Although by no means the first Italian crime film, Marino Girolami’s Violent Rome was the one that really crystallized the format, setting down a template that would be followed countless times over the next few years: a straight-laced lone cop, who fights against his less-than-enthusiastic bosses as much as an endless parade of street scum, has a disabled / disadvantaged friend and cool associates in the undercover squad. All of this was borrowed from other films – such as High Crime, From the Police With Thanks and international productions like Dirty Harry and (particularly in this case) Death Wish – but it was assembled in a way which seemed to chime with audiences at the time.
The plot follows Inspector Betti (Maurizio Merli), a committed detective trying to clean up Rome, but who’s continually frustrated by the ability of the assorted criminals to escape prosecution, mainly thanks to the vagaries of the law. He tracks down a pair of juvenile delinquents who hijack a bus and kill a young passenger, beats up some hopeless purse snatchers, puts away a gang of violent armed robbers and so on. After his friend and partner, Biondi (Ray Lovelock), is left paralyzed while helping to foil a bank job, he loses his temper, steps over the bounds of the law and shoots one of the culprits.
Forced out of his job, he is approached by a lawyer called Santori (Richard Conte), who has formed a kind of legal vigilante group. Betti organizes them into something resembling a functional operation, and they manage to prevent some robberies and hassle some undesirable types. But no matter how many people they turn over to the police, it always seems like there’s someone else in the wings waiting to steal, rape or kill. And Betti, meanwhile, no longer has the protection of the law behind him.
While Violent Rome is pacey enough and contains some decent action sequences, it’s not actually as good a film as its success would suggest. It suffers by lacking a compelling central narrative, and comes across more as a series of vignettes strung together to make up a 90 minute product. Although the plot does follow the characters of Betti and Biondi, there’s no central villain to act as a counterpoint to them, meaning that their conflict seems targeted at all criminals rather than an identifiable figure. The nearest is probably John Steiner, as a gangster called ‘The Nail’, but he’s unceremoniously dispatched after little more than a cameo appearance.
Despite this rather meandering approach, it’s not a bad film, and it’s easy to see how it captured the mood of a country in crisis. Rome is portrayed as a city under siege, with even law abiding citizens on the edge of rebellion thanks to the surging criminal underclass; representatives of which lurk in just about every dark corner or shady byway. Merli, meanwhile, is constantly berated by the people he serves for not doing enough to protect them, which only exacerbates his feelings of powerlessness and increases his desire to take a more unorthodox approach. While not a political film – despite accusations of ‘fascism’ from some of the more idiotic contemporary critics – it certainly has a political element, although it offers very little in the way of solutions: even Betti and Biondi come off worse in the end, while Sartori’s vigilantism only brings further trouble upon his family.
Marino Girolami, working under a Franco Martinelli pseudonym for some reason, was a hugely accomplished B-Movie director, who had made his name directing production line comedies and youth movies in the early 60s. While there’s no doubt he knew how to put together a perfectly workable movie on time and under budget, he’s possibly not the most natural of action directors: his son Enzo Castellari bought more fluidity to his similar work, while Umberto Lenzi, for instance, had a more cynical, balls-to-the-wall outlook that fitted the genre like a glove. This was actually his second crime film, having made the obscure Lo scarbo the previous year, and he’d revisit the format with Special Cop in Action and Roma, L’altra faccia della violenza. The driving force behind the film, though, was producer Edmondo Amati – an interesting figure, responsible for numerous popular films throughout the sixties and seventies – who saw an opportunity for homegrown, hardboiled Italian crime films.
This was also the film that propelled Maurizio Merli into stardom, playing the first of a series of hard-as-nails, frustrated cops, often called Betti just to capitalize on the popularity of his Violent Rome character. Cast because of his resemblance to Franco Nero, who’d had a big success with the similar High Crime, Merli had been acting for some years, but had only begun to gain major parts the previous year, with starring roles in White Fang to the Rescue and Catene (in which he was on the opposite side of the law), and was then in the public eye after appearing in Franco Rossi’s popular TV production Garibaldi. In fact, Merli was only the second choice for the role – American actor Richard Harrison was originally proposed by Amati for the part of Betti, but thankfully someone realized that he was simply too American and lacked the necessary inflexibility. ‘I accepted and threw myself with passion into the work’, Merli said, ‘I did everything, the action scenes and the private scenes, and in all of these scenes I had tried to do something more, to create a true character, an everyday person.’
Enzo Catellari, meanwhile, has shed more light on the casting of Merli, saying: “After [High Crime] proved so succesful, the producer proposed that Franco [Nero] and I should do another film. But for financial reasons this wasn’t possible. So instead my father was called, and he created Maurizio Merli as a copy of Franco: same make up, same costume, same name, same actions… but what happened was extraordinary, and I for one was very happy for my father. My only regret is that the producer imposed a pseudonym on my father.”
Violent Rome was certainly successful. The film was released in the middle of August, with very little publicity and hardly any expectations, but took a record 2615 million lire, showing for four consecutive months. Merli was awarded with an ‘Una vita per il cinema’ award by the Centro Studi (for being a prepared and intelligent actor). Trivia fans will also be pleased to note that the flower stand that features in the background of one car chase sequence was actually run by Salvatore Baccaro, the strangle looking little chap who became The Beast in Heat