High Crime

Commissioner Belli is trying to break the drug traffic in Genoa. What comes through the port is large and there is a name behind it that nobody can touch. Belli loses the men he arrests once the case reaches the prosecutors: the evidence falls short, the witnesses back off, his superiors close the file. Then it reaches his family. After that he stops behaving like a policeman and acts on his own. The title says the whole problem: the police accuse, the law acquits. Enzo G. Castellari directs; a hundred and three minutes, with Franco Nero as Belli, and Fernando Rey and James Whitmore in the cast. Italy made a run of police films in the seventies; the genre came out of that period's distrust of institutions.