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Andrew Nette is a Melbourne-based writer of fiction and nonfiction. He is the coeditor of three books on the history of postwar pulp and popular fiction, all published by PM Press, the most recent of which, Dangerous Visions and New Worlds: Radical Science Fiction, 1950 to 1985 was published in late 2021.

For issue #130 of The Internationalist, we excerpt from Nette's essay “Are You Asking Us to Investigate or Overthrow the Government?” where he reflects on the movie La polizia ringrazia (1972) which displays Italy's turbulent "Years of Lead," blending police procedural tropes with critiques of political corruption and societal chaos.

Stefano Vanzina’s 1972 Italian/German coproduction La polizia ringrazia (Execution Squad) opens with two men being interviewed by the media. The first, former police superintendent Ernesto Stolfi (Irish actor Cyril Cusack) responds to a journalist’s questions about the crime wave gripping Italy: “In my opinion, something radical has to be done if we are to restore the faith of the individual in government.” The second, Bertone (Enrico Maria Salerno), head of Rome’s homicide squad, comments to journalists about a man called Bettarini, who was accused of a vicious heist in which a night watchman was killed and who has just been acquitted for lack of proof, describing the decision as “criminal.” Bertone is soon fronting the media again aft er an unsuccessful jewelry store heist leaves two members of the public dead and the criminals escape. Listening to accusations that police are not doing their jobs, he claims it is they who are under constant attack. Disillusioned, ground down by the demands of his job, Bartone is also under pressure from the district attorney, Ricciuti (Mario Adorf), who is keen to ensure that the police continue to do things by the book despite the chaos.

One of the young men involved in the jewelry store heist is soon apprehended by men in plain clothes. It is unclear who they are. They take him to a secluded spot, execute him firing-squad style, and leave the body for Bartone and Ricciuti to find. The same men are subsequently shown executing a string of people: Bettarini, a street walker, a businessman caught trying to pick up a young man, and another waiting at a train station, who we learn is a trade unionist charged but acquitted of killing a cop in a street demonstration.

Amid growing police sympathy for the vigilantes, Bartone suspects the killings are the work of rogue cops he dubs “the clean-up squad,” coordinated by someone “interested in showing that our system of democracy is unable to curb the underworld and [who has] got the idea to promote a clean-up job of their own.” Bartone asks a friendly journalist, Sandra (Mariangela Melato), to help him uncover who is orchestrating the vigilantes in return for an exclusive. She connects the killers to a conservative journal pushing for the restoration of capital punishment, part of a wider but undefined far-right conspiracy. Bartone eventually confronts Stolfi, an old friend he has come to believe is involved in the killings. Stolfi tells him the killers are ex-police, backed by politicians, businessmen, and members of the clergy, with the aim of overthrowing the state and establishing a dictatorship. Bartone is shot dead by a sniper before he can arrest Stolfi. His body is dumped for the police to find, and the evidence compiled by Sandra disappears.

Execution Squad was one of over a hundred hard-boiled Italian police procedural thrillers, referred to in that country as poliziotteschi—a term derived from the Italian word for “police,” polizia, and esco, or “esque” in English—produced from the late 1960s to the end of the 1970s. This life cycle coincides with the peak of a lengthy continuum of political conflict in Italy, stretching from the end of World War II to well into the 1980s, referred to as the Anni di piombo (Years of Lead). Its most intense phase in the 1970s was bookended by two major events. The first was the bombing of the headquarters of the National Agricultural Bank in the Piazza Fontana in Milan, in December 1969, which killed seventeen people and wounded eighty-eight. Initially linked to the far left, the act was soon connected to the neofascist paramilitary group Ordine Nuovo, or New Order, working with elements of Italy’s secret service. The second event was the kidnapping and subsequent assassination of former Italian prime minister Aldo Moro by the far-left Brigate Rosse (Red Brigades) in 1978. Other forces contributed to the generalized sense of chaos in Italy during this time: rising crime, an economic downturn due to the 1973 oil crisis, and rapid social changes, which divided the country between the modern, sexually liberated urban centers and a more conservative agrarian society still prevalent in rural areas.

The poliziotteschi cycle was in part influenced by the international success of Hollywood movies such as Dirty Harry and The French Connection, both of which appeared in 1971, The Godfather (1972), and Death Wish (1974), as well as the work of European directors such as Jean-Pierre Melville. It also formed part of a mode of domestic film production referred to as the filoni (filo meaning “thread” in Italian), in which a successful film resulted in the proliferation of similar movies, until they ceased to become profitable, at which point the industry moved on to other subjects. While narratively they can be characterized as a grouping of hard-boiled, often ultra-violent films featuring tough, rule-breaking male police and criminal characters, according to Austin Fisher’s Blood in the Streets: Histories of Violence in Italian Crime Cinema (2020), the poliziotteschi was in fact made up of several interrelated subgenres: the Mafia film, the vigilante film, and the police procedural. Some exhibited aspects of the Italian horror cycle, the giallo. Some combined more than one subgenre.

Poliziotteschi reflect the Years of Lead in many ways. Collectively, they can be viewed as embedding radical cultural artifacts in their historical, political, and economic moment: the street demonstrations and radical political iconography, graffitied slogans and Che posters on the walls of squats and student apartments, and many other signifiers of post-1968 ferment. But the Years of Lead are most pronounced in a subgenre of films that fused police procedural and hard-boiled crime tropes with attempts to uncover high-level political conspiracies and attempted coup plots, always far-right or neofascist in origin. In addition to Execution Squad, Fisher lists these films as: Roberto Infascelli’s La polizia sta a guardare (The Great Kidnapping, 1973); Sergio Martino’s Milano trema: la polizia vuole giustizia (The Violent Professionals, 1973) and La polizia accusa: il servizio segreto uccide (Silent Action, 1975); Luciano Ercoli’s La polizia ha le mani legate (Killer Cop, 1975); and Michele Massimo Tarantini’s Ploiziotti violenti (Crimebusters, 1976). To these, I would add Martino’s poliziotteschi/giallo hybrid, Morte sospetta di una minorenne (The Suspicious Death of a Minor, 1975), Francesco Rosi’s Cadaveri eccellenti (Illustrious Corpses, 1976), and Damiano Damiani’s Lo ho paura (I Am Afraid, 1977). The latter two titles are usually differentiated from the poliziotteschi because of their higher-status directors and better production values. But while they may lack the poliziotteschi’s frenzied violence and often gratuitous nudity and sex, they arguably have more in common with their so-called lower-brow cinematic cousins than not. As academic Brian Brems argues in a 2019 piece on the Vague Visages site, the poliziotteschi adopted many aspects of neorealist filmmaking, including “using real locations and cinematic signifiers meant to resemble the documentary approach.” They also represent “a cynical extension of neorealism’s sympathies with the victims of an unjust society.”

Crucially, all these films exhibit the same basic genre formula. Each features a lone individual, always male and working as a cop or an investigator. These individuals are alerted to the existence of a far-right political conspiracy or attempted coup, which they then seek to root out, unmask, and neutralize. The protagonists are tough and cynical but essentially decent, distrustful of authority even though they represent it, and prepared to bend or break rules to further their investigation, sometimes in ways that seem almost as brutal as those of the criminals they oppose. Crucially, in all the films above, while the conspiracy has some public manifestation, for the most part it remains shrouded in secrecy. The protagonist encounters its foot soldiers—the flunkies, assassins, and hitmen—but those who give the orders remain veiled, their aims articulated only through code words and phrases. The protagonist’s efforts to give corporeal form to the conspiracy are matched by its efforts to silence him and eliminate anyone who can point to its existence. The protagonist must also contend with more senior policemen or judicial officials who believe in the integrity of the Italian state’s political and legal system and insist on enforcing its rules.

The only assistance the protagonist usually receives is from a journalist, which mirrors events in Italian history. Neofascists in the military staged a failed coup in 1964, details of which only became public when the story was broken by journalists in 1967. Investigative reporters were also instrumental in exposing far-right involvement in the Piazza Fontana bombing. And, like the gradual dissipation of the Years of Lead, what victories the protagonists may have achieved at the end of each film are pyrrhic or inconclusive and usually come at the cost of career destruction or, as in the case of Execution Squad, death.

Excerpted with permission from Revolution in 35mm: Political Violence and Resistance in Cinema from the Arthouse to the Grindhouse, 1960–1990, edited by Andrew Nette and Samm Deighan and published by PM Press, 2024.

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