WINTER OF DISCONTENT: Live Like a Cop, Die Like a Man

On any list of maverick cops, Inspectors Harry Callaghan and Jack Regan are bound to feature highly. Fred and Tony – the, ahem, heroes of Ruggero Deodato’s ‘Live Like a Cop, Die Like a Man’ – are the kind of guys who make Callaghan and Regan look like Jessica Fletcher and Jane Marple respectively … or they would be if they weren’t played by Marc Porel and Ray Lovelock.

On paper, Fred and Tony are little more than licensed vigilantes, whose “means justify the end” work ethic reveals them as no better – perhaps even worse – than the crooks they pursue. On screen, however, Porel man-pouts with such moody determination that I rather suspect Robert Pattison used the film as a training video in order to perfect his characterisation for ‘Twilight’, while Lovelock struts and poses as if he were in some weird commercial for men’s fashions where a pistol is 1976’s must-have accessory and the best way to show off the cut of a sweater is to have the wearer beat up a suspect.

Still, for the purposes of this review let’s suspend disbelief (actually, let’s just expel the fucking thing – it’s quicker) and allow that Fred and Tony are hard, edgy characters with no moral code and not an ounce of human pity between them. As the film opens, they’ve just been transferred to a special squad under the command of Adolfo Celi. I can’t remember his character being given a name and IMDb bills Celi as “the Captain”. Anyway, Fred and Tony have been transferred to a special squad – it’s literally called the Special Squad – with the remit of stopping crimes before they’ve even been committed.

You see, the Special Squad have been given unlimited resources in the form of a very expensive computer that can predict crime (I kid you not: that’s the full extent of the exposition and Celi manages to deliver it without laughing). Now, exactly how nicking someone for a bank robbery before they’ve robbed it works in judicial terms, I’m not qualified to say. But surely it’s just intent at that point and the wannabe robbers would be back out on the streets within a few months.

Maybe that’s why Fred and Tony simply shoot everyone at the scene and leave the local beat cops to clean up with some vague promise of making sure their report clarifies everything. Not that there was even a single scene of them doing paperwork. There are plenty of scenes, however, of Fred and Tony behaving like due process never existed, and despite Porel and Lovelock’s inability to convince as hard-ass bad boys, it’s this tireless parade of unethical behaviour that ensures the film cracks along nicely, requiring no padding to reach its 100 minute running time. But desist with the technical details, I hear you cry; bugger the running time and don’t even think about boring us with aspect ratios and film stocks. Tell us about the unethical behaviour.

Well, it’s like this: Fred and Tony join the Special Squad and promptly go after gang boss Pasquini (Renato Salvatori), unaware that his inside man Daniele Dublino (again, I don’t recall the character having a name, and IMDb just goes with “corrupt cop”) is about to reveal their identities; and since that’s really all there is by way of narrative, Deodato and his three screenwriters (including ‘Milano Calibro 9’ helmer Fernando di Leo) basically ensure that Fred and Tony randomly get involved in any and all occurrences of mayhem on their way to the boatyard shoot-out that ends the film, be it pursuing a couple of snatch-and-grab artists in a six-minute motorcycle chase, crashing into a hostage situation, or gunning down the would-be perpetrators of an armoured truck heist for merely pulling on their balaclavas and looking at the truck.

And even when our boys are actually concentrating on the Pasquini plot, their modus operandi eschews such staples of policework as detection, forensics and evidence gathering in favour of arson, gunplay, duffing up the mobster’s associates and taking turns shagging his nympho sister Lina (Sofia Dionisio). If the surname’s familiar, that’s because she’s the younger sister of Silvia Dionisio, star of Deodato’s earlier ‘Waves of Lust’ and the director’s wife at the time. Sofia Dionisio has a nude scene in ‘Live Like a Cop, Die Like a Man’ that can only be described as sleazy. True, shooting a sleazy sex scene featuring your sister-in-law isn’t quite in the same league of ickiness as some of the stuff Dario Argento has cast his daughter in, but still …

While we’re speaking of the Dionisios, remember Silvia’s J&B scene in ‘Waves of Lust’? Well, Deodato breaks out the blended whisky for narratively redundant bit of iconography featuring Pasquini’s moll:

And while we’re discussing the film’s reductive treatment of its female cast, Silvia Dionisio plays Adolfo Celi’s secretary, to whom Fred and Tony behave in a manner that would make even Sid James in a ‘Carry On’ film break character and tell them off for being chauvinist pigs. Granted, the script gives Dionisio a few zingers to fire back at them, but she’s one of only three female characters who aren’t there to be a vamp or a victim (the other two are elderly housemaids incorporated for comedy value). And yes, casual misogyny isn’t exactly a hidden agenda in the film industry as a whole and 70s Italian exploitation pictures in particular, but even your most disreputable of gialli and sexploitation opuses give their actresses a bit more to do.

So what does ‘Live Like a Cop, Die Like a Man’ have to recommend it? Why splurge over 1000 words on it? Because, basically, it’s entertaining as all hell. That six-minute motorcycle chase? It kicks off literally moments after the opening credits, hurling the viewer full-tilt into Fred and Tony’s renegade way of doing things, and the pace doesn’t let up from there. There’s an action set-piece every ten minutes or so, the execution of which are generally pretty damn good – the bike chase is a stand-out; ditto a bit of cat ‘n’ mouse in a quarry, and a mob hit on one of Fred and Tony’s colleagues. Deodato’s craftsmanship is effective: he has a knack of establishing the dynamic of any given scene very economically, often using specific visual details to define location or character interrelationships. The editing is focused and rigorous, driving things forward all the time.

Also – and it would be remiss of me not to admit this – Porel and Lovelock make for an unforced double-act, creating a kind of bland chemistry that suggests they’ve worked together for so long that they don’t even bother playing off each other any more. It’s just a shame that they come across as moderately less dangerous than Bert and Ernie during a particularly well-behaved episode of ‘Sesame Street’.

WINTER OF DISCONTENT: Waves of Lust

A word on the title: Ruggero Deodato’s ‘Una Ondata di Piacere’ actually translates as ‘A Wave of Pleasure’, however the most common English-language title is the pluralized-for-no-reason ‘Waves of Lust’. So we’ll go with that. In all honesty, I prefer ‘Una Ondata di Piacere’ and when my wife asked what I was watching, that’s the title I used because it sounded nicely poetic and I didn’t have to ’fess up to it being a tawdry little thriller where Silvia Dionisio and Elizabeth Turner get naked a lot.

Off you go, then. The rest of the review will be waiting when you’ve finished noodling on Amazon or Netflicks.

So, where were we? Oh yes. There are two ways of looking at ‘Waves of Lust’, and either could serve as a capsule review in its own right.

1. It’s Polanski’s ‘Knife in the Water’ done as a porno.

2. It’s an 88-minute advert for J&B.

Granted, J&B and ’70s Italian cinema have an inseparable relationship and it’s virtually impossible to watch a giallo, a cannibal movie or a sex comedy without a bottle flaunting its distinctive yellow label in the background, but ‘Waves of Lust’ takes things to a new level. Deodato’s camera lingers on bottle after bottle of the stuff almost as fetishistically as it caresses the fleshly delights of its leading ladies or the trim lines of the yacht on which most of the action takes place. And then, just as the sexual tensions which have simmered away throughout the movie come to a head, Deodato throws in a scene where Dionisio lies naked on a sun deck while John Steiner slurps J&B from her navel.

‘Waves of Lust’ isn’t a particularly great movie, but damned if it doesn’t leave you feeling like a shot of whisky. Even bad whisky.

Here’s the basic plot – and believe me, it’s basic: young couple Barbara (Dionisio) and Ilem (Al Civer) are holidaying at a coastal resort when they encounter Giorgio (Steiner) and Silvia (Turner). Giorgio is a boorish industrialist who treats Silvia like a slave and his workers like cattle; his treatment of a fellow (if significantly less successful) businessman who appeals to him for backing is so contemptuous that the fellow commits suicide. This doesn’t bother Giorgio in the slightest. He’s more interested on getting Barbara on his yacht, and if that means suffering Ilem’s company then so be it.

Thus the first 18 minutes. The rest of the piece takes place almost entirely at sea and proceeds as a four-hander. An antagonism between Giorgio and Ilem has already been established, Giorgio regarding the younger man as déclassé. Ilem, meanwhile, needles Giorgio about his drinking and winds him up by plucking drinks, cigarettes and even food from his hand and consuming them himself without so much as a by-your-leave. Predictably, Silvia takes a shine to Ilem. Barbara almost demonstrates an interest in Silvia. Giorgio just wants to have his wicked little way with Barbara.

Discount any homoerotic tension between Giorgio and Ilem (a ’70s sexploitationer directed by Ruggero Deodato was never going to get that subversive), and there are only so many combinations of attraction, alliance and betrayal that the script can contrive and ‘Waves of Lust’ spends an often tedious hour working its way through them. There’s some interesting business regarding a painting and the psychological effect it has on Giorgio, but on the whole the narrative is boilerplate.

With the thrilleramics muted and no real individual directorial style on display – ‘Waves of Lust’ consists of nice shots of coastline, swish yachts, blue sky and sparkling water – interest in the movie stands or falls on its eroticism. And in Dionisio – to whom he was briefly married – Deodato has a seductive siren of the highest order. Lithe, confident and not remotely assailed by the ugly stick, Dionisio vibes a casually mocking sexuality that makes it easy to see why the hard-nosed Giorgio becomes so captivated and why Ilem is on edge the whole time. Turner also does a decent job of Silvia’s character arc from doormat to femme fatale, even if the script cynically refuses her deliverance.

Ultimately, though, ‘Waves of Lust’ teases with plentiful nudity (a Silvia Dionisio nudity drinking game will probably see you undergoing a stomach pump before the end credits roll) but short changes on actual sex scenes. The long-promised Silvia-Ilem consummation ends just as Barbara decides to join in.

Nor is there much in the way of suspense, while the inevitable violence of the finale is clumsily staged and offers neither shock nor catharsis. It’s watchable enough, and Dionisio doesn’t disappoint as the main attraction, but in the pantheon of sex-yachts-and-one-upmanship films, it doesn’t have the acute class-conscious underpinnings of ‘Knife in the Water’ or the delirious sleaziness and demented denouement of Ottavio Alessi’s ‘Top Sensation’, though it would probably play well in the bottom half of a double bill with the latter. Hmmm, now there’s an idea.