The City Armed to the Teeth: Bending the law in the Italian crime Movies tradition

The “poliziottesco all’italiana” is a particular crime movie-genre of the Italian film tradition of the seventies. This film-genre is a cross-over between the American Western tradition, the French genre of Noir and Polar and the famous gangster-movies. In the title of many of these movies there is an explicit reference to some Italian cities: for example Milan in Milano calibro 9 [Caliber 9, 1972], Naples in Napoli si ribella [A Man called Magnum, 1973], Rome in Roma a mano armata [Rome Armed to the Teeth, 1976], Turin in Torino violenta [Double Game, 1977], and many others. The cities are the real protagonists of these criminal stories and the setting where you meet corrupt cops, bad criminals, solitary judges and private executioners. These cities – with the sprawl of suburban streets and areas, the new architectures of social control, the contrast between the buildings of justice and the public violence – are also the real ill bodies in this genre and in the legal-political Italian reality of the seventies. In this paper, I will focus on the link between the representation of the city and the rise of anti-juridical justice such as private justice, vengeance, and popular justice. In this case, the illness of the city is the crisis of political institutions and legal order.