If the beginning of a review is the place for confessions, I have to confess: I love these 70’s Italian renegade-cop films -- I love the bleached-out 70’s look, the blonde-baked-weathered-worn-down colours, and the freedom-suffused music with its Dylanesque inflections, all raspy broken vocals over a part-edgy part-pretty steel-stringed acoustic guitar. Perhaps it is true that Ruggero Deodato’s Live Like a Cop, Die Like a Man centres on a fairly simplistic, fairly sharply-drawn clash between Good guys and Bad guys, but it also offers a constellation of meanings in which the central protagonists’ freedom, their delinquent tendencies (they have faces like thieves, or so we are told), their choice of a profession which positions them as protectors of society, and their ever-present motorbike, are all interlinked. The motorbike turns up in Italian films of this genre again and again. Why? Actually, a lot of reasons suggest themselves. But the difference between riding a bike and driving a car is not just a difference of ‘look’, it’s a difference of nature, (the middle-aged scowling but amiable police Chief drives a car, and the all-powerful criminal boss, of course, is always driven around by somebody else). The motorbike, then, signifies a different mode of being: a willingness to accept danger, express one’s individuality freely, and choose how one uses this freedom and this individuality in relation to others. In the case of this film’s central protagonists, Antonio (Ray Lovelock) and Alfredo (Marc Porel), it’s a statement that you can be an individual and still be socially responsible simply by directing all your destructive order-hating rule-breaking anti-social chaotic inclinations against anti-social others. No wonder I love these films.

When Live Like a Cop, Die Like a Man was first released it unsurprisingly gave the censors, (those valiant defenders of Order and Right-minded thinking), quite a bit to protect us from. (We could ponder the peculiarly perfect mirror-image that Antonio and Alfredo on the one side, and the censors on the other side, present us with: two opposed kinds of defenders of society -- I merely mention it here as to ponder it properly would take me too far afield.) Firstly, the film contains a certain homoerotic undercurrent. And secondly, there’s lot of violence -- most objectionable to the censors being a scene which depicts the enucleation and squashing of an eyeball. In Raro Video’s DVD release the enucleation is included, the squashing is not. (This is one of the many 70’s grindhouse movies Tarantino referenced when he directed Kill Bill Vol 1 (2003) and Kill Bill Vol. 2 (2004) and to which he paid homage by staging his own eyeball-gouging eyeball-squashing scene.) It’s worth taking a little time to talk about the film’s homoeroticism and violence because both elements co-exist with other elements that are either contradictory to them, or that are represented in ways quite different to that which we might have expected.

In the film’s opening scene Antonio and Alfredo do, in fact, bear a certain resemblance to gay lovers. The effect is somewhat humorous, (if only due to the fact that we are aware it is unintended), but more significantly, it tends to be at cross-purposes with the characters’ consciously designed meaning: the opening shots establish Antonio and Alfredo as free (the wind is, after all, always blowing through their hair) and independent, the chase that follows establishes their ruthless tough guy credentials, and their sexually-explicit flirting with their boss’ secretary in the scene directly following the chase wants to leave us in no doubt as to their virile, very heterosexual machismo. But a resonance of gay love, apparently explicit in the original story, is still present in the final work as an implication, an implication that is only exasperated by the fact that Antonio and Alfredo share everything: their job, their apartment, their bike, even their women. This gay undercurrent is certainly strong enough to generate a degree of confusion both in the viewer and in the film itself. Thus, Antonio and Alfredo’s heterosexual vigour and prowess is continually touched upon in plot, and yet, every scene which shows them interacting with women also shows their sexual potency being undermined by women. The already-mentioned scene in which Antonio and Alfredo exchange sexual banter with their Chief’s secretary is a good example. The secretary definitely reveals a certain partiality to the two young men. To their blatant, "Which of us do you want to fuck first", she replies that men imagine themselves as sexual gifts to women and that they promise a feast but can barely supply the hors d’oeuvres. Against a man’s pitiful single orgasm, she pointedly notes, a woman can have multiple orgasms. The most noticeable thing about this exchange, however, is the way in which the secretary’s character expresses a sureness and control that appears completely to subvert Antonio and Alfredo’s attempts at male dominance. In the simplest of terms: she’s tougher than they are. And in her presence Antonio and Alfredo assume the diminutive dimensions of boys engaged in bragging about imaginary sexual prowess. You could say that she emerges as someone whose ‘got balls’, a phrase which I am well aware comes loaded with a certain phallocentrism, and yet, to avoid this phrase would be to avoid emphasizing the way in which she over-powers and appropriates their manhood. At the end of this scene, she seems a real presence, and they seem more like cardboard cut-outs. Further, her arguments concerning masculine sexual stamina, or more accurately, the lack thereof, find unexpected support in the film’s one sex scene. When Antonio and Alfredo visit the flat of crime boss Bibi’s sister, the old woman who looks after the flat talks endlessly and eventually gets around to telling them that Bibi gives his sister everything but "that", (a strangely incestuous remark which is taken no further), and the old woman adds that the young girl can’t get enough. "Your friend is probably exhausted" she continues as she potters about the kitchen -- the moans of pleasure from behind the closed doors of another room have alerted her, and us, to the fact that Alfredo’s questioning of Bibi’s sister has turned into something other than standard police procedure. And when the camera finally lets us see him, he really does look exhausted: he lies across the end of the bed as if he’s been used up and thrown away like a cast off candy wrapper. The poor fellow can barely raise his head. She on the other hand, the young girl, Bibi’s sister, is ready for a second course, and when Antonio enters to take over the ‘questioning’ she can wait no longer and roughly pulls him on top of her. At this point, with the sounds of Antonio’s surprised response still in our ears, Deodato cuts directly back to the office and to Antonio and Alfredo again together with the blond secretary. Check and mate to her!

The film’s violence is equally interesting, although at a first glance it might not seem so. Deodato constructs most of the violence out of fairly standard action sequences that nevertheless include camera angles and editing techniques that were inventive for their time. These sequences characteristically hurtle the viewer into the midst of the action, are fairly lengthy, building and elaborating on the tension of the chase or the standoff, and always end in the killing of the bad guys. In addition to this, Deodato’s representation of violence is densely distributed. That is, the film often shifts without any break from one violent scene to another. For example, Deodato shifts directly from a scene in which a hostage-taker is shot from two different directions by Antonio and Alfredo, (an iconic mode of dispatch used more than once), to a scene in which a man is being continuously kicked and punched to the ground, (the beginning of the famous eye-gorging scene). On the other hand, there are places in the film which contrast markedly with this more usual style of accelerated hot violence. In these places Deodato slows down and cools the violence, and in so doing manages to imbue Antonio and Alfredo with an icy depth and toughness that is simply not present in other scenes. For me, the entire movie pirouettes around a single such scene in which Antonio and Alfredo disobey orders (as usual) when they take upon themselves the task of foiling an armed robbery by shooting the felons in the process of attempting the robbery. The scene unfolds with barely a spoken word. Deodato manages to create a set of very expressive and subtle contrasts through the characters’ different gestures: the way Antonio and Alfredo screw silences onto their guns, (so reminiscent of professional killers); the genuine warmth with which Antonio half-smiles and puts his hand on the arm of one of the criminals that he bumps into as the other is leaving the café; the way Alfredo approaches the driver of the getaway car with an open innocent friendliness, and then shoots him directly in the face; the complete lack of bravado or emotion in the way that they both shoot down the criminals in the street; and the quiet naturalness with which they get on their bike, and show barely enough interest to more than glance at the men they’ve just killed as they leave. Incidentally, the introduction of a folksy Dylan-like song on the soundtrack as they start up their bike, with its evocation of anti-establishment values and freedom, gives the deadly mood of this scene a strange twist. It’s a mood that is quite unexpected and hard to sum up, but Deodato manages to effectively combine an ice-cold resolution and cruelty with a sense of optimism, openness, freshness, and hope -- with, what you might call, something like the presence of a sunrise. This should have been enough to shock the socks right off the censors.

In Live Like a Cop, Die Like a Man it’s not just the action that hooks me, it’s Deodato’s particular ability to generate this cooled-down quiet violence. And this quietness bubbles up in others places as well: when Antonio and Alfredo are walking across the open courtyard of an old apartment block, the voices of people living in the apartments can be heard talking about buying parsley for a meal and not being able to go out because the baby’s sick. Again, as they approach the door of Proietti’s apartment someone, from somewhere inside some apartment, shouts, "Did you get the bread?" "No, I forgot." "I knew it!" These moments offer an expansion of meaning, a widening of focus that takes in everyday details of existence, details that are allowed to exist in their own right and not simply in order to advance the plot. A certain richness of effect is achieved here. A certain looseness or quiet realism that begins when the action stops. No wonder I love these films.

Postscript: The standard English title for Uomini si nasce poliziotti si muore is Live Like a Cop, Die Like a Man. This is slightly quirky and off-kilter. A friend, Rolando Caputo, has informed me that a more literal translation of the Italian is: Born a Man, Die a Cop. This translation harmonizes far better with the film’s intended construction of Antonio and Alfredo as two red-blooded Italian men whose profession as cops, and whose particular penchant for violence, suggests that their preferred mode of death will be in a hail of bullets or some other version of a furious fight. The last thing that Antonio and Alfredo do in this film is live and behave like cops.

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