The young conman wants revenge, although he isn't the type to go into all guns blazing action hero mode, so he plans on doing the biggest con of his career on Clark. With the help of his pimp mother (Valentina Cortese) and a bunch of old partners of his conman father, he gets to work. However, it's not as easy as he would have wished for, with Clark's henchmen and an insurance inspector (William Berger) and a cop on his trail.

Did you love The Sting? Well, a lot of people in Italy obviously did, and if there is one thing for certain when it comes to the Italian film industry of the time, then it's its incredible hunger for the production of cheap rip-offs of everything that has made even a little money.

Nick the Sting has the definite advantage over other second row caper movies of having been directed by Fernando Di Leo. Today (at least outside of Italy), Di Leo is mostly known for his harder Eurocrime and cop movies, but he of course also made a lot of Western or whatever else the genre of the day might have been.

It turns out that Di Leo's snappy sense of pacing is useful in a caper movie as well as when showing the more brutal film version of gangster life like in Milano Calibro 9, and so whatever faults Nick the Sting may have, being slow or boring certainly isn't one of them. And if any kind of chase or a little brawl is needed to liven up the proceedings, Di Leo is the right man to deliver them with surehanded enthusiasm.

Neither is the acting a problem, although I find Meranda more convincing when he is not donning silly disguises, but I'd put that inherent ridiculousness more on the genre conventions (which require broadness and obviousness of disguises as to let the viewer feel superior over the hero's victims) as on the actor. Everyone else seems to have a lot of fun with her or his role, giving the film a bit of a party feeling that seems only too fitting when one keeps in mind that one of the pleasures of films of this type has always been to watch clever working class criminals sticking it to the rich, brutal gangster types in a less bloody variation on the "little man strikes back" theme. Nick the Sting even puts further emphasis on this part of its subtext by giving the conpeople an appearance of community and social responsibility for each other the big gangsters and the police seem to lack.

One could of course go on and criticize the film's script for the much too complicated scam its heroes are setting up, but another pleasure of the genre lies exactly in this baroque complexity that is meant to demonstrate the good guys' cleverness. After all, it's not supposed to be a realistic scam, because then the victims would be poor old people and the protagonists much less sympathetic, it's supposed to be an idealized and utopian version of a scam where no one really gets physically hurt, and only the real bad guys are hurt at all - where it truly hurts them, their bank accounts. (Please imagine Billy Bragg and Wilco playing "The Unwelcome Guest" here).

A more troubling problem of the plot is its closeness to the original The Sting, and I would decry the film's near plagiarism loudly and violently if not for the fact that I didn't find myself caring much about things like intellectual property while watching.

Instead, I was having quite a fun time with one of the friendlier genre films coming from Italy.

 

Technorati-Tags: italian movies,reviews,fernando di leo,luc merenda,lee j. cobb,caper,eurocrime

Silent Action (1975)

aka La polizia accusa: il servizio segreto uccide

A small yet strange series of deaths of people working for the Ministry of Defense and the military hits Italy. Since all of the deaths seem to be accidental or suicides, no alarm bells start to ring anywhere. That's a problem, because the deaths are in fact murders and we the viewers the only witnesses.

The Roman cop Solmi (Luc Merenda) is as unsuspecting as anyone else, until he is starting to investigate the death of the private detective Chiarotti. Chiarotti's death is murder all right - his head has been bashed in with a fire poker. It's just all a little strange. Why is a mere detective as rich as Chiarotti was? Solmi soon finds a prostitute (Delia Boccardo) who must have been present when the detective was killed, but she nearly dies in a murder attempt that's made to look like a suicide. She can't tell Solmi much anyway. That Chiarotti was having an argument with a man and was killed by the man is pretty much all she knows. Useful descriptions are not forthcoming.

For DA Mannino (Mel Ferrer), the girl is still the main suspect in the case, whatever Solmi may think about her physical fitness to kill the victim with a few poker strikes and the psychological absurdity of the theory.

The case gets more interesting when a man gets arrested while breaking into Chiarotti's villa and stealing a single hidden piece of tape with the voice of a dead general declining to cooperate with a man named Rienzi. Even more interesting is the fact that the burglar claims to work for the Secret Service.

Solmi diligently asks the Secret Service what's up, but their Captain Sperli (Tomas Milian) denies everything, as spies are wont to do, but is still interested in talking to the burglar and hearing what's on the tape. When Solmi and Sperli get to the tape, it turns out to have been erased.

This is of course not the last time in the film that Solmi's witnesses are killed or kidnapped or someone who must be pretty close to the investigation interferes with it, but once his sense of justice is awakened, Solmi can't be dissuaded to leave the case be.

People know and love Silent Action's director Sergio Martino mostly for his Giallos, but as a working commercial director, he of course did his time in whatever genre was the flavor of the day, how fitting or unfitting his talents might have been.

Silent Action combines the Italian cop movie with the conspiracy thriller arm of the spy movie, both genres Martino's talents are surprisingly fitting for. The director was always an excellent craftsman, using every bit of technique he could afford to keep his films entertaining. If you ask me, the emphasis on "keeping his films entertaining" is the main difference between him and Bava or Argento who were more artfully minded and willing to use their visual talents to push their films in other, more experimental directions not every audience would be able or willing to follow all of the time. While I love both Bava's and Argento's films, I can't say that I blame Martino for "just" trying to make perfectly great genre films.

In the case of Silent Action, Martino was quite successful. After a somewhat slow start, the film picks up tempo until its plot is ticking along at a joyous pace. I read complaints about a certain lack of action in the movie, but that lack of action only exists in comparison with a handful of Italian cop movies that just don't need as much time to build their plot as a conspiracy thriller does and in the minds of people with severe ADD - on planet reality, there is plenty of chases and shoot-outs to admire, and while Martino as an action director is no Enzo G. Castellari, he is still pretty damn good.

"Pretty damn good" is also a fitting description for Luc Merenda's performance. Merenda usually is the Italian cop movie guy people forget when listing their top five actors in the genre (I blame the lack of a moustache, the moustacheless niche already filled by Fabio Testi), but he really is no slouch. His Solvi is a rather interesting variation on the cop movie hero - besides the lack of a moustache, he is less prone to long, reactionary rants about the evils of modern society and the beauty of the police state and shows a certain restraint in the use of unnecessary violence. Why, it even takes an hour until he starts to torture someone, and even then he's downright subtle about it. This of course makes his character surprisingly believable as someone actually interested in justice and not a vigilante as most of the dubious heroes of police movies often are. This time, the cop hero is actually someone to root for, giving the typical 70s conspiracy film ending (and if someone thinks that this counts as a spoiler, I just can't help it) a bit of weight even though the conspiracy itself isn't all that memorable.

All in all, it's a very fine film that balances the need for action and the need for investigation scenes as effortlessly as Martino is able to decide when to use his hand camera and when a long tracking shot.

 

Technorati-Tags: italian movies,luc merenda,sergio martino,cops,conspiracy,reviews,tomas milian