VIVA [QUALCOSA]: SUPERFICIAL MATTERS

Abstract

Placed back in sequence, the rather awkward pose shown here (Fig. 1) finds its sense and generic placement: a blond and flawlessly moustachioed cop is on his way up, via a crane-dangled cable, to storm a school where sadistic hoodlums have taken hostage not just schoolchildren but, worse for them, the lover of said cop. But, isolated as a still, this image is a contradiction, a digital frame pulled from a celluloid film never meant to be paused over. The film, Un poliziotto scomodo, was directed by Stelvio Massi, produced and distributed by PAC, and released in 1978, and it was designed to circulate without pause, passing from one terza visione (third-run) theatre to another until it became worthless, too scratched to see or too familiar to be screened again. To hold attention onto it as an image, rather than an undifferentiated element of a passage, is therefore at odds not with the absent wish or essence of this film in particular but with the general structure of viewing to which it belonged. Like the extracted image itself, the film as a whole is defined by its status as a multiple, just one entry in a sequence of repetition, because it belongs to the filone (low-budget cinematic cycle) of the poliziottesco, the cop movie. Generating roughly 100 films from 1973 to 1978, many poliziotteschi share the same set of directors, actors, composers, locations, plot twists, and even footage, and nearly all riff off the same narrative structure and themes established by the capostipiti (the archetype films) at the outset of the surge. The actor glimpsed in this still, Maurizio Merli, is playing the essentially same part — the protagonist cop who takes the law into his own hands — for no less than the ninth of his thirteen poliziottesco appearances. The title of this particular film provides a quick glimpse of the cycle’s total logic, insofar as scomodo qualifies the noun that remained central for the whole run: not the police in general, but a cop, un poliziotto who neither fits nor quits the job, a bristling commissario di ferro who will not settle down, take bribes or guff from anyone, or stop lashing out against a world of perennial violence and a legal system he deems incompetent and excessively lenient. The commissario is therefore a man who, in proper crypto-fascist style, goes beyond the laws again and again in order to defend Law as such, all while tossing off the odd one-liner, maintaining heart-throb status, and dispatching, rather than jailing, an assortment of sub-proletarians, corrupt officials, sadistic capelloni, and meridionali transplants populating the same periphery where the films’ plentiful car chases could be shot without harassment by real-life cops. The Italianist, 34. 2, 298–305, June 2014