User Reviews

Another in the long-running line of Bruno Corbucci's Nico Giraldi series, this one relocating Tomas Milian's shabby cop to the bustling streets of New York and the scorched terraces of Miami rather than plain old Rome, his previous hunting ground. Despite the different setting the formula is the same as ever, with Milian's Giraldi using his wits and fists to capture a major villain - except this time the villain is the mob!

The emphasis is on the humour as usual, with a witty - and at times just plain crazy - script that gives Milian plenty of wisecracking banter to play with, and an emphasis on overacting supporting players offering up plenty of unusual characters for our scruffy hero to interact with. This time, there's a woman who looks like Woody Allen who has a crush on our hero; another woman, a nightclub dancer, with a whip fetish; a guy pretending to be dead on the kitchen table to avoid paying his debts, and much, much more.

The film stays watchable through a myriad of plot twists to keep you guessing, plus a fair amount of action sequences to keep things exciting. Notable inclusions are a madcap bar brawl and a chase on hover crafts which is pretty good. Milian is on top form as Giraldi and proves to be the best thing in the movie, whilst the supporting cast also offer more than adequate performances - especially the guy playing his buddy Salvatore, Enzo Cannavale, whose presence makes for some fine dialogue between the two leads. Not quite as good as my favourite in the series, 1977's HIT SQUAD, but instead a solid, fairly entertaining addition to the cycle.

From 1976 to 1984, Tomas Milan starred in eleven movies in the Squadra antiscippo series. Starting with The Cop in Blue Jeans, these films include Hit Squad, Squadra antitruffa, Little Italy, Assassino sul Tevere, Delitto a Porta Romana, Crime at the Chinese Restaurant, Delitto sull'autostrada, Crime in Formula One, Cop in Drag and this movie.

In each of these movies, Milan plays Nico "Il Pirata" Giraldi, progressively goes from a tough Italian movie cop to a cop with a Chiense twin, one that becomes a race car driver and finally investigating Rome's gay community to investigate a murder.

Producewr Galliano Juso got the idea when he and director Bruno Corbucci were filming Il trafficone. Juso had his purse stolen by thieves on Kawasaki motorcycles, which make him wondered what would happen if the cops had an anti-snatch and grab team.

The fifth film in the series, The Gang Who Sold America has Giraldi now an Interpol agent in America. He meets the mob family from the last movie - Little Italy - including Salvatore (Enzo Cannavale) with his family and Giarra (Margherita Fumero, whose character is so close to Edith Prickley in both voice and dress that i wonder what came first; SCTV started airing in 1976, so it could go both ways), who is in love with him. Eli Walach, who played Don Girolamo Giarra, did not come back for this.

Giraldi puts two mob bosses against each other but this movie is mostly about broad comedy and action scenes, including air boats and plenty of fistfights. The beginning may be the best part, as Milan is dressed in a military jacket with a straw hat and a scarf, carrying a boombox and dancing to disco down 42nd Street. There's also a great scene where Indian singer Asha Puthli sings "The Whip" and fights criminals with Milan. Her name is Fiona Strike in this movie which is such a perfect Italian movie name.

Salvatore Baccaro, who is always an ogre in films. But the real reason I watched this?

The Goblin soundtrack. It's great, embracing full disco. Boomkat said, "The film is set in the United States, and the soundtrack sounds very American, starting from the first two songs, interpreted by the warm voice of Asha Puthli, an Indian singer who is also an actress in this movie, "The Whip" and "The Sound of Money" seem to belong to one of the many Stax productions of those years, only that they're played by... Goblin! The Roman band, whose line-up consisted of Claudio Simonetti (keyboards), Agostino Marangolo (drums), Fabio Pignatelli (bass) and Carlo Pennisi (guitar) was in those years nothing less than hyper-productive, but this did not prevent them from producing high-quality works. In fact, the album songs go through various genres (disco music, country, funky, soul, samba) with little concessions to some typical "Goblinian" moments."