Fango bollente

A film about three guys who hate their jobs and their lives, so whenever they're not at work, they waltz around town like they're anonymous villains in a post-apocalyptic movie. This is despite the film being set in then modern times, and not having anything sci-fi or fantasy related. Perhaps we're already living in a dystopia, or have been since the 1970s (maybe even earlier).

That all makes Savage Three a very nihilistic and thematically miserable film, but by design, and at least it's still entertaining, thanks to a fast pace and a gradual upping of bleakness and chaos as it progresses along over a tight 80-something minutes. Of this brand of classic, gritty, seemingly low-budget Italian crime movies, it's better made than many, and I think make for a good watch.

Maestro Vittorio Solerno's raven dark poliziottesco 'Savage Three' exposes the increasingly bestial proclivities of three workmates, headed by handsome hedonistic brute Ovidio (Joe Dallesandro). Spending the days working anonymously for a modern-looking data collection firm but spending their nights perpetrating myriad barbarous acts of arbitrary violence. Savage Three are not political upstarts, their spontaneous campaign of cruelty, blithely orchestrated to assuage the monotony of a dour, stultifying regimented office life. These ruthless crimes drawing the attention of laconic commissario Santaga (Enrico Maria Salerno), an idiosyncratic sleuth whose hunch that the grisly killing spree is the work of amateur thrill killers marking him out to be an eccentric maverick! The dogged Santega's unerring gut instinct leads him ever closer to the inscrutable Ovidio, his psychotic debaucheries, exploding in a final, fatal act of stomach-churning savagery from which there is no return. Solerno's disturbingly brutal narrative, while remarkably explicit, has a profound intelligence, giving The Savage Three an emotional gravitas that feels uncomfortably relevant even today.

No mobsters here. No bank robberies either. Just three working Joes, working day in, day out. Joe works in a science lab, staring at rats and working on computers. His wife is a career woman who's always at work (and not averse to forwarding her career by giving her boss a chewy!). His mate lives with several billion family members who won't shut up. The third guy can't get a minute's peace due to his house falling to bits and his neighbours arguing. It's enough to drive them all mad.

Which it does! These three, led by Joe, start acting out against society in every way possible. They start off by starting a football riot where dozens are injured and one person dies. The case is given to perpetually tired looking cop Enrico Salerno, who initially encouters, but does not suspect, Joe while attending computer lessons at the lab Joe works at (the computer-based dialogue here is hilarious by the way). Enrico is down on his luck as he was demoted after ramming some bad guy in his car, so he's playing things a bit softly this time round...at least at first.

I've said it before - Joe Dallesandro can't really emote, but he's good as an angry psychopath. His trio become the scourge of society as the add murder to their list of crimes, at first stabbing a truck driver during a road rage incident, then killing a pimp and a hooker. They also kill a member of high society by impaling her on the fork of a fork lift truck, using an effect so good I can't figure how they did it.

This film plays out like some kind of Italian Clockwork Orange with kind of similar themes. If I was a man who thought about stuff I'd say that this whole film is a commentary on man's inability to successfully channel his aggression in everyday mundane tasks and even the acceptable societal outlets for such feelings (football being the glaring example here). It evokes the 'violent male ape' hypothesis that violence is inherent in humans and that these violent tendencies are as natural as love, affection and hunger.

I'm not a thinking man however so I'll just say that Sal Borghese looked real goofy when we first see him.

This is a difficult watch, no lame brain entertainment, no shoot 'em up.

Was this before it's time or just showing how the cycle continues? 48 years after it's release and nothing much has changed.

Three bored drones go on a violent spree because...

... and it doesn't hang around. Very shortly after the beginning of the film the guys start disrupting things, and it just escalates from there.

It's hard to imagine that this *wasn't* influenced by A Clockwork Orange but to some degree this is more plausibly "close to real society".

For computer buffs, there's also some great footage of the IBM 370 model 158 mainframe - Joe Dallesandro plausibly using a card reader to load up the detective's fake "lottery program", and wielding a light pen - 40 years before the launch of the Apple Pencil!

Not all of it works, and Joe really struggles to look normal at times, but once you buy into the idea that the Italian police really *are* that incompetent, it's well done.

Worth a look.