À couteau tiré

Vicious and ingenious Italian policier featuring Harvey Keitel as O'Connor, an almost impossibly surly New York detective on the take, who smokes fine cigars while basking in his one prized possession--a Central Park West apartment paid for with drug dealers' money. In what must be a comment on O'Connor's tunnel vision, the apartment is almost totally unfurnished--it's as if O'Connor blew his whole wad on the place, and had none left over to make it liveable. Narcotics-division cops are getting slaughtered by a serial killer, and one day a scrofulous, pouty British geek (John Lydon--that's Johnny Rotten to you) shows up at the illicit apartment, confessing to the crimes. O'Connor is sure Leo the Brit isn't the cop killer--but the kid has seen his illegal crash pad, so now what?



The director Roberto Faenza has made what is surely the most explicit movie ever about the homoerotic subtext of the policier genre. The first two thirds are a fiendishly crafty minuet of sudden reversals; the last is a sadomasochistic folie a deux that's closer to Pinter or Genet than Don Siegel. Lydon is shockingly effective as the pettish punk (he ought to have a cat to stroke); Harvey Keitel seems Harveyish for a while, until you start noticing his hundred strokes of physical inventiveness. A Scotch glass smashed to bits shocks O'Connor with his own unconscious fury; a pair of chopsticks O'Connor doesn't know how to use turn into Saharan spears crudely crucifying a spicy tuna roll. Sizing up the averages, Keitel has the coolest resume of any contemporary actors--and O'Connor goes up in that gallery of scream-like-a-moose Harvey angst right next to Matthew the Pimp, the shylock-pianist from FINGERS, and that very bad Lieutenant.

Offbeat weirdo Leo Smith (John Lydon) creeps his way into corrupt cop Fred O'Connor's (Harvey Kettle's) head to play mind games. John Lydon's lack of acting skills actually helps to make his character even kookier than he was probably written. And there's for sure a weird chemistry between Lydon and Keitel. Fred O'Connor is on the edge. Is Smith a psycho? Eventually one snaps.

It's a good, off-kilter psychological thriller.

This is a great subtext movie. There's the surface thriller elements and then there's Harvey Keitel's rough-play with John Lydon aka Johnny Rotten. The pair play out the master/slave dynamic with nasty commitment. Its not merely S&M however, its positively psychopathic in a nasty but sickly playful sense. Its a dark little vision of police power abused and quite probably all too real for some viewers and protestors out there who realise the strong arm of the law isn't disembodied from the bodies of individual policeman despite political rhetoric to the contrary. But hey, this isn't all that serious a movie. Keitel is great, Lydon is a vicious victim and it all goes by relatively quickly. John Lydon is worth the price of admission/rental/purchase alone. Enjoyably twisted.

Roberto Faenza's stark, downbeat 'Cop Killer' (aka) 'Order of Death' (1983) is a paranoid, palpably grimy,intermitently intense NYC-set poliziotteschi with the singularly arresting concept of pairing muscular method-man, Harvey Keitel's brooding Lt. Fred O'Connor, against the preternaturally angsty ex-Pistol, John Lydon, whose blithely bilious, Pil-popping persona is put to lurid good use as the manipulative, morally bankrupt psycho killer, Leo Smith. With shocking bursts of violence, and fevered flourishes of Mamet-like intensity, the misanthropic, 'Order of Death' has more refined cinematic qualities than its current bargain-bin obscurity suggests!

This claustrophobic, enjoyably skewed celluloid oddity is enlivened by maestro, Ennio Morricone's beautiful theme, and the increasingly tormented, Keitel makes for a memorably vexed, psychologically complex cop. While Faenza's jittery psychodrama is flawed, the gritty film's incendiary dynamics are undiminished,'Cop Killer' remains a darkly compelling entry in the by-then waning poliziotteschi movie cycle; and the sweaty, antagonistic interrogation sequences between, Keitel and Lydon still make for compulsive viewing! With modest expectations, Roberto Faenza's dingily exciting 'Cat & Louse' thriller is unlikely to disappoint, and should rate higher with the more obsessive Euro-crime, midnight movie addicts!

'Order Of Death' (aka 'Copkiller') is one of the most interesting movies on Harvey Keitel's early resume. Along with 'Fingers' and 'Blue Collar' it's one of his most underrated performances, and a movie that every Keitel fan should seek out. His character here - a corrupt NYC cop - is almost a practice run for his magnificent 'Bad Lieutenant'. Keitel plays Fred O'Connor a dysfunctional police officer who co-owns a secret luxury bachelor pad with his partner, bought with dirty money. The city is going through a series of cop killings and paranoia is rampant, though O'Connor doesn't really seem all that concerned at first. He becomes a little jumpy when he finds himself being stalked by a mysterious weirdo (John Lydon, yes Johnny Rotten of Sex Pistols infamy), and positively freaks out when he turns up on his doorstep claiming to be the cop killer. O'Connor doesn't believe him but is panicked all the same, as his whole secret life is at risk of being revealed, so he does the logical (?) thing - he keeps him prisoner. But this is only the beginning in a film that keeps you guessing, as mind games and battles of will ensue, with some strange identity and relationship swapping, almost worthy of legendary 70s headtrip 'Performance'. This strange film, somewhere between a hard boiled genre crime movie and an art-house puzzler, is flawed but fascinating, and should appeal to fans of Abel Ferrara and Wim Wenders, especially the latters overlooked 'The American Friend'.