Sergio Sollima's Violent City has a brilliant opening chase scene featuring a long moment of filming without any dialogue. The ending is a spectacular sniper scene across a rooftop to an elevator. Ennio Morricone's score is brilliant and features a wide array of instrumentation you would hear in his other films. While this movie contains some of the sociopolitical themes found in Sollima's other Italian genre films they are more surface level and not fleshed out enough in this movie. The pacing suffers because of too much filler and scenes being longer than they need to be. Apart from that the characters are not nearly as endearing or interesting as in some of his other movies.
Synopsis: "After being double-crossed by his mistress and barely escaping a murder attempt, a hit-man sets out to take his revenge on the woman and the mob boss who put her up to it."
The opening car chase is magical. There is a point during a straight-away where the camera goes first person on the car and when it turns I could feel my body turning with it. The speed never looks bad as it often sometimes does in old car chases with the cranking of the camera. There is also minimal rear-projection. The car chase also switches settings to very narrow areas where Bronson's character Jeff has to drive up a long winding set of stairs at one point. The car chase ends in a crash and Jeff is betrayed by someone he knows which leads to a shootout with a lot of blood squibs. Gunshot blood squibs are always the best parts of these movies.
After the opening 15 minutes or so the film gets to where I have problems with it. In his jail cell a young man talks about how will spend longer in prison for a burglary while real criminals like Jeff will be able to go free. The older inmate talks about society is being torn apart. These men never return to the movie and that starts a string of surface level themes about the hierarchy of criminals in society and how society is so violent that people need to be violent, or ally themselves with violent people to protect and preserve themselves. Because it is so surface level it just feels like a waste of film. Once Bronson is out, a crime boss played by Telly Savalas wants him to be his enforcer but he refuses. With help from one of his colleagues, played by Michel Constantin, (dubbed by Robert Spafford in the english dub) he sets out for revenge on his girlfriend and his former associate. He tracks his former associate, Coogan to a racetrack. What follows is actually an interesting, but once again overlong and in need of editing sequence. Him camping and timing the race cars and waiting for the right moment to shoot felt like a real amount of time to wait to make a hit. Cinematically though it's boring. Even before he sets up his sniper and gets to his spot the movie spends way too much time showing the race cars and doing commentary on all the racers.
Following this assassination, Jeff tracks down his girlfriend, Vanessa played by Bronson's real wife at the time, Jill Ireland. The second half of this film plays out like a noir movie with Telly Savalas' mob boss character Weber, having photos of Jeff at the racetrack and blackmailing him to work for him again. Vanessa has married Weber, according to her for her security, but it's only a matter of time before she might betray him too. Her side of the story shows what it is like to be a woman in a man's world and how in a violent world she allies herself with the tougher, but also the richer men. As I said earlier some of these themes would be better if they were written better and elaborated on more. The ending to the film features an incredible scene where the sound is cut off in an elevator as Jeff finally completes his revenge on the people who betrayed him for the last time. The sound design of just the gunshots going through glass and the mouthing of words and screaming you can't hear is great. I think Sollima loses something with the characters by not having his usual formula which is having an authority figure team up with either a criminal or someone lower on the totem pole in society. That was the basis for most of his other great movies. The best thing about this movie, not surprisingly is Ennio Morricone's score. His organ heavy theme, that sometimes changes to a string and horn heavy version of the same tune is quite pleasant to listen to.
Rating: 5/10
Trivia: Ennio Morricone's theme in this or at least the intro to it is the same one he used in Almost Human (1974)
Gun of the movie: Armalite AR-7
I couldn't find a trailer but here is the incredible opening car chase scene on Youtube:
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