Country: Italy
Genre: Poliziotteschi
Director: Enzo G. Castellari
Year: 1976
Rating: 
TRASH CINEMA RECOMMENDED MOVIE
The Big Racket starts out well enough. Grooving to the strains of an Italian progressive rock soundtrack, a bunch of motorcycle thugs outfitted with umpire masks and the finest in 70s Eurotrash fashion go to town on a clothing boutique with baseball bats.
You see, The Big Racket is about protection rackets. The scenes where the punks intimidate the business owners are very well done. They have a sense of imminent violence about them, but they’re also very funny, in a ghastly way. These scenes serve to establish the characters of the low-lifes in the gang, so that we can root for the inevitable loose cannon cop to snuff out their lives.
Inspector Nico Palmieri (the Dudley Do Right ringer Fabio Teste) is frustrated with the usual coddling of criminals by the courts, so he enlists petty crook Pepe (Vincent Gardenia) in a scheme to infiltrate the protection rackets. Pepe goes around robbing places, protected by Nico, as a way of gaining entry into the protection rackets. No, it doesn’t make much sense, but never mind.
Nico is actually surprised when he’s fired for his shenanigans (if you think that’s a spoiler, then you haven’t seen many cops and robbers flicks).
Unlike many Italian flicks from the 70s, The Big Racket has been well-preserved. The colors are vibrant and the soundtrack is relatively clean. The only trouble is that Blue Underground, which released The Big Racket on DVD, was too cheap or stupid to put an original language track and subtitles on the DVD, so we’re stuck with some ghastly English dubbing. It’s doubly a shame because the acting makes it clear that the original Italian would have been a riot. In fact, you don’t have to guess because the theatrical trailer on the DVD is in the original Italian, with English subtitles.
The filmmaking is pretty good. Director Enzo G. Castellari favors clean compositions and elegant camera movements for the most part, with the exception of some trendy (for the time) whip pans at the very beginning of the flick. Also, the fight choreography is perfectly adequate, which isn’t always true in these 70s Italian police movies. The punches actually look like they connect, and the fights are fairly realistic. The stunts are pretty good, too. In one vehicle rollover, Castellari films the action from inside the car, which is a lot of fun.
The Big Racket is gratifyingly nasty and violent, featuring underage rape, urination, death by fire, and some juicy bullet squibs, but it isn’t perfect. Star Fabio Teste is little more than a pretty face — you’d get more range out of Pinocchio than this guy. And the pacing could have been tighter, but that’s a problem with many Italian crime movies from the 70s.
On the other hand, many of the supporting actors provide flavorful performances. I particularly enjoyed Renzo Palmer, who plays a restaurant owner driven to the brink of madness by the antics of the protection racket.
In the end, The Big Racket is a bit too clunky to recommend to newcomers of Poliziotteschi flicks, but fans should have fun with it if they don’t expect too much.
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