John Saxon was one of those actors who just showed up in all kinds of things. He’s probably best known as Heather Langenkamp’s inattentive cop father in A Nightmare on Elm Street, but he appeared in all kinds of films in every sort of genre. He began his career as something of a teen idol before landing his first major role in Enter the Dragon with Bruce Lee. He found roles in lots of horror films and thrillers, but he was just as apt to show up in comedies, romances, and every other type of genre you can think of.
Buy The .44 Specialist Blu-rayHe often made films in Europe, including The Girl Who Knew Too Much, which is often cited as the first giallo, but also lots of other European horror and action films. He wasn’t always the star; in fact, he usually played secondary characters, often cops or other authority figures. But he acted in a lot of movies – some 200 of them – and so he often pops up in unexpected places. And I always love it when he does.
In The .44 Specialist (also known as Mark Strikes Again), Saxon plays Altman, an Interpol agent helping to guide our hero, Mark Patti (Franco Gasparri) through the murky waters of Italian terrorist networks as an undercover agent.
This is the third film in a loosely connected trilogy starring Gasparri as a cop named Mark. The first two films, Blood, Sweat, and Fear, and Mark Shoots First, were both made in 1975 and were intended as an actual pairing. The .44 Specialist was initially developed as a standalone film, but when the first two “Mark” films became hugely successful, they retooled it as the third film in the series. Oddly, while they changed the character’s first name to Mark, to fit in with the other two films, his last name is different, and they seem to have made very little effort connecting this character to the other.
In this film, Mark Patti is an undercover agent working the streets for petty crime. He grabs purse snatchers and the like. Even when he thinks he’s onto something larger, he sees an “in” to a terrorist network. His bosses tell him that’s not their department and he should just stick to the basics.
Naturally, he ignores that advice and connects himself to two low-level terrorists. That’s when he also connects with Altman, who offers the services of Interpol. Try as he might, Mark has difficulty infiltrating any higher into the terrorist organization. It isn’t so much an organization with levels of superiors and bureaucracy as it is a loosely connected web of people working together towards the same goal.
Honestly, the scenes of the film don’t feel all that connected either. I’ve not seen the original script, but it certainly feels like someone took that and hastily made a bunch of changes to turn it into a sequel without putting a lot of thought into how that affects the overall story. The end results are disjointed.
Unlike a lot of poliziotteschi films from the time period, Mark is not a no-nonsense type of cop who’d rather crack skulls and shoot first, than actually do real police work. He’s more sensitive. When he’s with the terrorists, he steers them towards modes of non-violence. Naturally, a lot of violence occurs anyway. That is what we’re paying for, after all.
But most of the action is fairly blandly shot. There is a nice set piece towards the end where they hijack a train, but the other action is instantly forgettable. I found the non-action scenes fairly dull as well. They try to build periodic tension between Mark and the other terrorists – about whether or not they should trust him – but it never worked for me. Even the trusty John Saxon wasn’t enough to keep my interest.
Kino Lorber presents The .44 Specialist with a nice looking Blu-ray transfer.
Extras include:
Audio Commentary by Film Historian Rachael Nisbet
Alternate English Feature Audio Track
Trailer
The audio commentary is quite informative. Nisbet does a great job of giving background information on the film and placing it inside the history of Italian crime cinema of the 1970s. While I did not love this film that commentary absolutely makes me want to watch the first two films in this series.
