LIVE LIKE A COP, DIE LIKE A MAN (Uomini si nasce poliziotti si muore, 1976)

Fernando Di Leo regarded the trilogy of films for which he's best known as a director -- the "milieu" trilogy of Milano Calibro 9, Manhunt and The Boss -- as films noirs, continuing the American tradition's humane portrayal of criminals as tragic or sometimes sympathetic personalities. Those films stand out in stark contrast to the more popular Italian genre of polizieschi movies, in which criminals are usually portrayed as subhuman scum. But wherever Di Leo's heart lay, he still had to pay the bills. So after collaborating with two other writers on the story, he wrote the script for a tough-cop movie that would be directed by Ruggero Deodato, the jungle-terror specialist who would go on to make Cannibal Holocaust. You can tell that neither Di Leo nor Deodato has his heart in the project. That is, they don't seem to share the sincere conviction that drives the best of Italy's cop films. Instead of making a straight story of righteousness combating crime, they tried for black comedy, the joke being that the cops are barely better than criminals.

In fact, we learn that a computer profile of our heroes, Fred (Marc Porel) and Tony (Ray Lovelock) identified them as classic criminal types. It remains a mystery to their boss (Adolfo Celi) why they ever became cops. The answer, as revealed to us by implication, is that being cops empowers Fred and Tony to be thugs and bullies by siccing them on other criminals. You don't hear the sort of righteous indignation from these guys that you'd hear from Maurizio Merli, the mustachioed polizieschi icon, in films by Umberto Lenzi and others. They seem to fight crime just for kicks.

Di Leo and Deodato do what they can to stack the deck early, starting things off with a brutal and fatal mugging by two purse-snatching motorcyclists. These goons drag a bag's desperate owner until she brains herself against a streetlamp. After this atrocity, Fred and Tony ride into action. We're supposed to be angry enough at the muggers to stay interested in what proves an interminable motorcycle chase -- but when I describe the first action scene in a movie as interminable, you know we're in trouble. Fortunately, it ends with a wake-up call for the audience. The chase proper ends when the muggers ride their bike into the back of a truck, one of them dying on the spot, the other thrown out into the street. He's badly injured, but might have survived had not Fred or Tony -- to be honest, I don't remember which is which -- snaps his neck.

Our heroes are basically police terrorists. Their tactics range from thwarting a robbery by assassinating the perpetrators before the fact to annoying the local crime boss, "Bibi" Pasquini (an unenthusiastic Renato Salvatori or Rocco and His Brothers fame), by torching the luxury cars parked outside his high-stakes gambling den. They have two overriding mandates, to bring down Pasquini and get laid. They spend their office time harassing an openly contemptuous female officer, while intercourse proves an essential element of their interrogation technique -- at least when they interrogate attractive young women.

The big joke that develops toward the end is that their two objectives threaten to cancel each other out -- cancel them out, I should say. The climax sets them up in a deathtrap, from which they're too interested in their own climaxes to escape. Which will come first: la petit mort or the Big One?...

Basically, we're dealing with Starsky and Hutch with a license to kill. If that makes Uomini si nasce any funnier, more power to you. To me, it looks like writer and director didn't really have their heart in the comedy, either. The problem is that Porel and Lovelock aren't that funny. The whole joke of the film is that they're violent idiots, but comedy is neither Di Leo nor Deodato's strong suit. They come up with an absurd target-practice sequence in which Fred and Tony leap and roll through a series of ditches, repeatedly firing at cans located dangerously close to each other (the cops, not the cans). Like the motorcycle chase, this goes on too long before it turns into a proper action scene, and the creators clearly have no idea of how they might keep it funny. They get a little closer to the effect they want at the climax. Audiences will inevitably ask if our heroes can really be this stupidly horny as they scene drags on -- but whether it all pays off depends on how you want it to pay off, and I suspect a large part of the audience is bound to be disappointed.

And he strikes!...like Thunnn-derr-balll!

Live Like a Cop, Die Like a Man is newly available as a Netflix streaming video, along with an impressive number of Italian genre titles. This one is most likely not the highlight of the group, but Italian action fans who have a clear idea of what kind of film this is might still find it entertaining on an undemanding level. Even I got a little kick from seeing Adolfo Celi get to play a badass policeman, but whether that justifies 93 minutes of your time is not for me to say.