Thanks are in order for NoShame. As if in an instant the Rome and LA-based upstart has established itself as one of the most exciting and praiseworthy DVD distros running. Doggedly devoted to quality product, they’ve been rolling out class-act diamonds from Italian cinematic vaults for only some several months now. Their range of releases already evinces a thrilling broadness of taste, with shiny new packages of Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow and The Story of a Love Affair sharing catalogue space with the kind of great obscure fun stuff so cherished by Video Watchdog thumpers, like The Big Alligator River and The Strange Vice of Mrs. Wardh. Naturally, “respectability” plays no role in the reverence shown in each DVD’s presentation — a non-elitist inclusiveness that is NoShame’s central appeal.

Pure crime exploitation genre pulp, Emergency Squad ( Squadra Volante) falls decidedly into the “fun stuff” camp, but that’s not cutting it short. It’s happy there, and on its own relative terms the movie is perfect in its particular confined world. The director, Stelvio Massi, learned the craft as a cinematographer of spaghetti westerns (he assisted on A Fistful of Dollars and worked on Giuliano Carnimeo’s Sartana series) and giallo thrillers. Emergency Squad was his third film, and he’d go on to make more (the Mark the Cop series, Destruction Force), all united by their macho adherence to genre conventions.

Tomas Millian is Ravelli, perpetually cigarillo-chewing renegade cop tortured by the unsolved slaying of his wife. His characterization as dark and troubled throughout the film dips so deep into movie cop cliché that it emerges on the side of, if not originality, at least envious audacity. Later, Millian would become best known as Nico Giraldi, the brazen undercover officer from a series started with the Serpico-biting The Cop in Blue Jeans. As Ravelli, Millian is all clench-jawed obsession, his quiet rage directed inward when it isn’t spraying out of his semi-auto rifle. Dirty Harry is the obvious touchstone here (Eastwood remained a beacon), especially in the scenes that establish Ravelli’s contempt for the petty formalities of the law. When an officer is murdered in a heist (deviously cloaked as a violent film shoot by the offenders), Ravelli finds a bullet on the scene that he later matches to the gunman that slew his wife. He’s going to pursue the killers no matter what, but the deskbound suits are cautious. He’s a first-rate cop who “follows his intuitions,” they say, but he’s got “no discipline.” He’s “a great man — and a great bastard, too.” And indeed this great bastard beats suspects, shoots at will, and drinks Scotch with spoiled stoners (in the film’s most fantastically funny and bizarre setpiece) on the way to getting his man.

Gastone Moschin owns Emergency Squad’s best performance, as villainous team-leader Marseilles. He’s best known (in the U.S.) from The Conformistand The Godfather Part II (also from 1974), in which he played Fanucci, the corrupt Don snuffed by De Niro in the blinky hallway. Here Moschin makes this thoroughly despicable killer and fatuous double-crosser nearly sympathetic with his creeping bad cough and painful looks of escape at his only hope, his wannabe-pinup diva girlfriend Martha Hayworth (Stefania Casini). Massi’s style matches his actors’ dualities, lacing more than the usual exploitation gut-punch dazzle (zippy rack zooms from eye to gun barrel, motorcycle helmet-cam, whip pans, a sleazy/trippy wah-wah score) with viscous, dreamlike moments (ghostly flashbacks of Mrs. Ravelli’s murder, the stoner scene).

Chris D.’s bibliographical essays and video interviews with the late Massi (cheerfully humble) and Millian (pompous as hell) highlight the extras. There’s less discussion of Emergency Squad in particular than in careers as a whole, but it’s all illuminating, and the package as a whole is typically satisfying. Already in their young existence, NoShame is a pillar.
—JUSTIN STEWART