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Rating: Film: "Dirty Blood Diamonds"
Director: "Fernando Di Leo"
As many of you may know, in recent years a movement for the revisionism of our "genre" Cinema, which was very popular in Italian theaters between the '70s and '80s, has grown: films ranging from horror to erotic, western to crime films, sometimes turned into involuntary examples of trash-movies. Needless to say, the Italian critics were fierce about this way of making Cinema, not always justifiably so and often too biased, but despite this, the phenomenon managed to attract a large audience.
Today, this phenomenon has the form of a double-edged sword; on one side, it is helping to rediscover some films that without it would have remained forgotten or worse, denigrated to the mere role of "b-movies," on the other, there is the risk of re-evaluating works of little value (which is partly already happening).
Moving past purely introductory matters, I now want to talk about one of the most renowned directors of those years, regarding "genre" cinema: Fernando Di Leo.
A director of Apulian origins, known for having written screenplays without official credit for films like "For A Fistful of Dollars" and "For a Few Dollars More" and later celebrated for his forays into the noir genre (be careful not to call it "poliziottesco"!) thanks to a fabulous trilogy known as the "milieu trilogy" to define a genre in a personal way, infusing his works with a vision sometimes more romantic, sometimes more ruthless of what crime was in those years, and among these three works the most successful and appreciated is definitely "Milano Calibro 9": the first chapter of this saga today considered a small cult of Italian noir.
To speak about the subsequent "Dirty Blood Diamonds" it is necessary to mention Di Leo's most famous work for a fundamental reason: this film was born to be a remake of "MC9" and from its release, it suffered from this comparison which certainly did not help the viewer to have a clear vision of its value.
For those familiar with the work this film is based on, the plot, at least in the initial part, will have the flavor of déjà vu: the protagonist Guido Mauri (Claudio Cassinelli) gets out of jail after serving five years, during which he always suspected he was betrayed by his former boss Rizzo (played by a convincing Martin Balsam), fueling his suppositions is the addition of a robbery against the bus he was traveling on, an action that ended in tragedy for which the protagonist blames the ex-boss and also the appearance of Rizzo's lieutenant, the belligerent and violent Tony, an excellent Pier Paolo Capponi of great presence who will deliver one of his most whimsical performances.
From here on, the story disengages from the original work, not only concerning the narrative but also radically overturning its morals, giving it a completely personal value.
If this film is taken as a remake of Di Leo's masterpiece, one will surely be disappointed, even the elements that make this a pleasant film, when compared with its predecessor, leave a sense of littleness but this is a mistake because as already mentioned, this film only starts as a remake and constantly evolves gaining its own light. What is disregarded regardless is primarily the very wooden performance of the protagonist Cassinelli, not only regarding his very limited expressiveness but also for his annoyingly flat voice tone (I would have loved it if they had dubbed him), fans will notice a direction, although effective, that is clearly more listless than in the director's beginnings, and finally an evidently tight budget. Among the positive aspects, it is necessary to highlight the excellent performance of Pier Paolo Capponi, amazing in playing the thug Tony who does not make you miss too much the role previously assigned to Adorf, also good is the presence of the wonderful Barbara Bouchet, already appeared in the previous chapter, here in a similar though more marginal role that once again presents her famous dance, lastly, let's not forget the soundtrack by the great Luis Bacalov, who manages to put together a sufficiently engaging motif.
I find myself conflicted about expressing a judgment with numerical values, I assign 3/5 but immediately clarify that this is not a product for everyone, this is Cinema but done in its own way (as I mentioned at the start of the review), produced with few means and simply for entertainment purposes, the viewer has to let themselves be dragged without giving excessive importance to certain defects and evident budget limits, if this hurdle is overcome one can enjoy a pleasant product.
Not among the director's peaks but worth reconsidering.
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