Quentin Tarantino is a fan of Fernando Di Leo and it's easy to see why on the new DVD set, “Fernando Di Leo: Crime Collection.” The Italian director had a wonderful way with choreographing elaborate criminal encounters involving multiple parties exchanging the loot—or whatever—in public squares, outside phone booths or on moving subway trains. As his career progressed, his hand-to-hand combat scenes grew less clumsy and more agile.
Di Leo gained attention by writing screenplays for spaghetti westerns, including Sergio Leone's A Fistful of Dollars, and some of that terseness continued in the contemporary Italian settings of his crime movies. In “Crime Collection's” earliest film, Caliber 9 (1972), a wary protagonist just out of prison, Ugo (memorably performed by Gastone Moschin), is caught between the cops and a mob boss (“the Americano”). Like the denizen of a brutal American film noir, Ugo is the honorable thief—an island of conscience in an ocean of sleaze.
In Caliber 9 and “Crime Collection's” three other films, The Italian Connection (1972), The Boss (1973) and Rulers of the City (1976), the context for the double and triple crosses is a society dominated by poverty, corrupt officials, murderous mobsters and the loss of values. Several include faces familiar to audiences of classic Hollywood; the perpetually sneering Jack Palance plays a gangster called Scarface in Rulers of the City. “Crime Collection” includes a booklet with a filmography and an extensive interview with Di Leo.
