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The opening invokes Bullitt and Point Blank, the car chase sees metal rushing in narrow Caribbean passageways and concludes with a cut from the blasting sun to a surgeon's lamp. Betrayed, shot and imprisoned, the professional assassin (Charles Bronson) so tough a spider dares not bite him. ("Something has broken inside you," notes a cellmate, who advises him to "change your job.") He settles accounts with the double-crossers once back in New Orleans, which means rekindling the sadomasochistic bond with the perfidious moll (Jill Ireland). Their reunion has her dragged out of a debutante ball for a waterfront rape interrupted by a nearby beating, "why is it whenever I'm with you, I always end up in the middle of blood and violence?" Sergio Sollima's bravura and acerbity in spades, Lina Wertmüller on the screenplay, a prime Ennio Morricone death rattle of fuzzy guitars. Modern hitmen are nothing but glorified clerks, according to the expansive kingpin (Telly Savalas), "killers with a time clock to punch and an old-age pension." (He invites the protagonist into his underworld clan, "I've been an orphan all my life" is the inevitable riposte.) Le Doulos is quoted with a billboard-sized steamboat mural behind which swims the bare blonde, Melville returns the compliment in Le Cercle Rouge with a virtual reprise of the rifle's racetrack calibration. The Italianate eye on the New World offers a nightclub with waitresses half-dressed in a mammy-slave motif, and a painted family portrait that conceals a TV screen for the boss to watch Westerns. "But power can't be shared." The superb denouement envisions the corrupt ascent as a bullet-cracked glass elevator, Bronson's slit-eyes turned upside-down fill the frame at the close. With Michel Constantin, Umberto Orsini, George Savalas, Ray Saunders, Peter Dane, and Benjamin Lev.
--- Fernando F. Croce |