Contraband

The opening departs from Benedek's Port of New York, with zigzagging foam on the Neapolitan coast to set up the incoming blood tide. Trafficking cigarettes proves to be integral to the local economy, the smuggler (Fabio Testi) is a Milanese transplant trying to balance family and work, his brother's murder triggers a vengeful mission. "Funeral in the bay. Wouldn't you say that's suggestive?" Il Marsigliese (Marcel Bozzuffi) muscles in for a narcotics merger, and shows he means business with a moll's face and a Bunsen burner in an obscene update of The Big Heat. The ensuing gang war is littered with corpses, "Italy is starting to look like America in the Thirties." The marketplace most sanguinarily unbalanced, a maritime city floating on viscera, Lucio Fulci like Francesco Rosi with body parts. The smoking volcanic fields might be the same Ingrid Bergman walked for Rossellini, except that a henchman falls into a sulphurous pool and his corroded body gets thrown into a luxurious living room. (The interplay of the sumptuous and the savage is jokingly epitomized as the camera tilts down from rotunda frescoes to the bang-bang of the Western playing on a capo's TV.) For their part, the police know better than to interrupt criminal slaughter: "As long as they keep killing one another, it's fine with me." The perfidious crime playboy (Saverio Marconi) is a mainstay of this underworld, where the casting of the Tavianis' bucolic naïf as a seamy disco habitué is as personal a Fulci touch as the squishy squib that dispatches him. "Brutte cose," it falls to the Old Guard to restore order, and there's the filmmaker himself with machine-gun in hand. Mackenzie is concurrent with the English view (The Long Good Friday). With Ivana Monti, Ferdinando Murolo, Venantino Venantini, Enrico Maisto, Ajita Wilson, Tommaso Palladino, Guido Alberti, Romano Puppo, and Ofelia Meyer.