DVD
REVIEW:
FERNANDO DI LEO CRIME
COLLECTION
03/06/11
OVERVIEW: RaroVideo US collects some of his finest work in The Fernando Di Leo Crime Collection, a four-DVD set that includes Di Leo’s highly influential “Milieu Trilogy” – Caliber 9 (Milano Calibro 9), The Italian Connection (La Mala Ordina) and The Boss (Il Boss). The set’s final disc includes 1976’s Rulers of the City, which stars Jack Palance as a mob boss.
All four films were digitally restored and remastered in collaboration with the Venice Film Festival. Each is presented with a number of extras, including a documentary about each
COLLECTION SYNOPSIS:
The inspiration for Quentin Tarantino’s early films, Fernando Di Leo is the master of garish, intricately plotted, ultra-violent stories about pimps and petty gangsters who perfects the genre with an uncanny accuracy. Di Leo doesn’t leave anything out of his criminal underworld films-mobsters, naked women, pointed guns, drugs, money laundering, small town crooks, and hired killers. For the first time digitally restored and remastered in collaboration with the Venice Film Festival: 4 of Fernando Di Leo’s masterpieces in one box set.
CALIBER 9
In the first film of the Trilogy, smalltime gangster Ugo Piazza has just been released from prison. He tries to convince the police, the mafia, and his one-time associate Rocco, a sadistic hoodlum who enjoys sick violence and torture, that he wants to go straight, but everyone believes he has $300,000 of stolen money hidden somewhere.
SPECIAL FEATURES:
-Documentary on Calibro 9
-Documentary on Fernando Di Leo: La morale del genere
-Documentary Scerbanenco noir
-Photo Gallery with audio commentary by Gastone Moschin
-Director biography and filmography
-New and improved English subtitles
THE ITALIAN COLLECTION
The second film in Fernando Di Leo’s Milieu Trilogy focuses on Luca Carnali, a small-time mobster and pimp who has been set up by his gangland boss. When a shipment of heroin disappears between Italy and New York, Carnali is framed for the theft. Carnali is pursued through Milan by a pair of merciless American hit men.
SPECIAL FEATURES:
-Documentary Alle origini della Mala
-Photo Gallery
-Director biography and filmography
-New and improved English subtitles
THE BOSS
Based largely on real people and actual events, Fernando Di Leo’s action-packed film, the final part of his Milieu Trilogy is his boldest commentary on corruption and the criminal underworld. A bomb attack in a cinema in Palermo kills all the members of one mafia family except for Cocchi. Realizing that the instigator of the bomb attack is Daniello from another mafia family, Cocchi is determined to revenge.
SPECIAL FEATURES:
-Documentary Storie di mafia
-Director biography and filmography
-New and improved English subtitles
RULERS OF THE CITY
The paradox of Rulers of the City is that the rulers are small time crooks and suburban gangsters who barely manage to make ends meet, but that’s what makes the film so real and accurate and perhaps why Quentin Tarantino credits I Padroni della Città as the pivotal force behind his decision to be a film maker. In the film Tony is a mob loan collector who’s unsatisfied with his position in life, and constantly dreams of living it rich in Brazil with his brother. To make some quick cash, Tony joins the forces of organized crime, making his way up the ladder. Together with Napoli, another mob enforcer, Tony hatches a plan to con mob boss Manzari (Jack Palance) out of a fortune, but Manzari isn’t about to let that happen.
SPECIAL FEATURES:
-Documentary Città violent
-Director biography and filmography
-New and improved English subtitles
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