Rulers of the City (1976) Light-Hearted Revenge Based Eurocrime

Released to Blu-ray this week by Radiance and Rare Video is Rulers of the City, an Italian Euro Crime/Poliziotteschi offering from 1976 by director Fernando Di Leo, a filmmaker who had already provided the genre with staples such as Caliber 9 (1972), The Italian Connection (1972) The Boss (1973), and Kidnap Syndicate (1975), as well as penning the screenplays for many of Italian cinema’s other successful filoni, the Spaghetti Western with films such as A Fistful of Dollars, For a Few Dollars More, Navajo Joe, A Pistol for Ringo and The Return of Ringo. In the disc’s typical sardonic extra feature from Mike Molly, the genre movie buff points out that, as the popularity of the Spaghetti’s waned and the Poliziotteschi’s popularity began to rise, many Italian scriptwriters began to adapt their proposed horse operas for a contemporary setting in the Italian underworld.

Whilst Molloy can’t be certain that Rulers of the City initially started out life as a Western, he’s quick to point out that the leaping off point of the film’s narrative is a conceit well mined in the Spaghetti genre – a child witnessing the murder of their parent(s) growing up to seek revenge on their killer. However, what Molloy fails to note is that, just as the Spaghetti Westerns began to embrace more comedic elements as their popularity began to decline, so too did the Poliziotteschi as they began to fall from favour. For all the moodiness of its premise, Rulers of the City is a very light-hearted crime drama, populated with much comic relief.

The film opens with a pre-title scene in which a young boy awakens from his sleep to witness his father betrayed and murdered by his friend and fellow thief, played by Jack Palance with ratty, slicked back hair. It’s a beautifully effective sequence, in which Di Leo slows the misty visuals down, yet allows the diegetic sound of fatal gunshots and scraping chairs to play as normal. We then cut to the film’s titles which sees our protagonist Tony, played by Fassbinder regular Harry Baer, driving his distinctive red Puma GT dune buggy through the streets of Rome. Once the credits fade, we are introduced properly to Tony, a handsome and carefree debt collector for small-time crime boss Luigi Cherico (Edmund Purdom) with an unfeasibly good capoeira fighting technique that suggests Di Leo was attempting to tap into an audience’s growing affection for martial arts movies. If you’re thinking that Tony appears too happy-go-lucky and insouciant for a man who, as a child, witnessed his father’s murder and is now out for revenge, then you’d be right. Di Leo performs a very good twist here; in presenting the film’s protagonist after that opening prologue, you’d be forgiven for thinking that this is the man that the traumatised boy grew up to be, but Tony is a different character altogether, and Di Leo – in his film about revenge – opts to relegate his avenging angel character to a pivotal, but nonetheless, secondary supporting role.

So the film spends some time with Tony, who is eager to impress Luigi and move up in squalid little syndicate of debt collecting, bag-snatching and bent gambling dens. It is during a game of cards at the latter that Jack Palance’s crime boss, “Scarface” Manzari, enters. Now with a new hairstyle to denote the passage of time, Scarface punishes an incompetent gambler on his payroll and proceeds to write a cheque to the house for three million lira. What seems like a generous offer is, in fact, a poisoned chalice, as Luigi is never going to cash in that cheque, not if he values little things like breathing and growing old. But Tony, keen to make an impression and get the better of his rival in the syndicate, the bullying Peppi (Enzo Pulcrano), accepts the job of calling in Scarface’s debt. Together with Rick (Al Cliver), the gambler thrown out from Scarface’s ranks, he hatches a plan worthy of The Sting; he will hire an actor and together they will imitate a pair of tax inspectors performing a spot check on Scarface Manzari’s business affairs. Eager to placate the taxmen, Scarface authorises his deputy Luca (Carmelo Reale) to issue a ten million lira bribe. In doing so, Tony unwittingly sparks gang warfare in Rome – a bloody tit for tat fued that ropes in his criminal mentor, the flamboyant old con and pool shark Napoli (Vittorio Caprioli), but that the laidback Rick seems incredibly at ease with, as it is just the opportunity he’s been waiting for to get his revenge upon the man who killed his father all those years ago. And Rick proves to be a ruthless crackshot…

As I said earlier, Rulers of the City sees Di Leo on a more light-hearted and comedic form. This is a world away from the ugly misogyny of The Boss or the mafiosi masterstrokes of Caliber 9 and I suspect that the Hollywood film that influenced him the most when making this was The Sting (1973) as both feature small-time cons whose milieu is one of crummy gambling dens getting one over on a vicious big-time mobster. To that end, the title seems ironic as these are the lumpenproletariat of Rome, a world away from the epic powerplays of the cosa nostra, living a hand-to-mouth yet happy enough existence bouncing between card tables and pool tables. The character of Napoli is our sage, offering words of wisdom about “the old days” of low-level hustling that contrasts with the growing advent of organised crime and an altogether more cut-throat and ruthless world, but he is also our comic relief too; Caprioli’s performance is one of effete mugging and corny bits of business which, when combined with the fantastical fighting of the ever-unflappable Tony, often jars with Rick’s revenge storyline and the equally bloody retribution that Scarface exacts, leaving bodies in its wake as he and his enforcers search for his missing ten million.

Di Leo never really finds the balance in tone and, though it would be quite right to say that Rulers of the City is one of his weakest Poliziotteschi films, it would be incorrect to say that it wasn’t enjoyable or that it was a film without merit. For a start, the film boasts some truly spectacular setpieces, including the climactic, stunt-laden showdown in the grounds of a vast and deserted slaughterhouse that involves a motorbike, a car, and enough weaponry to start WWIII. Performance wise, Baer never really engages, Cliver is on the wooden side of enigmatic and Caprioli is often OTT as the script demands, but Palance is an old pro who imbues the film with a necessary menace that has you rooting for the good guys nonetheless.

So what if Rulers of the City is tonally strange? So many examples of Italian genre cinema were often like that, as their filmmakers, like magpies, plundered various components from a wide array of movies in search of something that might resonate with their audiences. Yes, Rulers of the City is silly but everything that you’d expect from a Poliziotteschi is nonetheless present here, from the desire for vengeance and the double-crosses and conspiracies to the frighteningly easy resort to bloody violence and characters getting many a swift kick to the bollocks. But there’s also a weirdly homoerotic subtext as the comic, campy Napoli supervises his two young protégés who we’ve already seen lying in bed together – albeit alongside three female sex workers in the morning after an unseen orgy – before the trio triumphantly roar off into the sunset in Tony’s buggy for a life in Brazil. And anyway, where else are you going to see a film in which Gisela Hahn’s club singer performs a song about abortion to a room full of romantic slow-dancing couples?

This release marks the first time that Rulers of the City has been available on Blu-ray in the UK and the original negative has undergone a stunning 4K restoration, complete with both the original Italian and an English dub audio option. Extras include the aforementioned Mike Molloy video essay and an archival featurette including interviews with Fernando Di Leo, Al Cliver, editor Amedeo Giomini, and weapons expert Gilberto Galimberti. The reversible sleeve features artwork based on original posters and new writing by Francesco Massaccesi comes in the accompanying limited edition booklet.

Mark’s Archive – Rulers of the City (1976)