THE LAST DESPERATE HOURS

Milano: il clan dei Calabresi (1974, Cristiana Cinematografia) 

D: Giorgio Stegani. P: Giovanni Addessi. W: Giovanni Addessi, Franco Barbaresi, Camillo Bazzoni. Ph: Aldo de Robertis, Sandro Mancori. M: Gianni Marchetti. St: Antonio Sabáto (Paolo Mancuso), Silvia Monti (Laura Monachesi), Pier Paolo Capponi (The Inspector), Nicoletta Rizzi (Lidia Mancuso), Fred Williams (Dario Lippi)

 

 

“Until yesterday, they licked my hand like dogs.” 

Conflating the plots of two classic noirs, Stegani offers an insight into character, rare for Italian pulp cinema, in this story of a callous pimp with less than 24 hours to live, seeking revenge on those who set him up.  

Stegani was not a prolific director and this was his only poliziotteschi, which is unfortunate because this gripping race-against-time thriller is far better than the majority of the decade’s Italian urban crime movies. Intrinsic to the film’s success is Sabáto’s richly embellished performance as Paolo Mancuso, wringing drops of pathos from his portrayal of a murderous egoist whose fate, from the uncomfortably exploitative title sequence to the brutally ironic conclusion, is tied tightly to the seamy world he has risen above but can never truly escape.

 

 

Enshrouded in his trench coat, Sabáto doesn’t transmit the same world-weariness as many a noir protagonist. Rather than displaying vulnerability, Mancuso begins the film as a swaggering crime boss – enterprises include prostitution, gambling houses and heroin distribution. However, when a mob of Calabrian hoodlums impinges upon his territory, a price is put on his head. Pursued by motorcycle-riding hit men, he is forced to hide in an industrial lab where he is bitten by a rat, falling victim to a deadly virus. Like Edmond O'Brien in D.O.A., Mancuso pursues his own would-be murderers while, in a more procedural narrative strand, echoing Kazan’s Panic in the Streets, the police must identify the carrier and contain the virus.

 

 

Although the film owes its inspiration to noir, common poliziotteschi tropes are all present. There are bursts of visceral gunplay, an obsession with vice-ridden characters, exhilarating chases and gaudily fetishised street prostitutes. It is firmly in the exploitation camp, acts of misogyny are portrayed unflinchingly, most unpleasantly during a sexual assault that underscores the opening credits. The scuzzy tone is augmented by some striking compositions from Mancori, by then an experienced hand after lensing the internationally popular Sabata series. Presenting Mancuso alone on vast wastelands, the high rises of the city’s housing developments lining the background, the cinematography conveys a sense of urban as well as psychological desolation. Crane shots show Mancuso’s increasingly isolated perspective, while street-level, documentary-style footage provides a palpitating sense of desperation.

 

 

The increase of social and political violence in the Seventies – the anni di piombo, or years of lead – saw popular Italian filmmakers abandoning the broadly liberal positions they had taken in the Sixties to produce crime films that were often nihilistic, sometimes reactionary (left-wing critics saw them as fascistic). Milano’s script, however, largely counters that trend. While Mancuso drives through a roadblock in his expensive car, unmolested by the police, Morenda, a destitute morphine addict, is herded along with the city’s down-and-outs for a mass police interrogation, during which the poverty-stricken southerner casts opinions about Italy’s north/south, rich/poor divide. Later, Stegani fully exploits his modest budget to evoke Morenda’s home environment – a shabby refugee camp for southern Italian migrants, the underclass and Milan’s addicts, a kind of ghetto existence for which Mancuso, by peddling vice, is partly responsible.

 

 

Trying to identify those who wanted him dead, Mancuso encounters a number of well-sketched characters. Fred Williams is oily and shifty as Lippi, Mancuso’s partner in crime who, in cahoots with Maraschi (played by fellow German Peter Carsten), has decided to relinquish his obligations to his associate. Special mention should be given to Rizzi, who projects a sense of fragility as Mancuso’s estranged wife. The scene in which we learn that they lost their son is heartrending, generating a shard of sympathy and understanding towards such an amoral protagonist. 

Once Mancuso has locked horns with his enemies, the police net tightens and, although the procedural isn’t very inventive, relying simply on information given by a transvestite informer, the film builds to a surprisingly poignant climax. Universally betrayed, Mancuso is driven to seek sanctuary among the wretched community he came from, a far cry from the privileges he has grown accustomed to. Now its denizens, led by the hapless Morenda, turn on him. The ending is as grimly poetic as the great gangster movies, as one of the most powerful men in Milan, eaten away from within by the virus, is symbolically consumed by the human misery that contaminates the city, and which he has helped to perpetuate.

Clark Hodgkiss