‘Wake Up & Kill’ (1966) - Carlo Lizzani.

Gifted Director, Carlo Lizzani’s audacious, adrenaline-fuelled, greatly influential poliziotteschi classic ‘Wake Up & Kill’ (1966) is the ceaselessly locomotive true crime classic that so energetically dramatizes the frantic, media-hyped rise, and subsequent ignominious fall of photogenic smash-and-grab merchant, Luciano Lutring. While filmed a good few years before the hyperbolic, bullet-blasted, road-carnage heyday of poliziotteschi mayhem masterminded by exploitation titans, Lenzi/Martino/Massi et al., Lizzani's no less thrilling 'Wake Up & Kill' expresses its very own unique personality! The dynamic, cinema verite style, the director cannily utilized, allowed for considerably more intimacy, pathos and emotional gravitas over the grievous, downward spiralling plight of infamous jewel thief, Lutring (Robert Hoffman) and his ravishing songbird paramour, Angela (Lisa Gastoni).

This consistently exhilarating 60s true crime drama forcefully grabs you from the explosive intro, as screenwriter, Ugo Pirro’s cogent script keeps the viewer wholly immersed in misguided misfit, Lutring’s cavalier, hubristic, whiskey-soaked Riviera crime spree that inexorably attracts the mercenary attentions of the over-mythologizing press, hyperbolically dubbing him the ‘machine gun soloist’; a glib moniker that wily inspector, Moroni (Gian Maria Volonté) ardently hopes he might be able to stop becoming a statistical fact! The autobiographical film’s vivid action sequences are no less dynamically rendered than the morbidly fascinating, increasingly desperate relationship between steadfastly loyal, Angela, and her fractious, machine gun-toting hoodlum husband, ostensibly leading them both to an inevitably destructive climax! ‘Wake Up & Kill’ might still be highly regarded as an influential true-crime masterpiece even without its scintillating score by, Ennio Morricone, yet sonorously endowed with such an enthralling theme, Carlo Lizzani’s muscular, torn-from-the-headlines true crime thriller is vertiginously elevated to that of a minor genre masterpiece!  The beautifully restored Arrow Video Blu-ray is a fantastic addition to any avid film fan's Euro-Cult collection. 

 

 

  

'L'amour fou'

'Gunning for Euro-crime glory!'