Angel of Evil

Renato Vallanzasca, raised in Milan, starts stealing at fifteen, robs banks in his twenties, moves into kidnapping and becomes the city's best-known criminal. He escapes from prison repeatedly. The press follows him like a star, and so does part of the public. The film is not interested in a criminal career. It is interested in how fame inflates the criminal himself: Vallanzasca loves the cameras and smiles for photographs, and the film lets his charm reach the audience before hardening the scene. The form has a seventies texture: period cars, a grey Milan, fast cutting and visual references to the Italian crime wave of those years. Michele Placido directed. The story is real: Vallanzasca is still in prison, and on release there was opposition to the production on the grounds that it romanticised him. Placido said he took that on knowingly and made the film as a portrait rather than a defence. Kim Rossi Stuart plays Vallanzasca and Filippo Timi his partner. Who it is for: viewers who like Italian crime films and portraits drawn from real events. Who it is not for: anyone who wants the victims' side. The film stays almost entirely in the criminal's view and the people killed are barely names.