The Big Racket (1976) & Heroin Busters (1977): two films by Enzo G Castellari (Review)

Enzo G Castellari is now best-known not for a film he directed but for a film he inspired: Quentin Tarantino’s Inglourious Basterds, which lifts its title from his 1978 war film The Inglorious Bastards. A more direct impact he had on movie history would be Keoma, the 1976 film he directed which brought the curtain down on the classic era of spaghetti Westerns as surely as Touch of Evil did for noir. Like all Italian genre directors of his generation, Castellari was a fast worker, and Arrow’s new set Rogue Cops and Racketeers: Two Crime Thrillers from Enzo G Castellari collects the two films he made on either side of Keoma. Both of them show the influence of that masterpiece bleeding through, while also remaining thoroughly satisfying in their own right.

The Big Racket and Heroin Busters both star Fabio Testi as hard-boiled cops willing to break every rule to neutralise a dangerous criminal gang. They’re not sequels, and Testi is nominally playing different characters in both of them. But they’re carefully moulded to his screen persona, so much so that Heroin Busters simply calls his character “Fabio”. The Big Racket has the most interesting Testi variant, as Inspector Nico Palmieri, chasing a gang who are extorting the local merchants. That might seem like a slightly dull crime for a poliziotteschi film, but don’t worry, Castellari depicts their revenge on businesses who won’t pay up in extended scenes of unforgettable carnage. The gang may be operating for purely economic reasons, but there’s more than a hint of madness in their behaviour. Like the gang in Last House on the Left, they have one female member, Marcy, played by Marcella Michelangeli (who played the hero’s mother in the Taviani brothers’ realist landmark Padre Padrone!). Again like Craven’s film, she might be the wildest of the lot of them, beating one helpless victim to a pulp as one of her cohorts cackles “She’s a lady!”

One of Keoma‘s most striking features is its treatment of flashbacks, panning across to past events rather than cutting. It gives the film an uncanny sense that time, as Hamlet put it, is out of joint. That strange quality recurs in The Big Racket, which occasionally starts the action of one scene while the audio of the previous one is still playing on the soundtrack. The heart-stopper comes after a captive is gang-raped, an event that’s depicted more discreetly than you may imagine from a 1970s Italian crime film but is nevertheless extremely disturbing. As another figure looms over her, we steel ourselves for another assault, but in fact, it’s her father – Castellari has cut, without warning, to her being saved. It’s a choice that cuts out all the catharsis from the rescue, and rightly so: this isn’t the end. The end comes when the girl’s father brings together a criminal gang to catch this criminal gang, including Testi’s Inspector Palmieri, who we’ve seen being hospitalised by the bad guys in a scene that might as well be a superhero origin story.

Palmieri’s superpower is that he seems to remain suave and unflappable even in the most extreme situations. One year later in Heroin Busters – you’re right, it is a ridiculous title – and this is no longer part of the Testi repertoire. Tracking down a gang of international heroin smugglers, undercover cop Fabio is as callous and unpredictable as any of the racketeers in The Big Racket. The villains he’s chasing have been amplified to match; a group of drooling, giggling, pant-pissing junkies. The text of Heroin Busters is staunchly anti-drugs but the depiction of the pushers’ depravities can – as is often the case in this type of film – tip over into glamourisation, including the most amusingly unexpected lesbian scene this side of Tombs of the Blind Dead.

For a poliziotteschi film, this is a feature, not a bug. Heroin Busters hammers it home at the end, with Fabio asking his straight-laced Interpol counterpart (David Hemmings) who the good guys and the bad guys were in all this. It’s a clunky moment, particularly compared to the fascinating time-capsule scene in The Big Racket where the criminals try to get the public on their side by pretending to be revolutionary Marxist victims of the system. Both The Big Racket and Heroin Busters are delectably ’70s, with loose-shirted reprobates skidding tan-coloured cars around landscapes still scarred from World War II. Only the former, though, gets to that bone-deep cynicism and paranoia that differentiates Italian crime films of the 1970s from other nations’ knock-offs of Dirty Harry and The French Connection.

Which isn’t to say Heroin Busters is bad. It still has plenty of spectacular scenes, including a plane chase sequence where licensed pilot Testi does all his own flying. The Big Racket has a good, funky score from the De Angelis brothers but Heroin Busters boasts music from Dario Argento’s regular composers Goblin. The dissonant, icy arpeggios of the main theme collapse the distance between poliziotteschi and the similarly-flourishing Italian horror scene. Unfortunately, Hemmings, so good in Argento’s Deep Red, isn’t utilised as effectively, tending to disappear from large stretches of the action.

Both films have been newly remastered from original 35mm negatives, allowing a better look at the budget-busting action scenes that help make poliziotteschi so satisfying. Extras weren’t available for us to review, but there are new interviews on both discs with Testi and Massimo Vanni, who also appears in both films, as well as new interviews with Castellari and appreciations of the soundtrack composers from record collector and musician Lovely Jon.

Graham’s Archive – The Big Racket & Heroin Busters