POWER TO THE PEOPLE

Popular cinema in the Seventies was brimful of maverick lawmen – from Harry Callahan and Buford Pusser in America, to the irate ispettori of Italian poliziotteschi – who felt manacled by a legal system weighted, so they thought, towards criminals. In their wake, and that of spiralling crime statistics and alarmist headlines, came a citizens’ militia who shared the cops’ frustrations. Driven by personal grievance, they took the fight to the hooligans and the mobsters, enforcing summary justice like the vigilance committees of the old American west. Indeed, while the typical vigilante film channelled – and exploited – middle-class anxiety (or was it paranoia?) and urban alienation, it was basically an outcrop of the western. (See The Ox-Bow Incident for the most stimulating study of lynch law and its ramifications.) The same notion of private justice segued into modern stories, in which men (and women) still do what they believe they gotta do when the authorities can’t do it for them, protecting their lives, loved ones and properties from the ignoble savage hordes. All this transposed to a new wild frontier: the mean streets of the big city. 

Here, then, are ten citizens who would not take it any more, who stood up – in chronological order – to the punks and the hoods. Time to take back the streets.

 
PAM GRIER AS ‘COFFY’ COFFIN IN COFFY

  

BACKGROUND Surgery nurse; doting sister.
JUSTIFICATION Younger sibling ensnared by LA’s dealers – now in rehab.

ACTION Posing as an addict who’ll do anything for a fix, Coffy offers a dealer sex for drugs, then terminates him with a shotgun. Convinced the police are powerless or corrupt – she’s right on both counts – she uses her wiles and physical charms to infiltrate the pimp King George’s coterie of call girls. Her real target is gangster Vitroni (Allan Arbus), but she is distraught to find her boyfriend, an ambitious politician, is aligned with the very people she has been fighting.

EVALUATION That rare thing, a blaxploitation film with genuine soul, courtesy of Grier’s intelligent, sensitive and frankly sensual performance. As much as director Jack Hill exploits Grier’s physicality – copious nudity; brawling with prostitutes – he allows her the space to create a multi-layered character. Coffy experiences anxiety and remorse in the course of her crusade, and pays a heavy emotional toll – “The key to making the character believable is that she was so affected by her actions,” said Hill. There is certainly nothing blithe about this film’s treatment of vigilantism and revenge. (See also: Gordon’s War – a black Vietnam vet enlists three friends to clean up the ’hood.) Kevin Grant

CHARLES BRONSON AS PAUL KERSEY IN DEATH WISH

 
BACKGROUND Middle-class professional; family man; conscientious objector.

JUSTIFICATION Wife and daughter attacked in their home, the former killed, the latter rendered insensible. How much battering by brute reality can liberal principles withstand? 

ACTION Moral qualms fading – helped on their way by a sojourn in Arizona gun country – Kersey takes to the streets armed with a .32 and an everyman’s sense of injustice, thinning the ranks of New York’s muggers and becoming a hero – even to the cops.

EVALUATION Michael Winner’s film was predictably divisive. Most critics were so disgusted they vomited their reviews, choking on terms such as ‘right-wing’, ‘reactionary’ and ‘fascist’. Swathes of viewers responded more enthusiastically – “They got up and cheered at the first shooting,” observed produced Bobby Roberts after a preview in New York. The script draws attention to the moral complexities of vigilantism, and Kersey by no means takes violence in his stride. (Bronson himself expressed approval of his character’s endeavours.) Ultimately, however, like the westerns and maverick-cop films it mirrors particularly closely, Death Wish deals in catharsis and condones Kersey’s campaign. This continued, of course, in four rather less considered sequels. Kevin Grant

FRANCO NERO AS CARLO ANTONELLI IN STREET LAW

 
BACKGROUND Diligent engineer; beau of cartoonist Barbara Bach.

JUSTIFICATION After Carlo is kidnapped and slapped around by gristly bank robbers, the police response is woefully inadequate. Cruising the underworld for leads, Carlo risks violent confrontations. Another drubbing by the same goons raises his temperature to boiling point.

ACTION Stress, and the ineffectual rule of law, result in Carlo striking his girlfriend when she tries to calm him with hackneyed liberal rhetoric. Blackmailing street thief Tommy (Giancarlo Prete), Carlo soon acquires a cache of high-calibre weapons. Tommy, seeking redemption, helps Carlo search for the gang – but they find him first. Further humiliation triggers a warehouse gun battle, Carlo matching the thugs shot for shot.

EVALUATION In this Euro-crime spin on Death Wish, Carlo has a far lower threshold than Kersey when it comes to retribution; the film is an exercise in sensation rather than meditation, exploiting Italian jitters about intensifying urban violence. Enzo Castellari’s adrenalised direction, driven by the De Angelis brothers’ cacophonous score, is strengthened by his muse’s highly strung but consummate action performance. Nero performs his own stunts; his final beating sees him dragged through water and bounced off a moving car. After degradation comes martyrdom, but Carlo won’t turn the other cheek. Clark Hodgkiss

HENRY SILVA AS DAVID VANNUCCHI IN MANHUNT IN THE CITY

 
BACKGROUND Engineer (clearly a cursed profession in Italian cinema); family man.

JUSTIFICATION Daughter shot dead in heist; police stymied in their investigation – “One day the man in the street… is going to get fed up with all this crud.”

ACTION Following a giallo-like clue – a scorpion motif – through a maze of sleazy characters, Vannucchi is approached by an attorney to join the shadowy Movement for Social Defence. He goes his own way, venting his mounting anger on street thugs before zeroing in on the culprits. But there is a sting in the scorpion’s tail… 

EVALUATION Italian popular cinema in the Years of Lead was awash with death squads and paramilitaries (viz. Execution Squad, Violent Rome, The Big Racket, Silent Action). In this Umberto Lenzi film they represent a sinister reaction to the criminals and terrorists against whom the police appear powerless – much to Vannucchi’s exasperation. The script backs him into a corner, his options limited to fight or flight (the preference of his estranged wife, Luciano Paluzzi). Vannucchi metes out violence like a poliziotteschi rogue cop; the film appears to sanction his actions, although a whiff of ambiguity hangs in the air like cordite. Kevin Grant

ROBERT DE NIRO AS TRAVIS BICKLE IN TAXI DRIVER

 
BACKGROUND Vietnam vet; fantasist; “God’s lonely man”.

JUSTIFICATION “This city is like an open sewer… Whores, skunk pussies, buggers, queens, fairies, dopers, junkies… Someday a real rain will come and wash all this scum off the streets.” Travis anoints himself the agent of social cleansing; fixates on a 12-year-old prostitute, determined to deliver her from evil. 

ACTION Stocking up on unlicensed firearms, Travis arrives at his vigilante career by happenstance, shooting a stick-up man in a grocery store. As disillusionment swells – his “angel”, Betsy (Cybill Shepherd), fails to meet his standards – so the grip of psychosis tightens. He tones his body, hones his fast draw, flirts with political assassination. Meeting child-whore Iris (Jodie Foster) is the tipping point. Freshly mohawk’d, shrugging off wounds, Travis kills her pimp (Harvey Keitel) and his cronies in a bloody apotheosis. 

EVALUATION Bathed in a sickly neon glow, Taxi Driver is noir by way of psychological western, matching physical location – a contaminated city – with its protagonist’s fractured mind. Like its forebear The Searchers, what’s unsettling is the quandary that surrounds the protagonist. Should he be pitied or vilified? Is he murderer or martyr? The enigma lingers to the last – Travis feted by the press, revisited by Betsy, seemingly exonerated. For the filmmakers this was a sideswipe at the veneration of celebrity. But do the closing scenes show objective reality or subjective delirium? Back in Travis’s cab, are we back inside his head? Kevin Grant

ROBERT GINTY AS JOHN EASTLAND IN THE EXTERMINATOR

 
BACKGROUND ’Nam vet; dock worker; latent psychopath.

JUSTIFICATION Best friend and fellow vet mugged and paralysed by members of the Ghetto Ghouls street gang.

ACTION Having taken his M16 to the Ghouls responsible, Eastland broadens his remit, from the mobster (fed into an industrial mincer) who leeches money from the dockers’ wages, to the ‘chicken hawks’ and their customers (burnt alive; shot with mercury-tipped bullets) who prey on young boys. Announcing his intentions to the press, he attracts the sinister attention of politicians and the CIA...

EVALUATION Director James Glickenhaus went on to become a very successful financier, but struck gold early in his career with this lucrative grindhouse spin on Death Wish and Taxi Driver. Eastland implicitly likens the Ghouls to the Cong, the urban jungle of New York to the killing ground of Vietnam. The inner city looks like a war zone, all derelict buildings and rubble; the seedy Sodom of Times Square is scarcely less inviting. Eastland admits to no moral misgivings; given the level of degeneracy around him, that’s not surprising. Kevin Grant

ZOE TAMERLIS AS THANA IN MS 45

 
BACKGROUND Mute, bashful spinster; fashion-house seamstress

JUSTIFICATION Raped twice in a day: in an alley by director Abel Ferrara wearing a Perspex mask; in her apartment by a clammy burglar whom she shoots dead. Emotions paralysed, she’s unable to disclose the depth of her trauma.

ACTION Panic attacks at work become commonplace, depression manifests and there’s the dilemma of disposing of the body – with assistance from her neighbour’s gluttonous mutt. The burglar’s pistol gives her anguish voice, levelling misogynists and street gangs. Her mind-set of helplessness shorn, she adopts a cooler, sexier persona while her handle on sanity collapses; molested by her slimy boss at the Halloween party, she unleashes hell in a slow-motion shooting spree.

EVALUATION Bruising exploitation or courageous feminist statement? Ferrara’s brash Eighties aesthetic parades a seedy Big Apple made rotten by lecherous loafers. Zoe Tamerlis – with sagacity beyond her 19 years – fully understands the subversion at play. While men are faceless aggressors, she discovers some are victims, too. Grindhouse tropes are inverted when, at the fancy-dress party, she dons a nun’s habit. Usually designed to titillate in these films, here kinky religious garb veils an irrepressible agent of death. Clark Hodgkiss

TOM SKERRITT AS JOHN D’ANGELO IN DEATH VENGEANCE

 
BACKGROUND Italian-American deli owner; family man; mamma’s boy.

JUSTIFICATION Pregnant wife injured in road-rage incident with local pimp Eldorado; she loses the baby. Elderly mother wounded in drug-store heist, finger severed for her ring.

ACTION D’Angelo rallies his neighbours in South Philly’s Little Italy when violent crime hits close to home. They form the People’s Neighbourhood Patrol, harassing muggers and arsonists, pimps and dealers. D’Angelo becomes a local celebrity. His head is turned by political fixers and he agrees to stand for office, but not before his best friend is killed by Eldorado’s men. The police commissioner divulges the pimp’s whereabouts – if D’Angelo gets elected, he’ll owe the top cop a favour…

EVALUATION Lewis Teague’s clarion call for civic self-defence (also known as Fighting Back) benefits from directorial restraint and a well-structured script. It moves from idealistic depiction of community solidarity to a more cynical portrait of political machination, with side notes on race relations (D’Angelo is branded a racist by a black organiser, played by Yaphet Kotto) and urban deprivation. Skerritt is excellent as the headstrong protagonist who becomes swept up in the maelstrom he has set in motion, his clarity of purpose hazing over, much like the distinction between crime fighter and avenger. Kevin Grant

ROBERT FORSTER AS EDDIE MARINO IN VIGILANTE

 
BACKGROUND Factory worker; family man.

JUSTIFICATION Wife assaulted, toddler son shot to death by the Headhunters gang – the leader gets off scot-free courtesy of a crooked lawyer and an inept judge.

ACTION After serving 30 days inside – punishment for a courtroom outburst – Eddie takes matters into his own hands. Scruples shattered, he joins a trio of colleagues, led by Nick (Fred Williamson), who have been targeting muggers, rapists and dealers. Together they corner Headhunter numero uno; a chance encounter then puts Eddie on the trail of his lieutenant – the man who killed his son. 

EVALUATION For much of William Lustig’s grimy tabloid thriller, Eddie and Nick debate, in blue-collar terms, the ethicality and efficacy of vigilantism – Nick lecturing Eddie on the failings of the legal system, the climate of fear in the city; Eddie worrying where it all ends: “What if you do something I don’t like? Pretty soon you got assholes all over the streets looking to blow each other’s brains out. If I do that, what makes me different from the scum?” Lustig evades that question, proffering violent retribution as a short-term solution to social decay and a palliative to personal loss. Forster’s gritty performance adds substance. Kevin Grant

DOLPH LUNDGREN AS FRANK CASTLE IN THE PUNISHER (1989)

 
BACKGROUND Police officer; family man.
JUSTIFICATION Wife and children killed by car bomb meant for Castle – the price of crossing the mafia.

ACTION Presumed dead, Castle literally goes underground. From his base in the sewers he wages war on organised crime, killing 125 mobsters in five years and earning the soubriquet the Punisher from the press. He adds the yakuza to his hit list when it muscles in on mafia territory, the fearsome Lady Tanaka (Kim Miyori) kidnapping the children of the crime lords to keep them in line. 

EVALUATION The first screen outing for Marvel’s murderous antihero was directed with brusque efficiency by editor Mark Goldblatt. Its terms are stark both visually and thematically – “If you’re guilty, you’re dead,” is Castle’s blunt philosophy. He adds more than 50 villains to his tally over 90 minutes and is rarely given pause for thought – you don’t employ Lundgren for cogitation, after all – by a script that posits his drunken informer (Barry Otto) and best friend on the force (Lou Gossett Jr) as figments of his dormant conscience. Kevin Grant