Tony Arzenta
Duccio Tessari - 1973
Radiance Films BD Region B
I first saw Tony Arzenta when it was released in New York City, dubbed, cut, and a couple of years old, under the title of No Way Out. I had only seen a handful of films starring Alain Delon at the time, so was unfamiliar with his on-screen persona as a hit man other than what little I may have read.
Duccio Tessari was the selling point for me. The Italian director hit his commercial peak in the mid 1970s with his one English language film, Three Tough Guys, featuring the acting debut of Isaac Hayes, which I had seen earlier. Broadly speaking, Tony Arzenta follows in the template established by Jean-Pierre Melville’s Le Samourai. My interest in the new blu-ray follows the recent restoration that premiered last year in Italy, and the current interest in Delon’s career with a partial retrospective in New York, with a new 4K restoration of Le Samourai also scheduled.
In the title role, Tony Arzenta is a contract killer who decides for the sake of his eight year old son to retire from his life of crime. His boss, Don Gusto, tries to dissuade Arzenta. At a gathering of crime bosses, it is decided that Arzenta can not retire, at least not alive. The plot to kill Arzenta goes awry when it is Arzenta’s wife and son who get killed.
Tony Arzenta appears to have been going through a reassessment since the time of its initial release. While I am glad to see the film as originally intended by Tessari, my own take is that it is a good film but not a great one. While it is Delon who dominates the film, there is also the iconography of having Richard Conte appear as Don Gusto. Only two years away from dying at age 65, Conte is haggard looking. During his last years, Conte’s stardom was primarily in Italian genre films, a kind of exile after brief Hollywood stardom followed by supporting roles in several Frank Sinatra productions. Another crime boss is played by an uncredited Anton Diffring, a slight break from his role as the perennial Nazi bad guy.
What I remembered most from my theatrical viewing was a scene with Arzenta shooting a mob boss, with the bullet shattering a small aquarium, with gold fish flopping around, a moment that could well have inspired a similar scene in one of Lethal Weapon movies. There is also a scene when Arzenta is speaking to the mistress of a mob boss. Instead of tracking forward on Delon, Tessari chose to have a series of static shots moving from long shot to close up. A nice touch is in the first of two car chase scenes with Tessari briefly cutting into a quick montage of a car’s gears in action.
More noticeable for me now is the use of red in the sets, clothing and cars. Red it most dramatically used in a killing taking place in a train tunnel. There is also recurring use of hallways or narrow spaces where the camera and the actors can only move forward or backwards. The idea of restricted space is fitting for a story where the characters are limited by traditions and sets of established rules that are not allowed to be disrupted.