Mafia Junction (1973)
"Si può essere più bastardi dell'ispettore Cliff?" (original title)

Massimo Dallamano is a criminally underrated Italian director, most famous today for "What Have You done to Solange?, one of the very best Italian gialli. But he also directed its equally excellent sequel "What Have They Done to Your Daughters?", the Laura Antonelli erotic classic "Venus in Furs", and "The End of Innocence", one of the better "Emmanuelle" knock-offs. This British-Italian co-production is his only foray into the Italian crime thriller genre that I know of, but it rivals anything by Ferdinand DeLeo or Umbeto Lenzi.

The great Ivan Rassimov plays an undercover cop who falls somewhere between a heavy-handed "Dirty Harry"-type rogue and a flat-out corrupt bastard--and by the end he has pretty obliterated the line between the two (if nothing else making this film a lot more honest than the American-style vigilante cop movies). He inserts himself "Yojimbo"/"Fistful of Dollars" style between two hilariously colorful drug-smuggling gangs. One gang runs an escort service which it uses to film powerful men in compromising positions with girls (and boys)and then blackmail them into helping out with the trafficking via a whole Rube Goldberg scheme involving art auctions. This is all totally ridiculous, of course, but highly entertaining. The other gang is lead by "Mama", an old lady (she's supposed to be Turkish, but looks a lot more Italian and even crosses herself at one point), who wields a gun and leads the police on high-speed chases! Her gang are all aspiring musicians, wielding musical instruments as well as guns, and quite literally providing their own theme music. After the gang kidnaps Rassimovs main squeeze (Stephanie Beacham) and tortures her with their music, he responds by kidnapping "Mama's" jailbait daughter (Verna Harvey, who definitely does not dress like a Turkish girl). At the end, another, American gang shows up lead by "Tony Accardo" (which was the name a real-life Chicago gangster at that time).

This movie has everything fans love about the genre--crosses and double-crosses, gun-play, high-speed car chases, sadistic brutality, and extreme moral ambiguity. Beacham and Harvey (who had appeared together a few years earlier as governess and charge in Michael Winner's misbegotton "Turn of the Screw" prequel "The Nightcomers") provide some nudity. (Well, so does Rassimov actually, but "Mama" stays dressed at least). There's also a GREAT musical score and the kind of nice cynical 70's ending you'd never get away with today. Highly recommended.