Given the title of Killer Cop (Raro / Kino Lorber, Blu-ray, DVD) a 1975 poliziotteschi from Italy, you might expect a rogue cop thriller, and ambitious young Commissario Matteo Rolandi (Claudio Cassinelli), a rising officer on a major drug case, certainly has good reason to go rogue. His case gets caught up in a major terrorist bombing and his best friend (Franco Fabrizi), a workaday veteran with a fidgety nature and a streak of bad luck, is murdered for stumbling across the prime suspect. He’s frustrated that he’s been bounced from the case by the Prosecutor General, a serious, stone-faced legend of dogged duty who has the unlikely nickname “Minty” (because he keeps popping breath mints while working a case) and is played by American star Arthur Kennedy (dubbed in Italian of course), so when his drug investigation winds back into the bombing he conducts his own investigation. It turns out the Prosecutor has his reasons for keeping the case close to the vest: the police force, the justice department, the entire political system in Milan is riddled with corruption and he doesn’t know who he can trust.
The northern capital of Milan, the symbol of modernity and progress in the Italian cinema of the 50s and 60s, is the epitome of official corruption and the urban mob in the crime cinema of the 70s. The violence here, however, is no mob war or message from the criminal underworld. It’s not even a terrorist attack, at least not as defined by the traditional “war on terror” yardstick. It’s… well, I’m not really sure, but as the masterminds explain it, “It was only supposed to be a demonstration.” The best I can figure is that it’s a conspiracy rooted in a cabal of industrialists, government officials, and mobsters and it is designed to stir things up. Which pretty much vindicates the fears of both Rolandi and Minty, who keep tripping over each other with a frequency that makes them both suspicious.
Raro has been championing the poliziotteschi—brutal crime thriller and mob dramas from Italy in the 1970s—since its revelatory release of Fernando di Leo’s filmography. Killer Cop is a minor but interesting addition to the library, a low-key film that (unusual for the genre) focuses on honest cops trying to do their job in a culture of corruption and political intimidation. Italian audiences of the day would have recognized the event as a reference to a real-life bombing at Piazza Fontana, which was unsolved, and director Luciano Ercoli suggests a conspiracy that could have come out of the American cinema of the day, like The Parallax View. It’s short on exposition, which is as interesting as it is frustrating—the whole conspiracy remains shadowy and the complicity of the police and justice officials is unclear—but also gives the film an atmosphere of distrust of all official representatives. The bomber himself (Bruno Zanin) is a kind of sad-sack patsy, not even a true believer but a foot soldier getting his orders from phone calls and abandoned by his bosses when the case spins out of their control.
As far as I know, this is Ercoli’s only poliziotteschi but he brings an interesting attitude to the genre.
Blu-ray and DVD, with both Italian and English dub soundtracks (the Italian is preferable, as the English dubbing is sloppy and lazily performed) and optional English subtitles, plus a 20-minute interview with production manager Alessandro Calosci.