The Italian Connection

A heroin shipment sent from New York to Milan disappears. The American bosses want an accounting and a name is given as the culprit: Luca Canali. The man is a small time pimp in Milan; he has nothing to do with it and does not know why he is the target. Two hired killers come from America. Dave and Frank will find him. The local organisation in Milan helps them and Canali starts running. He can trust nobody. Then his family is touched and the man stops running. Fernando Di Leo directs. Mario Adorf plays Canali and Henry Silva and Woody Strode the killers; Adolfo Celi is in the cast. It is an Italian and German co-production. The film is the second link in Di Leo's crime trilogy; the three were made in the same years and are cited together. The matter it treats is the expendable man; Canali is chosen because nobody cares about him. Its most cited section is a chase in a scrapyard; the scene is held long and the cutting unbroken. Mario Adorf's performance carries the picture and the character is not built as a hero. The production was openly cited in American crime cinema in later years and its influence noted. Milan as it was in the seventies is recorded in real locations. Its limit is structure; the plot is simple and the characters' reasons thin. Who it is for: viewers who like Italian crime cinema and genre films of the seventies. Who it is not for: the violence is explicit, the women functional, and the script weak.