Gang War in Milan (1973): Violence, Misogyny and Political Commentary (Review)

If you’re looking for a film about a gang war, one that just so happens to take place in Milan, then Radiance Films (through partner label Raro Video UK), has got you covered with their latest release – Umberto Lenzi’s 1973 debut into Italy’s contemporary urban crime genre (or ‘Eurocrime’ as it’s become known), Gang War in Milan.

Barbarella‘s Antonio Sabàto stars as hirsute Sicilian smoothie Salvatore ‘Toto’ Cangemi, whose successful trade in vegetable wholesale is actually just a front for his real business – Milan’s most lucrative prostitution racket. Everything seems to be going smoothly for Cangemi and his aide-de-camp and friend from his poverty-stricken days in Sicily, Lino (Antonio Casagrande), until one day Cangemi finds one of his girls floating face down in the swimming pool. The pimp quickly discovers that the girl’s hit was ordered by French drug baron Roger ‘Le Capitaine’ Daverty (Philippe Leroy of Le Trou and Milano Calibro 9 fame), a murderous calling card strongly advising Cangemi to join forces and use his stable of sex workers to sell Daverty’s heroin to their clientele, thereby completely sewing up Milan’s criminal empire with a 70/30 split in Daverty’s favour. Needless to say for a movie entitled Gang War in Milan, Cangemi rejects the offer and the pair begin to play hardball with one another – an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth.

With everything to lose, Cangemi turns to a Mafioso fresh from business in Chicago, Billy Barone (The Valechi Papers‘ Alessandro Sperli), for protection, and to his new English girlfriend Jasmine (Danger: Diabolik‘s Marisa Mell), for comfort and succour, but is he doing the right thing? Just how much protection can be found from Barone, who is already eyeing up Milan as “a little Chicago”, and just how much comfort and succour can Jasmine – a sophisticated twenty-something golddigger whose last beau was an eighty-something millionaire with a weak heart – really provide for Cangemi? Allegiances shift and betrayals come thick and fast, often from the unlikeliest of places.

Anyone familiar with Italian cinema from the 1970s will know that there’s a significant degree of violence and misogyny inherent in the proceedings but, with Gang War in Milan, it’s like Umberto Lenzi said “Hold my espresso”. The fact that the story centres around a pitched battle for the control of the city’s prostitution racket ensures that Gang War in Milan scores highly on the misogynist violence front. Sex workers are threatened, kidnapped, tortured, maimed, drowned and murdered in a variety of ways. Acid is thrown in their faces, their breasts are slashed with flick knives and used as an ashtray for cigarette stubs. One is brutally whipped with a leather belt, and it’s a measure of the film’s excess to argue that she’s one of the lucky ones. Gang War in Milan isn’t all men-on-women violence though, as one of the film’s most shockingly memorable sequence involves the kidnapping of Lino by Daverty’s men, who then set about torturing him by electrocuting his testicles. It’s fair to say that this isn’t a film that lets up on the gruesome, sleazy aspects of the criminal empire and the methodology it’s depicting, but you do have to wonder if the movie is misogynistic because of the world it is portraying, or if it’s just an example of misogynistic filmmaking.

Screenwriter and giallo novelist Franco Enna, along with Lenzi (who heavily rewrote the script), certainly ensure that their movie has a traditionally toxic Catholic male view of women – they’re either Madonnas or whores. The whores outnumber the Madonnas in Gang War in Milan, although Cangemi’s beloved, hospice-residing white-haired mother, Barone’s passive niece, and the innocent Sicilian girl forced into sex work by her sleazy procurer ‘cousin’ Balsamo represent depictions of womanhood that err towards the preternaturally pure. None of these women however, not even Marisa Mell’s femme fatale, truly possess a voice, let alone three dimensional characterisation. Interestingly enough, Gang War in Milan does have a writing credit for a woman – Ombretta Lanza. Before you try and consider just how a woman (said in an Adam Buxton voice), could pen such a torrid tale of misogynistic violence with feminine ciphers, it’s worth noting that Lenzi subsequently claimed almost twenty years later that she was in fact just the daughter of one of the producers, who impulsively decided that she should have a credit in one of his films.

Watching the almost procedural-like depiction of bloody oneupmanship and violent chess-like manoeuvres, you could be forgiven for initially missing a crucial tenet of Italian cinema from this period, namely the political commentary, but it is there. It’s there in the sentimental depiction of rural Sicily that Cangemi carries in his heart, in his relationship with both his ailing mother (whom he worships), and in the bonds of friendship with his lifelong Sicilian friend Lino which he places so much emphasis on. Despite its misogyny, it could be argued that Gang War in Milan condemns the capitalist system for reducing women’s bodies to mere commodities to sell to men, though the condemnation of the drug trade is far more clear cut – and the very fact that we can legitimise it with the term ‘trade’, almost without thinking of the implications of that word is damning for capitalism.

Where Lenzi truly targets capitalism is in his depiction of characters like Cangemi and Lino – whose heads have been turned by the vice of the big city only after escaping a life of poverty in their rural villages. To a lesser extent the aforementioned naive country girl procured by her ‘cousin’ Balsamo for their stable of girls is also a criticism of capitalism – an ingénue so pronounced that when asked to wear a peep-hole bra, she’s aghast to find that the supposedly expensive material they have instructed her to wear has holes in it. Incidentally, when Balsamo is subsequently garroted in the toilet of a restaurant (one of the film’s most striking sequences), Cangemi is leading his table of diners into a full-throated rendition of an old Sicilian song. To that end Gang War in Milan is Lenzi’s j’accuse of Italy’s post-war ‘economic miracle’ that created a divide between town and country, turning its back on the traditional industry of its rural Southern heartlands in favour of industrialisation in the north.

Years later, when asked to consider Gang War in Milan alongside its contemporaries Lenzi didn’t reach for Coppola’s opus The Godfather, choosing instead to cite Visconti’s Rocco and His Brothers – the 1960 film in which a widow moves her family to the city and the problem that presents for her sons, one of whom (the titular Rocco), is portrayed by Alain Delon. Ultimately it’s a test of your own sympathy whether you can get on board with Lenzi’s romantic intentions as the characters in Gang War in Milan are so repugnant, so irredeemably lost to a life of crime and abuse that it’s a struggle to find anyone to identify with or root for.

Lenzi had this to say about the film’s minimal police presence in the shape of Franco Fantasia’s Chief Inspector Contaldi – “He almost doesn’t exist as a character; the film is set completely within the underworld. It’s the story of a war between two rival gangs”, which suggests that this lack of identification was somewhat intentional. It’s telling then, that when the director returned to the Eurocrime genre, for example in 1974’s Almost Human and 1977’s The Cynic, The Rat and The Fist, he was careful to ensure that the lawmen had just as much focus as his ruthless villains.

Radiance’s handsome package includes a new visual essay on Lenzi’s films by Troy Howarth (author of Make Them Die Slowly: The Kinetic Cinema of Umberto Lenzi), an introduction to the movie by Mike Malloy, and an audio commentary from Andrew Nette. Also available is the usual limited edition booklet, this time with new writing by Roberto Curti, and an archival essay by the aforementioned Eurocrime expert Mike Malloy.

Mark’s Archive: Gang War in Milan (1973)