1976 - THE TOUGH ONES - Italian Poliziotteschi film

A fairly decent Italian police thriller set in Rome.  Inspector Tanzi, a character clearly modeled after Clint Eastwood's Dirty Harry character is on the trail of a tough gang of French guys.  Tanzi also has to deal with a creepy killer hunchback played by the Italian actor Tomas Milan who I think was in about every Italian movie ever made.

The action is good.  There are some exciting car chases and shootouts.  The actor Maurizio Merli  who plays Inspector Tanzi, handles the usual rouge cop stuff well.  As with a lot of these cop movies he shouts and screams about the "system" and letting these "slime" get away. But fear not street justice will prevail.

 

The version of this film that I saw was dubbed into English which made Tanti's rants about the lack of law and order sound even more intense.  As was usually the way with these films an American actor in this case played by Arthur Kennedy is in the film for reasons I don't exactly understand.  Apparently Italian filmmakers liked to stick American's in what are essentially rip offs or remakes of American cop films.

 

Anyway the film is entertaining and you get some good views of Rome circa the 1970's when people aren't being shot or run over by bad guys.

The film was written by Dardano Sacchetti who has a long list of films he worked on such as The Cat o' Nine Tails, Bay of Blood  and 1990: The Bronx Warriors to name just a few. The running time is a brisk 95 minutes.