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Years of Lead: How American movies transformed the Italian poliziotteschi movement

If you’re a fan of cult Italian movies, we sincerely hope you wake early every morning whispering a calm prayer of thanks to Clint Eastwood.

After all, Clint didn’t just help pioneer one great wave of genre movies in Italy (otherwise known as the spaghetti western), he was also instrumental in transforming another, the poliziotteschi.

Of course, Italian crime / police movies existed before Dirty Harry (the earliest poliziotteschi came in the 1960s), but they were transformed forever after Don Siegel’s masterpiece crossed the water, becoming darker, more morally ambiguous, and much more violent.

It makes sense that Clint would become the icon that would lead the poliziotteschi to greater heights, the genre essentially took western tropes and dressed them in different ponchos. The two genres not only shared actors and directors, but composers, cinematography styles, and narrative tropes.

Perhaps the best signifier of this trend is Franco Nero’s success in the Italian crime genre. The artist formerly known as Django (itself a rip-off of Clint’s Man with No Name), Nero was scooped up by Enzo G. Castellari into the first post-Harry poliziotteschi High Crime which used the genre to explore police corruption and vigilante tactics. A huge success in its native country, High Crime was a turning point for the poliziotteschi.

Where the Spaghetti westerns explored the struggle between law and disorder in the distant past, the poliziotteschi movies focused their lens on an explosion of crime in Italy of the modern era: the ‘Years of Lead’ - the term for the specific period of social and political tension in Italy that these movies explored narratively and thematically. As such, Years of Lead is a truly appropriate title for Arrow’s box set, which collects five of the best of the genre.

But these movies didn’t just look to Eastwood’s Man with a Magnum for ideas. After the Dirty Harry influence proved to be so successful, poliziotteschi directors watched many more gritty American crime movies for inspiration.

High Crime itself wasn’t just inspired by Dirty Harry, but by Bullitt and (very directly) The French Connection. Serpico was another key title for the poliziotteschi filmmakers, as was The Godfather.

So, we’ve handed in our gun and badge and taken a desk job: watching every single movie in Arrow’s excellent Years of Lead set to search for clues that’ll allow us to uncover their potential ‘70s cinematic origins. Turns out we don’t exactly have to be Columbo to do so - these things wear their influences on their denim sleeves.

Spoiler alert: 1971 was a monumental year for the makers of the movies in this set. It’s basically the equivalent of 1977 for punk. Confused? Allow us to explain...