Fernando Di Leo: Pulp Maestro

The director of street tough movies with a front seat view to the crossfire of Italy’s turbulent, lawless, political violence-filled Anni di piombo—the “Years of Lead” from the late ’60s to the end of the ’80s—Fernando Di Leo, whose early work as a screenwriter included uncredited work on Sergio Leone’s Man with No Name films, was one of the most gifted artists to work in the poliziotteschi, or police procedural genre, and a titanic influence on filmmakers such as Quentin Tarantino. Outspoken in their disillusion at the social order controlled by the cooperative combine of capitalist, church, and mob capo, boasting scuffling stick-and-move camerawork, percussive cutting to pulsing, proggy soundtracks, and fierce performances from a rogue’s gallery of actors that includes Henry Silva, Jack Palance, and Mario Adorf, Di Leo’s best genre works double as howls of dissidence towards an unjust system, their savagery having lost none of its power to shock today.