Poliziotteschi
genre of Italian crime films
Poliziotteschi (Italian: [polittsjotˈteski]; sing.: poliziottesco) constitute a subgenre of crime and action films that emerged in Italy in the late 1960s and reached the height of their popularity in the 1970s. They are also known as polizieschi all'italiana, Italo-crime, spaghetti crime films, or simply Italian crime films. Influenced primarily by both 1970s French crime films and gritty 1960s and 1970s American cop films and vigilante films (among other influences), poliziotteschi films were made amidst an atmosphere of socio-political turmoil in Italy known as Years of Lead and amidst increasing Italian crime rates. The films generally featured graphic and brutal violence, organized crime, car chases, vigilantism, heists, gunfights, and corruption up to the highest levels. The protagonists were generally tough working class loners, willing to act outside a corrupt or overly bureaucratic system.
Etymology
In Italian, poliziesco is the grammatically correct Italian adjective (resulting from the fusion of the noun polizia ('police') and the desinence -esco ('related to'; akin to the English -esque) for police-related dramas, ranging from Ed McBain's police procedural novels to forensic science investigations. In Italian media, poliziesco is used generally to indicate every detective fiction production where police forces (Italian or foreign) are the main protagonists.
In English, the term poliziottesco – a fusion of the words poliziotto ('policeman') and the same -esco suffix – has prevailed over the more syntactically correct poliziesco all'italiana to indicate 1970s-era Italian-produced "tough cop" and crime movies. The prevalence of poliziottesco over poliziesco [all'italiana] closely follows the success of the term spaghetti Western over western all'italiana, being shorter and more vivid. In both instances, however, the term that has come to be used more frequently by English-speaking fans of the genre (poliziotteschi, spaghetti Westerns) was originally used pejoratively by critics, to denigrate the films themselves and their makers.
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This entry incorporates text from “Poliziotteschi” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.