ITALY ARMED TO THE TEETH: MY TOP NINE POLIZIOTTESCHI
Though I came of filmgoing age in the 1970s and spent most of that decade hanging out in cinemas or reading Monthly Film Bulletin or Time Out, I came late to poliziotteschi, an Italian subgenre of ultra-violent crime thrillers. My knowledge of Italian cinema in the 1970s was limited to arthouse fare such as Fellini, the Taviani brothers, Visconti et al. As for Italian genre, I saw Suspiria in The Odeon Leicester Square on the first week of its UK release in July 1977, and caught up with Argento’s giallo thrillers and other horror films a few years later (helped by the rapid proliferation of the film buff’s favourite new device: VHS), but it wasn’t until 2012 that I saw my first poliziottescho, Umberto Lenzi’s Rome: Armed to the Teeth, in the presence of the director at the Offscreen Film Festival in Brussels.
Despite my being an avid reader of Time Out‘s film section in the 1970s I don’t remember any poliziotteschi being released that decade in the UK. Then again, I was more interested in horror films and Brian De Palma thrillers than in Italian cop movies, and might not have noticed them, especially if they were being screened in their dubbed-into-American versions, slapped with interchangeable generic English titles, and slipped into regional cinemas without press shows or reviews. Poliziottescho, like giallo, had yet to coalesce into a recognisable subgenre in the hearts and minds of cinephiles.
