The Violent Four

Four men rob a bank in Milan. Getting away, they end up in a gunfight with the police in the middle of the city; the bullets hit streets and trams, and passers-by are killed. A large manhunt follows. The film shows the robbery and the escape first, then who says what in the interrogation of the captured gang; the man at the head of the group is ready to take all the blame himself, and nobody understands why. Carlo Lizzani made the film right after the Cavallero gang case that actually happened in Milan in 1967, an event talked about in Italy for weeks. Gian Maria Volonté plays the gang leader and makes the character neither a monster nor a victim: it becomes clear that the man regards himself as a kind of political militant and that the people around him do not believe it. The film mixes documentary footage into the fiction. It is counted among the works that started the strand of Italian crime cinema which would explode in the seventies.