About the only thing I can say good about Milano Trema is that it has some nice shots of Milan in it. This Italian production with a native cast is a poor ripoff of some of our cop dramas like Bullitt or The Seven Ups or even the Dirty Harry series.Luc Merenda an orthodox cop with a Dirty Harry style of doing business does one thing that Harry Callahan would never do, go undercover because too many criminals know his face. He is however suspended for an execution of a pair of escaped criminals.After that his main booster the ever so tolerant police chief of Milan is assassinated by a criminal gang. Merenda goes undercover to find them.The gang is headed by American expatriate Richard Conte who after playing Don Barzini in The Godfather played a lot of cheap grade z productions for a paycheck. He has the look of a man waiting for his paycheck to clear as he mouths his dialog.There's a nice police chase similar to the one in Bullitt in this film. But all in all it's all stuff we've seen better on American cinema.

After his mentor, the only cop who is both honest and "by-the-book" in this movie (and possibly any other Italian "poliziani"), is assassinated in the street, a rogue cop, who has been suspended for gunning down two surrendering suspects, goes undercover, mixing with prostitutes, pimps, and reckless, amateur bank robbers in an effort to crack the case; only to find that it involves both Red Brigade terrorists and corruption at the highest levels of Italian government. It is easy to write-off this and other Italian polizianis as cheap "rip-offs" of American films like "Dirty Harry" or "The French Connection". But this genre really resonated in Italy which was even more beset by rampant crime, high-level corruption, and would-be "revolutionaries" in 1970's than America was. And whereas American police thrillers got dumber, more simplistic, and sometimes downright fascist going into the Reagan era (i.e. "Make my day!", "Crime is a disease and he is the cure!"), the Italian films went off in a decidedly more morally ambiguous and often more cynical direction, which I personally find much more interesting. (It's perhaps understandable that America would later blunder into Iraq, convinced that they were the unambiguous "good guys" and weren't going to get any blood on their white cowboy hats, while the Europeans were generally much more wary and realistic).This movie is pretty confused. It's pretty hard to believe that corrupt law enforcement officials would be connected to the radical Marxist Red Brigades and vice versa. It's also hard to separate the "rogue cop" here from the regular Italian police, who also shoot unarmed suspects and kill innocent hostages in reckless high-speed car chases. (One villain makes the mistake of trying to ally himself with hero, naturally assuming that anyone so violent and unconcerned the law or public safety would be a natural partner in corruption).Still it is more realistic and honest in many ways to admit that fighting violence with violence, even it doesn't outright corrupt, is very messy and will leave you with hands that are far from clean. "Dirty Harry" and "The French Connection" themselves were much more noirish and morally ambiguous than is acknowledged these days. But what this movie really reminded me of was the first Dirty Harry sequel "Magnum Force" where the troubled vigilante cop with some morals faces off against vigilante cops with no morals (and who also turn out to be very implausibly connected to his most liberal critics). Like that movie this poliziani is pretty confused, but, at the same time, all the more honest for it.It's also well-made and very entertaining. It was directed by the great, and still underrated Italian director, Sergio Martino. It's currently only available on cheap DVD (part of "The Grindhouse Collection Volume 1") ported from a very messed-up videotape (the sound is atrocious). Still I would highly recommend it.

THE VIOLENT PROFESSIONALS (Sergio Martino - Italy 1973).Not all too interesting Dirty Harry variation from Sergio Martino in this crime thriller, starring Luc Merenda as a tough smooth-guy cop who goes undercover as a wheels man to infiltrate a ring of cop-killin' bank robbers. The main problem is main man Luc Merenda who has little charisma and is either permanently smiling or desperately trying to look tough. Either way, his repertoire is a bit limited. The unimaginative screenplay by Ernesto Gastaldi is entirely short on logic. This is less urgent when writing horror or giallos, but the actions of police and crime bosses are supposed to contain some kind of logic, since they're driven by greed and money. In the world of organized crime, there's usually little room for vague motives, but here, most actions lack any kind of motivation. Even a bank robbery is carried out so incredibly clumsy, it was beyond me why the bank robbers were even surprised things went wrong. Occasionally, it's a pretty lively affair with lots of action with some spectacular car chases (one of them probably took half the budget of the entire film), but some of these exciting set pieces can't save this from being a bore most of the time, with Merenda driving around in his car aimlessly or beating the living crap out of everyone he meets to get some answers about his chief's killing. In most cases, the answers don't add up to much or didn't make any sense to me. The English dubbing wasn't a big help in that department either.Camera Obscura --- 5/10

So far I've seen five of these 70's Italian crime thrillers, 3 of them being straight up, Don Siegel and William Friedkin-influenced "cop on the edge with an axe to grind" Dirty Harry rip-offs. Out of those three, all of which are great, this has got to be the one with the coolest story-line (the other two being "High Crime" and "Violent Naples," to give you an idea of the standard here). While it is neither perfect nor entirely realistic, it is action-packed, bloody and riveting, a cocktail of elements common to the genre. And this particular "cop-on-the-edge," played by Luc Merenda, is so on-the-edge that he "poses" as a pimp muscling in on prostitution rackets with the facility of an old pro, gets innocent bystanders killed without hardly batting an eye, and cold-bloodedly executes surrendering criminals in front of the entire police department!While he lacks quite the level of charisma and intensity delivered by Franco Nero or Maurizio Merli, Merenda holds his own. The primary reason he is able to do so here (the two secondary are Sergio Martino's competence in directing pulse-pounding action and the fact that the extremity I've come to expect from these films is as present here as anywhere) is the sucker-punch, no, make that downright subversive plot-line. Without giving too much away, suffice it to say that what appears to be shaping up into a slanted portrayal of fanatical domestic terrorists (not that groups like the Red Brigade need any slanting to look bad, just that dishonesty bugs me even if it's on the right side) proves later to be something entirely different. The ending of this film, while it would be typical in another context, blew me away.To top it off, you've got a killer score by the mad De Angelis brothers (if you've seen "Keoma," note that it helps that the only song with words isn't translated into English), and the only fatal car crash I've ever seen in an action movie where the car doesn't inexplicably burst into flames. Three cheers for this gleefully brutal mayhem-fest with the added plus of an intelligent plot!