Umberto Lenzi's Il trucido e lo sbirro (Free Hand for a Tough Cop) (1976) begins as a Western. Literally. From a tight close-up shot of a movie screen, the camera pulls out to reveal a darkened movie theatre, full of patrons obviously not entertained by the film's action. Sitting in the back is Sergio Marazzi, aka "Monnezza" (Tomas Milian), who sleekly pulls a pack of cigarettes from the breast pocket of the gentleman sitting next to him. Monnezza draws a cigarette from the pack for himself and then offers the gentleman sitting next to him a cigarette from his own pack. "Watch my seat, would you?" asks Monnezza. "I got to take a shit." Waiting in the hallway outside is Antonio Sarti (Claudio Cassinelli). "Are you Monnezza?" asks Sarti. Monnezza gives a smart-aleck answer, and Sarti coldcocks him. Sarti wants Monnezza, because Sarti is a commissario after Brescianelli (Henry Silva), a notorious and ruthless gangster who has kidnapped a young girl. Sarti believes Monnezza knows where he can find Brescianelli; and the clock is ticking, as the young kidnapping victim suffers from a kidney disorder which requires regular hospital visits. If she doesn't get to the hospital in a week, then she is going to die.
Il trucido e lo sbirro is a damn entertaining poliziesco, perhaps one of the decade's best: swiftly-paced, exciting and excessively violent, and well-written (by Lenzi and Dardano Sacchetti). By all means a soundly commercial, successful, and almost perfect poliziesco. 
Outside of its commercial genre and within its action, Il trucido e lo sbirro calls for questions. Here's an example: Monnezza is a street criminal; and pick-pocketing and small cons are his trade. Sarti coerces Monnezza into helping him by threatening to lock him up. However, whatever methods that Monnezza chooses to find Brescianelli and the young child, Sarti does not question them. Aboard a moving train, three armed criminals attempt to rob it. The police stop the train, surround it, and make an attempt to raid it. The three criminals escape on foot and take shelter in a moored boat. Enter Monnezza and Sarti who board the boat with an offer to help: Monnezza tells the gang that Brescianelli is the one who tipped off the police about their robbery. Would they be interested in teaming up to take down Brescianelli, as Monnezza also reveals that he and Sarti were double-crossed by Brescianelli? They agree. Now Sarti has three additional criminals to help him locate Brescianelli, but these criminals are not like Monnezza. These cats are seriously dangerous and violent criminals. Can Sarti keep these criminals in line, maintain his cover, or find Brescianelli and his young hostage?
By the numbers, Il trucido e lo sbirro plays out like a Pyrrhic victory but it ain't. The entire premise of Il trucido e lo sbirro is predicated on the presumption that the state of law enforcement and its methods are wholly ineffectual in stopping crime. The kidnapping case becomes the police department's top priority when it occurs. Cassinelli's Sarti was brought into Rome to head the case. Sarti was demoted to a post in Sardinia away from his position in Rome because of his hard-lined intensity and unorthodox methods against criminals. The once-exiled policeman returns home, now embraced by those who put him exile: his methods are now necessary. In a particularly nasty and fascinating scene, Sarti and one of his violent criminal crew infiltrate the home of a promising suspect. A maid answers the door and Sarti pushes through. Sarti is going to raid the suspect's documents in his study, and would his criminal cohort mind watching the maid? No problem, he says. As soon as Cassinelli's character is out of the room, his cohort grabs the woman and rips her blouse. His intentions are clear and unequivocal. Sarti returns to his cohort when he has heard a gunshot. The suspect that Sarti needs to interrogate lays dead on the floor, a victim of Cassinelli's criminal associate. What the hell did you do that for? yells Sarti. He could have led us right to the little girl. Sarti knocks the shit out of the criminal and points his pistol directly at his head. Cassinelli (who gives another fantastic and emotional performance) has generated enough anger to appear that he is going to shoot the man directly in the head but he checks himself: as much as he wants to kill him, he realizes that he needs him.
So what are Lenzi and Sacchetti saying about current culture and crime in Il trucido e lo sbirro? Here's a scene which may hide their intentions: outside of a movie theatre, two very young men enter its lobby. One is holding a box of tissues while the other appears to suffer from nasal congestion. After a toss of the tissue box, one of the young men wipes his nose with a tissue. "Has anyone ever told you that your face is lovely?" asks the young man to the woman behind the ticket counter. "Why no," she says. "No one is going to say so in the future," says the thug and Whack! He hits her directly in the face with the box of tissues (it's hiding something to charge it up). The two young men rob the box office and run out of the cinema. Sarti witnesses the fleeing criminals and begins to give chase. One of his criminal associates stops him: "Where are you going? What do you care? It's just kids having fun." Sarti again checks himself and maintains cover. The scene within the movie theatre is quite kinetic and exciting. It would appear that Lenzi had a bit of fun filming it and maybe wants to share some of that energy with his viewer.Virtually all of the scenes with the young kidnapping victim truly tug at the heart strings. It is rather difficult to envision a viewer who is not touched by a child victim, suffering from a debilitating condition, held hostage by a truly nasty human being (it is truly amazing how Henry Silva can appear almost like the Devil himself in his villain roles). Despite the numerous victims of criminal carnage in Il trucido e lo sbirro, the viewer is still behind Sarti and his pursuit. The little girl character more than anything is a symbol for Sarti, Lenzi and Sacchetti, and the viewer: she represents an ideal of justice. While it is intimated that Sarti is as violent as the criminals who he is pursuing, Sarti differs only in the fact that his goals are different. A noble and just cause? or perhaps Sarti has not yet lost his faith in humanity. The viewer of Il trucido e lo sbirro can pick either. What is clear is Lenzi portrays his culture in a state of chaos, and the characters left standing are not only its survivors but its winners.
For all of my pontificating, Il trucido e lo sbirro is most famous for Milian's performance as Monnezza (the name roughly translates as "Trash" and he is called "Garbage Can" in the English dub). Not only is the character the most richly-drawn (and not incidentally making everyone around him look more like an archetype or a stereotype), but Milian's performance as Monnezza is the most richly-detailed. Antonio Bruschini and Antonio Tentori, authors of Citta' Violente: Il Cinema Poliziesco Italiano Volume Primo, see Milian's character having its origins in Milian's "Cuchillo" character from Sergio Sollima's masterful The Big Gundown (1966) (p.90, Mondo Ignoto, S.R.L., Rome, 2004). The authors write, "Nel 1976 Lenzi da vita al primo, mitico, personaggio quasi totalmente farsesco interpretato da Tomas Milian, il vero precursore del successivo marresciallo Nico Giraldi." (p.89) Milian's Nico Giraldi character is phenomenally popular, beginning with Bruno Corbucci's Squadra antiscippo (1976) and spanning almost a decade with numerous films. It is difficult to describe how excellent and intricate Milian's performance is: from his facial expressions, to his body language, to his character's charming vulgarity, Monnezza floats through this violent world with a smile on his face, little money in his pocket, and behind all appearances, has a very good heart. Milian is so good that he instantly becomes focal in any scene. Milian drives the narrative of Il trucido e lo sbirro and its investigation. Monnezza is a survivor of this world and his energy is perhaps borne of its chaos. Regardless, Il trucido e lo sbirro is very much worth seeing for Milian's brilliant and landmark performance. Two other interesting facts: the Western playing at the beginning is Tutto per tutto (1968) (Citta Violente, p. 90), directed by Lenzi; and Henry Silva's character, Brescianelli was "the real name of a gangster who otherwise operated in the Milan area within the Marseilles clan." (p. 56, Tomas Milian Il Bandito, Lo Sbirro, e Er Monnezza, Mediane S.R.L., Milan, 2007, text by Pierpaolo Duranti and Erminio Mucciacito with English translation by Pat Scalabrino.)See it.
Silva is in a prison cell but not for long. With inhuman strength, he begins to disassemble the steel from the cell's furniture and mold it in his hands. Bending the bars and descending a wet-sheet rope, Silva's Ristack escapes. After a quick police elusion, Ristack holes up with his homie, Marco (Georges Géret), who owns a small cafe. Less than twenty-four hours after busting out of the joint, Ristack is ready to work. He arrives at gentleman's club, The Hippodrome, to see its owner, Milan (André Pousse), and his shady colleagues. The Insolent has a proposition for Milan: a daylight heist of an armored truck with its cargo several hundred pounds of gold. Would Milan be interesting in fronting this perfectly-planned heist, asks Ristack, and providing a fence to move the gold after? Milan agrees and offers to rendez-vous with Ristack and his crew at an isolated villa to trade the gold for hard currency. Ristack with Marco's help assembles a crew of desperate conmen and thieves. 
At around the halfway mark of L'insolent, the heist is executed and Ristack and company meet Milan for payment. As with most crime cinema in the 1970s, there were only a handful of plots, and with the rare exception (for example, Le cercle rouge (1970), directed by Jean-Pierre Melville) the plots were often the least interesting aspect of the cinema, usually perfunctory and predictable. L'insolent belongs in this majority class; but the devil is in the details; and Roy's flourishes give L'insolent its charm: while the film is set in present day, the overall feel of L'insolent puts it in some other reality. 
To begin with, the wonderfully ridiculous: while the police detectives later make an appearance in L'insolent, the beat cops take to the scene first after Ristack's escape. While executing an immediate area search from the prison, two cops encounter Silva's character, garbed in mechanic's overalls behind the counter of a gas station. Tersely, Silva resists a shakedown: "I'm only paid to work behind this counter." He hasn't seen anyone come by. When the cops command Ristack to lower the car on the mechanic's lift to have a look inside, they might as well as made a sweet polite request: Silva just gives a stare and says he ain't the mechanic and doesn't have the key to the lift. So much for thorough investigation, as the cops leave without Silva breaking a sweat. The police ineptitude rises to the level of buffoonery in a later scene after Silva's Ristack sets off a chain of explosions in the parked cars in front of The Hippodrome. "Hey, need some help?" asks one of the police officers. "No," says a Hippodrome henchman, "it was just a short circuit. All in hand." "Okay, then. Bye." The inclusion of these beat-cop scenes are somewhat baffling: as plot devices as tension builders, they clearly fail, as it's quite immediate that they're not catching Silva's Ristack or really going to make any progress in an investigation. Perhaps their ineffectuality is a joke on Roy's part, channeling the spirit of his film's title; but their inclusion is too labored to merit just a chuckle. Whatever reason, these scenes aren't grounded in any reality.
The Hippodrome, the gentleman's club run by Pousse's Milan, is L'insolent's most indulgent set-piece. Patrons play board games, by rolling ridiculously large dice, with the club's female dancers as game pieces while each of the ladies is scantily-clad in fetish/futuristic garb. The club sequences are too meticulous to be sloughed off as just a gangster's front. Again, perhaps Roy is channeling the spirit of his title, as these scenes are wilfully provocative, providing most of the flesh in the film and the flash. Likewise, these scenes aren't grounded in any reality.
Veteran Pousse as Milan is pretty terrific, as well. His character also has a charming insolent demeanor, totally different from Silva's and unique to him. Director Jean-Claude Roy will more than likely be remembered for his subsequent adult cinema in which actress Brigitte Lahaie delivered some of her most memorable performances (for example in Couple cherche esclave sexuel (1979)). Instead of delivering a perfunctory, gritty, violent crime flick, Roy delivers a perfunctory, playful and weird, violent crime flick with L'insolent. As 70s European crime cinema continues to gain a cult following, certainly Silva fans and eurocrime fans will pull this one out of obscurity.
Mike is sleeping with sexy Sharon Morris (Carole André) and doesn't tell her what he does for a living. Sharon's sunbathing when Mike tells her that he's going to be gone for a while, can't tell her where he is going, or when he is coming back. Expectedly mad, Sharon tells Mike that she won't be here when he gets back. Mike flies off to Bangkok to meet with his contact, Madame Fra (Danika La Loggia) of the local whorehouse which supplies Polo's camp with ladies; and isn't Mike surprised when down in the lobby of his hotel, Sharon meets Mike for a beer. Mike's expectedly mad and takes out for his mission. While at the whorehouse, Mike meets a pretty local prostitute and takes a bath. The next morning, on foot and in his jeans and t-shirt, Mike walks to Polo's camp, only to get ambushed and captured. Polo walks in on Mike and asks him as if he's seen him just yesterday, "What are you doing here Mike?" Mike wants to make an offer.
Silva and Strode are reunited from their earlier di Leo collaboration, Manhunt (1972), where they played a pair of nasty hitmen. Muller and Strode made two films together in 1984, this one and one of the better films to come out of the Italian post-apocalyptic wasteland, Romolo Guerrieri's The Final Executioner. The Violent Breed is only for the diehard di Leo fans.
The Hard Way opens after the credit sequence and 
Henry Silva is no stranger to Italian cinema nor to playing a bad mofo on screen. Silva goes from stoic to intensely animated in a split-second. He's a fantastic villain with other notable like roles in Fernando di Leo's Manhunt (1972), Umberto Lenzi's Free Hand for a Tough Cop (1976), and Fabrizio de Angelis's Man Hunt (1984), for example. Handsome Miles O'Keeffe began as Tarzan in John Derek's Tarzan, the Ape Man (1981). No stranger to Italian cinema, like Silva, O'Keeffe appeared as Ator in the fantasy films, Joe D'Amato's Ator the Invincible (1982) and Ator the Invincible 2 (1984) and Alfonso Brescia's Iron Warrior (1987). He also appeared in Ruggero Deodato's post-apocalyptic The Lone Runner (1986) and Stelvio Massi's actioner, Hell's Heroes (1987), alongside Fred Williamson. O'Keeffe's true talent is also his career hindrance: his uncanny likeness to a young Clint Eastwood, from his look to his demeanor to his delivery. This likeness was okay for the Italian 80s films, but when he plays Count Dracula, for example, in Anthony Hickox's Waxwork (1988), his limited range is really shown. Nonetheless, O'Keeffe is a perfect hero in The Hard Way with one of his best performances. 