Dis­cov­er the fast-paced thrills of this hard-boiled Euro crime drama

“A press release and a hand­ful of front pages. Then it’s gonna be the back pages tomor­row – and who cares when every­thing will be for­got­ten, right?”

This is the com­plaint of Police Inspec­tor Gior­gio Sol­mi (Luc Meren­da) about the small pub­lic impact of the polit­i­cal cor­rup­tion and con­spir­a­cy that he is inves­ti­gat­ing. ​“Are you sur­prised?” replies Solmi’s some­time girl­friend Maria (Delia Boc­car­do), who is her­self a jour­nal­ist. ​“You know how things work in this world.”

This is some way into Ser­gio Martino’s Silent Action, which belongs firm­ly to the group­ing of films known local­ly as poliziotteschi (aka Euro­crime), an Ital­ian sub­genre of the 1960s and ​’70s which mar­ried the grit­ty sen­si­bil­i­ty of recent Amer­i­can police films like The French Con­nec­tion, Dirty Har­ry and Ser­pi­co to the fraught par­tic­u­lar­i­ties of Italy’s so-called Years of Lead, when pol­i­tics were polarised, and kid­nap­pings and ter­ror became the con­ven­tion­al tools of either extreme.

Silent Action begins with a series of four mur­ders. First we see three mil­i­tary top brass killed in suc­ces­sion by a crew of assas­sins who then make the deaths look like sui­cides. Each of the scenes is briefly fol­lowed by images of a print­ing press, with super­im­posed text cap­tions to show the trans­for­ma­tion of these pro­fes­sion­al hit jobs into ephemer­al news head­lines which declare them not as mur­ders, but as deaths which are at best some­what sus­pi­cious. The fourth is dif­fer­ent: for we meet Sol­mi and his team at the lux­u­ri­ous vil­la of Sal­va­tore Chiarot­ti, an elec­tri­cian and part-time pri­vate inves­ti­ga­tor whose death (blud­geoned about the skull with a fire pok­er) is unam­bigu­ous­ly, offi­cial­ly murder.

The film’s ini­tial jux­ta­po­si­tion of Chiarotti’s mur­der to those oth­er three assas­si­na­tions sug­gests a con­nec­tion which Sol­mi him­self will take some time to dis­cern. Mean­while the image of those print­ing press­es and ledes sug­gests that we are deal­ing with a sto­ry ​‘ripped from the head­lines’, an impres­sion which is only rein­forced by the sly­ly word­ed dis­claimer at the end of the clos­ing cred­its: ​“The facts nar­rat­ed in this film are pure fic­tion even if in real­i­ty they can hap­pen or have happened.”

Indeed, as the mav­er­ick Sol­mi works with by-the-book DA Michele Man­ni­no (Mel Fer­rer) and Maria – each of whom, in embody­ing respec­tive­ly the police, the law and the fourth estate, rep­re­sent dif­fer­ent mech­a­nisms of soci­ety – he grad­u­al­ly uncov­ers a fas­cist plot for a coup d’état clear­ly mod­elled on the real-life Golpe Borgh­ese of 1970.

Yet even as Silent Action anatomis­es the rela­tions between dif­fer­ent, some­times con­flict­ing pow­er struc­tures in an all too recog­nis­able Italy of the ​’70s, it is also a grip­ping thriller, full of the action promised by its title – a pun­ish­ing car chase, vicious fights, sev­er­al explo­sions, a prison riot, and a cli­mac­tic raid on a para­mil­i­tary camp.

Each time the absurd­ly hand­some Sol­mi approach­es or arrests some­one for ques­tion­ing – a Tunisian escort (Pao­la Tedesco), a mys­te­ri­ous ​‘agent’ (Car­lo Alighiero), a hired ex-con (Anto­nio Casale), a for­eign mer­ce­nary (Fran­co Gironel­li) – they end up mur­dered by an invis­i­ble hand (with the orig­i­nal Ital­ian title serv­ing as some­thing of a spoil­er here) before they can ever be brought by Man­ni­no to a court hear­ing. Even­tu­al­ly team­ing up with secret ser­vices oper­a­tive Cap­tain Sper­li (Tomas Mil­ian), Sol­mi gets to the bot­tom of a right-wing con­spir­a­cy that has him, as much as Ital­ian democ­ra­cy itself, in its sights.

Set to Luciano Michelini’s propul­sive score and dri­ven with a bar­rel­ing for­ward momen­tum, Silent Action plays out with all the spec­ta­cle and vio­lence of a Bond film. But it is also hard-boiled, para­noid and cyn­i­cal, very much in keep­ing with the mood of its times. For here, the forces of fas­cism car­ry on with impuni­ty, hav­ing pen­e­trat­ed every ech­e­lon and insti­tu­tion in Italy – and Mar­ti­no sug­gests that any vic­to­ry for free­dom is doomed to be short-lived.

Today’s news­pa­pers are tomorrow’s fish wrap­ping, but in turn­ing Italy’s per­ilous predica­ment into unset­tling cin­e­mat­ic enter­tain­ment, Mar­ti­no has ensured that this Ital­ian sto­ry, how­ev­er fic­tion­alised, lives longer in the col­lec­tive memory.

Silent Action is avail­able on Blu-ray from Frac­tured Visions on 12 April.