By Steve Jones, USA TODAY
Some of the strongest influences on Quentin Tarantino's early films, Reservoir Dogs and Pulp Fiction, were the stylized, hyper-violent '70s crime dramas by Italian director Fernando Di Leo that focused on small-time crooks with tenuous life expectancies. Pulp Fiction's assassin duo of John Travolta and Samuel L. Jackson bear a striking resemblance to the equally implacable, though decidedly more taciturn, pair of Henry Silva and Woody Strode in 1972's The Italian Connection.
By Linda R. Chen, Mirarax
Italian director Fernando di Leo's mark is all over Quentin Tarantino's Pulp Fiction, starring Samuel L. Jackson and John Travolta as '70s small-time crooks.
By Linda R. Chen, Mirarax
Italian director Fernando di Leo's mark is all over Quentin Tarantino's Pulp Fiction, starring Samuel L. Jackson and John Travolta as '70s small-time crooks.
The film is just one of the classics in the new four-disc DVD set Fernando Di Leo Crime Collection (2011, Raro Video, not rated, $40), which also includes 1972's Caliber 9, 1973's The Boss and 1976's Rulers of the City. Di Leo, who died at 71 in 2003, was a noted screenwriter (Sergio Leone's spaghetti Westerns, A Fist Full of Dollars and For a Few Dollars More) before becoming a director himself. He, too, did several Westerns and movies in other genres as well, but he had his greatest success with his Mob tales.
He peopled his lurid films with all manner of pimps, prostitutes, psychopaths, thieves and femmes fatales while touching on loyalty, class and morality. He elevated such Italian actors as Mario Adorf, Gastone Moschin and Barbara Bouchet, while providing work for fading American actors like Silva, Strode, Jack Palance, Bill Conte, Lee J. Cobb, James Mason and others. His blood-splattered shootouts and wild, adrenaline-fueled chases would become blueprints for action directors to come.
Caliber 9, which is considered Di Leo's masterpiece, tells the story of Ugo Piazza, a thief who is just out of prison after three years and who both the police and his criminal colleague believe stashed $300,000 from a robbery before getting arrested. The boss allows Piazza back into the gang and orders the sadistic Rocco Musco (Adorf) to keep an eye on him. Piazza maintains his innocence to friends (including gorgeous go-go dancer girlfriend Bouchet) and enemies alike. Only at the end is the truth revealed.
Adorf takes the lead in The Italian Connection as pimp Luca Carnali, who the Milan Mob uses as a hapless fall guy when they steal a heroin shipment earmarked for New York. The American gangsters dispatch assassins Silva and Strode to hunt down Carnali, and the local thugs decide they had better get to him first. The clueless Carnali searches for answers until his wife and daughter are killed. Then he cares only about revenge.
The Boss is the final part of Di Leo's Milieu Trilogy. Silva is the assassin Nick Lanzetta, who eliminates a Mob family by firing a bazooka into a movie theater full of criminals. Cocchi (Pier Paolo Capponi) is the only gang member to survive, and he's out for vengeance against those who ordered the hit. Lanzetta, meanwhile, is double-crossed and finds himself caught in the middle of the blood bath.
In Rulers of the City, mobsters Tony (Hank Baer), Rick (Al Cliver) and Napoli (Vittorio Caprioli) want to make it rich. They plot to con Mob boss "Scarface" Manzari (Palance) out of a fortune. But such big ideas are not necessarily good for one's health.
Each film comes in its own slim case with the movie poster on the cover and has English and Italian audio and subtitle options. Other extras include documentaries, photo galleries and a booklet that includes a 2001 interview with Di Leo about his career.
Bar Refaeli Bali Rodriguez Daisy Fuentes Karen Carreno Kirsten Dunst
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