Passeport pour deux tueurs

Now released under the absurdly named Mack Video as the absurdly named BLACK KINGPIN, LA MALA ORDINA, once known as MANHUNT, shows the Italian seventies policier director Fernando DiLeo in peak form. The Italian cops-mob-and-corruption movies often had a neorealist tincture, not far from such British cousins as GET CARTER or THE LONG GOOD FRIDAY. (The best in this vein is the dark, harrowing VIOLENT NAPLES.) But some of them were as ripe and over-the-top as concurrent works of Italian horror; and this saga of a small-town pimp pursued, God knows why, by Mr. Big and two Vincent-and-Jules-looking U.S.-made button men, looks like the product of some torrid motel-room coitus between Sergio Leone and Don Siegel. The faces are sweaty, the beatings (to evoke Roger Ebert's memorable phrase) suggest the sound of ping-pong paddles smacking naugahyde sofas--the only thing that's missing is the groan of an Ennio Morricone score. An evening of Shane Black quips it ain't, but ninety minutes of top-shelf hardboiled groove it is.

Poor Mario Adorf. He just wants to pimp out his girls in Milan and give the cash to his ex-wife and his sickly young daughter. He's not a bad guy really, although he doesn't like it when guys try to rough up his girls. Mario's just getting on with his petty criminal life when all of a sudden he's being hunted down not only by the local crime boss, but by two hard faced American hit men too.

The hit men, Henry Silva and Woody Strode, have been sent to track him down and kill him in the most violent and brutal way possible as lesson from the US Mafia to those in Italy thinking of stealing heroin shipments. This might be all well and good, if in fact Mario had actually stolen anything. Instead the poor guy spends most of the film being hunted down like a dog while having no idea whatsoever why people want to kill him.

There's more pressure on Mario as the local don (Adolfo Celi) doesn't like the presence of two American gangsters on his turf and sends his men out to capture Mario. Every petty criminal in Milan knows that Mario's a marked man, so who can he trust? His hookers?

While this is a little thin story wise, the film itself is rather good. Henry Silva truly looks like a guy who would stab you in the face one minute then put the moves on your wife the next. Woody Strode is the straight man to all Silva's shenanigans, and Adolfo Celi nearly outdoes Silva in the hard-case gangster role, especially at near the end where the demented Mario finally confronts him. It's Mario Adorf that steals the show here as the clueless, but not helpless, Mario, as he jumps from being a flawed but caring father to a man who has been pushed about as far as someone can be.

Although the first half sets up all the characters and has a punch up or two, the film gradually gets more and more violent as you would expect, and of course it's standard practice to throw in a car chase too. This one goes from a car chase to a foot chase and even has Mario smashing his head through a windscreen in order to get at a gangster. From then it's non-stop until the gunfight in the scrapyard.

Funky soundtrack too. Loud, with it.

Two professional hit men from the States are hired to track down a small-time pimp Luca Canali in Milan, as this man was accused of the disappearance of a shipment of heroin between Milan and New York. Well that's what they are to believe by local crime boss Don Tressoldi. Their job is to brutally kill Luca and make a message of it. However Luca doesn't know why they want him and he won't go down too easy, as he tries to get to the bottom of it.

This confidently gritty 70s Italian crime thriller might start off slowly, but when it hits its strides. Boy it doesn't let up. What starts off talky where you are waiting for things to happen gets better as it moves along, where plot threads unfold and it suddenly becomes impulsively hazardous. There's one sensational car / foot chase sequence that packs brute force and never gives you a chance to catch a breath. It's very well done. Most of the action follows the same dynamic pattern. Thrilling, tough and intense with constant roughness. Fist fighting, scuffles and shootouts… as the sweat pours and the bruises are inflicted. Hear and see it! Not escaping is the seedy hook, brassily loud instrumental score, compact camera-work and authentic European locations.

Some well known players feature in the cast. Woody Strode and Henry Silva are the American assassins. Strode plays the quiet, steady head and Silva's a live-wire, womanizer. Complete opposites, but the same rather deadly and downright bad-asses. This shows in the lethal cat and mouse climax in a car scrap-yard with Mario Adorf's character. Adorf holds his own with a respectable turn, constantly making a slip when the manhunt begins, but after a tragedy hits. Now he's fuelled by revenge… going in head first. The script is just as jagged, as like the editing but there's a sardonic edge to it and the excessive melodramatics ups the emotions and motivations.

Hard-boiled, if bittersweet Italian crime entertainment.

Poliziottesco, a fusion of the words poliziotto ("policeman") and the same -esco desinence, indicates 1970s-era Italian-produced "tough cop" and crime movies. Recurring elements in poliziotteschi films include graphic and brutal violence, organized crime, car chases, vigilantism, heists, gunfights, and corruption up to the highest levels.

With directors like Fernando Di Leo, these films replaced the spaghetti westerns. They saw their decline after erotica and horror took over in the late 70s.But it was the spaghetti westerns that gave Di Leo his training. He wrote the script for A Fistful of Dollars, and was assistant director under Sergio Leone in For a Few Dollars More.

The films of Fernando Di Leo had a great influence on later directors like Quentin Tarantino and John Woo.

Henry Silva(Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai, Above the Law) puts in one of his best performances in this film. He is excellent as a sleazy hit-man. Woody Strode (Spartacus, Kingdom of the Spiders) is very good as Silva's partner.

Lots of action, one car chase, and plenty of big naturals. Mario Adorf stole the show with his huge range of facial expressions.

Two vicious hit men (Henry Silva and Woody Strode) are sent by the New York mob to Milan, Italy to "make an example" of a small-time pimp (Mario Adolph) who is believed to be responsible for a missing shipment of heroin. The two hit-man have the support of the local Milan mafia don (Adolf Celli), who may know more than he's telling about the missing heroin, but their target turns out to be much more wily and dangerous than they could have possibly anticipated.

Although this Ferdinand de Leo crime thriller is regarded as a minor masterpiece of the genre, it has only been released in America so far on a crappy VHS tape which really hampers the enjoyment. It's full-frame, horribly cropped with the kind of muddy, off-color transfer that gives third generation bootlegs a not-so-bad name. The dubbing could charitably be described as indifferent--it's like they pulled random English speakers off the street and had them read from cue cards. The women in these movies are typically just sex objects, but still you would think that an actress of Femi Benussi's stature in Italian exploitation films (maybe a rung below Edwige Fenech and Barbara Bouchet) would at least get CREDIT for the important role of the protagonist's ill-fated, former prostitute girlfriend. (And her patented long, butt-naked nude scene would probably be a little more enjoyable if the ample skin she shows wasn't bluish-gray due to the lousy transfer). Perhaps most ridiculous though, the whole thing is presented as a "blaxploitation" film due to the presence of African-American actor Woody Strode (who's obviously dubbed by a white guy) even though the real protagonist here is a white Italian.

The action scenes are very effective though despite the transfer. It's also a pretty good basic story. I like these movies where there's a criminal anti-hero taking on the mob rather than the usual vigilante cop. The Italian crime thrillers certainly have their share of vigilante cops (the genre was largely inspired by "Dirty Harry" and "The French Connection"), but even these films at least acknowledge that that there's moral ambiguity in the world and that violence isn't always a clean solution for every problem. Overall, I would recommend this, but if you're going to get it at all, it probably would be worth seeking out a widescreen Italian version with English subtitles. Avoid the laughable "Black Kingpin" version.