‘Rulers of the City’ or — Di Leo’s Irresistible Lunacy?
Fernando Di Leo was notorious for the attention-grabbing openings of his movies, and ‘Rulers of the City’ (1976) is no exception as we observe a slow-motion flashback of a young boy witnessing his father’s death at the hands of his double-crossing partner, “Scarface” Manzari (Jack Palance). This sequence’s eerie, stark, dream-like quality suggests we’re in for a serious-minded tale of brooding revenge yet whilst a revenge element is certainly present there’s nothing brooding or serious-minded about this flick in the slightest because ‘Rulers of the City’ might be the silliest movie Di Leo ever made… and it’s all the better for it.
Flash-forward to the “present day”, the film’s opening titles and a jazz flute soundtrack as small-time debt collector, Tony (Harry Baer), drives the streets of Rome in his open-top buggy. Tony’s looking to make a fast bundle so he can start a new life in Brazil so when his boss is owed a large sum of money from “Scarface”, now a powerful rival mob boss, Tony takes the unwanted job of retrieving the cash from the feared gangster.
The good news is Tony succeeds. The bad news is he does so in such a way that “Scarface” isn’t just after Tony’s head but that of his boss and everyone else involved as well. In short — all hell breaks loose.
The silliness of ‘Rulers of the City’ becomes readily apparent as soon as we realise what Tony and his partners — Rick (Al Cliver), an ex-employee of “Scarface”, and aging crook Napoli (a show-stealing Vittorio Caprioli) — have cooked-up in order to extract the money from Manzari because it’s less a financial transaction and more of a prank, so when “Scarface” goes ballistic we can’t help but wonder “Well Tony, what did you THINK was going to happen?!”
From here on out it’s a non-stop cavalcade of increasingly preposterous retaliation that relentlessly builds towards a preposterously explosive climax, and what the story might lack in depth or complexity is compensated by a clear and driving forward momentum (this film has some of the most energetic running-on-foot sequences I’ve seen, and you can tell Tarantino has seen them, too). Throw in a ridiculously entertaining turn by Vittorio Caprioli as the colourful Napoli and underworld violence has never seemed so hysterically daft.
Italian crime film expert Mike Malloy suggests that the script for ‘Rulers of the City’ could originally have been intended as a Western, and it’s a highly convincing case because you can easily imagine this tale of two rival gangs pitted against each other in that genre’s dusty setting. Not only that but the film’s opening flashback sets-up a revenge angle somewhat reminiscent of the one in Leone’s ‘Once Upon a Time in the West’ (1968) even if it doesn’t take on any real prominence here until the very end.
Fernando Di Leo fans tend to be a rather passionate and zealous bunch (I should know as I’m certainly one of them) and for good reason because his non-judgemental lack of pretension allows his films to blast along at a furious rate of knots. He might not be questioning his characters or their milieu in an attempt to provide answers to deep social problems but that’s because the only question of any real urgency Di Leo is asking his audience is ‘Are you having fun?’ and, when it comes to Di Leo, the answer is always an emphatic ‘Yes!’
