Meet Him and Die
hit blu-ray on April 1st from Raro Video
The great news about Meet Him And Die (1976) is that the title is as accurate as it is badass. Looking at shaggy, blonde, dreamy young Ray Lovelock, you wouldn’t assume that his aspiring young criminal Massimo is going to murder you. But he is. He definitely is. We meet Massimo as he chats with his wheelchair bound mother. He then, seemingly completely on a whim, robs a jewelry store and gets pretty thoroughly apprehended. Another piece of great news for folks who might consider watching this movie is that in prison, Massimo meets up with a criminal a little higher on the food chain named Giulianelli… and Giulianelli is played by none other than American character actor and apparent Italian crime film staple Martin Balsam (The Taking Of Pelham One Two Three, 12 Angry Men)! After a breakout, they go on a bit of a crime spree, a bunch of shenanigans ensue which guarantee some killer car chases and shoot outs, and a femme fatale of sorts is introduced in the form of one Elke Summer (a German actress who played a number of bombshell roles in the US in the 1960s and has over 100 screen credits to her name on IMDb). I’ve left out some surprise twists and turns for you to discover yourself, but for the most part, I’ve also suggested some of the major standout elements that exist in the film.
Italian crime cinema is my jam. There is really no other sub-genre where I’m willing to track down the deep cuts quite as happily as the poliziotteschi. And as this release’s resident scholar Mike Malloy (who does a fun and informative video introduction and writes the liner notes for this Raro release) points out, there were so many of these kinds of films in the 1970s that they really can all run together. Meet Him And Die is not a film I had ever heard of prior to this release, but I had seen the more infamous and jaw droppingly self parodying Live Like A Cop, Die Like A Man, which also stars the baby-faced Lovelock. And while Meet Him And Die will never stand out amidst the pack quite like the nihilistic and unintentionally homoerotic LLAC, DLAM, there are enough twists and highlights to make Meet Him And Die a definite recommend.
One chase scene in particular pre-dates Jackie Chan’s Police Story and Raiders Of The Lost Ark, but involves some of the great elements of some of the best chases in those films. Massimo is driving a truck which is robbed by a motorcyclist and a small gang of cars. When he’s left on the side of the road, he runs down a hillside on foot to catch the escaping truck and overtakes the motorcyclist. Now chasing his own truck on the motorcycle, several incredible stunts follow to get him back onto the truck and fighting the drivers in the cab to regain control. It is excellent work and causes you to wonder how much of the action Lovelock did himself, and/or how many stuntmen were grievously injured in the capturing of this sequence.
Then on top of the occasionally stellar action, there are two bizarre elements that help Meet Him And Die stand out. One being the crazy mixture of folk music blended into this violent crime tale that feels wholly anachronistic until Mike Malloy reminds you that Lovelock was a folk artist when he wasn’t acting. And the final ingredient of wackiness is the sex scene in which it appears Lovelock was elevated above Elke Summer on some type of board which allowed her to magically rotate around in bed beneath Lovelock in a most physically impossible way. Head-scratchers like this count in the plus column when it comes to the dime-a-dozen Italian crime films of this era. As another “for instance” when it comes to just how many of these films there are out there, Malloy also points out that Meet Him And Die director Franco Prosperi (a director whose work I’d never encountered before) was one of two men of the exact same name who were actively directing films in Italy in the 1970s!
Between Massimo’s total inability to not murder everyone, to the unexpected twists and turns, to the appearance of Martin Balsam and the genuinely excellent chase scenes and shoot outs helmed by Prosperi, Meet Him And Die is a poliziesco that is worth tracking down.
The Package
And it is a good thing that the film is worth tracking down, because once again Raro have done a solid job in bringing this film out in a good-looking restoration! The only bonus features are the ones I mentioned above, the video introduction from Italian Crime documentarian Mike Malloy, as well as liner notes from Malloy. But these are very fun and informative features and I didn’t personally feel I needed a whole lot more to get a great sense of the context surrounding this film.
The picture quality on this release was really great in some places, but I also encountered some digital distortion in several spots throughout the movie that didn’t look right. There are some classic elements you’ll see in this transfer, such as some film rips and scratches. Stuff like that not only doesn’t bother me, but sometimes increases my enjoyment of the release because you know they’ve painstakingly restored the very best copy of the film they were able to find, but the scratches and tears remind me of the vintage nature of the film and the film technology of the past which is being adapted to digital here in 2014. BUT, seeing weird digital tracking-type errors really takes me out of the experience. There are only a couple of these that I noticed, and for a small company like Raro and an obscure film like Meet Him And Die, these are minor issues that don’t hold me back from a full recommend.
And I’m Out.
PS: As with many Italian crime films from this era, the film in question went by many names over the years and across the various regions it played in. Raro has released it as Meet Him And Die, which is clearly the superior title. But as you’ll see in the right hand column, The Movie Database which Letterboxd uses filed the film under the vague and 2014-sounding title Risking.
H/T: Blu-ray.com is often the best place to find some killer screenshots of various blu-ray releases, so you can see I borrowed some of these pics from those fine folks.