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Shoot First... Die Later
[Blu-ray]
Blu-ray ALL - United Kingdom - Raro Video Review written by and copyright: Eric Cotenas (12th May 2025). |
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The Film
 Milanese police lieutenant Domenico Malacarne (Torso's Luc Merenda) is up-and-coming as much due to his kick-ass police work as it is to the maneuvers of his publicity-hungry chief (Queens of Evil's Gianni Santuccio) who wants to show the effectiveness of “precautionary arrests” on the city’s vice problems. Although he appears humble in his refusal to play up his own image with the press, it turns out that he has managed to keep his mistress Sandra (High Crime's Delia Boccardo) and set her up with her own art gallery by occasionally looking the other way and burying reports. He balks when mobster Pascal (Gang War in Naples's Raymond Pellegrin) and his lawyer Mozanni (Violent City's Richard Conte) ask him to sink his own case against two Portuguese gun-runners – alcohol and cigarette smuggling he doesn’t mind, but he doesn’t want anything to do with weapons – but is pacified by a bonus payment. He is, however, suspicious when they ask him to steal a complaint report filed by a Neapolitan shut-in Esposito (To Be Twenty's Vito Caprioli) about being assaulted by the passenger of a Swiss-registered car blocking his front gate in Sante Maria. The only reason he complies is because the report was taken by his own father (My Dear Killer's Salvo Randone) – only a sergeant and proud of his son’s career – but he can only get him to bury the report without arousing suspicion. He also makes efforts to pacify Esposito, but Pascal is not satisfied since the car was registered to the drug-addicted son of an Italian countess and his body has just been discovered in a cement-filled oil drum. When Pascal’s men murder Eposito, Domenico may have to risk his reputation to prevent his father and girlfriend from being their next targets. Shoot First, Die Later is not director Fernando Di Leo's best crime film but it is a very intriguing entry. While most directors in the genre focused on ass-kicking police heroes wasting thugs and sometimes exposing corruption within their own departments, Di Leo usually made criminals his protagonists and put them up against worse criminals and/or corrupt authorities. The policeman protagonist of this film is driven to wipe out scum but has also looked the other way when it came to small-scale smuggling for a nice compensation and now finds himself in deep as the mob escalates their activities just as the police have been given more leeway to crack down on these activities. If Pascal comes across as a forgettable loudmouth brute of a villain, that may be quite appropriate since virtually everything that goes wrong in the film is a result of his impulsive behavior. Even when he leans on Mozanni and Domenico to clean up his messes, he impatiently sends in others to deal with things more definitively and ends up drawing more attention to his activities. A weakness of the script is that it is unclear if one of the two acts that set Domenico on his quest for vengeance is one of Pascal's overriding decisions or part of the campaign against Domenico resulting from his response to it. To label the film's portrayal of the one gay character (Terror Express' Gino Milli) as a sadist and a transvestite (“Gian Maria: Gianni from the front and Maria from behind”) as non-PC may be an understatement – it seems as gratuitous and Domenico's homophobic responses to the character – but the film's single instance of animal violence is more disturbing even if it cuts away before anything had to be simulated. Merenda has less of a “bad hair day” here than in some of his other films – including Di Leo's The Kiidnap Syndicate and Nick the Sting – and is wonderfully wry as the backseat driver during the opening car chase; when the driver is apprehensive because the pursuant might be armed and says that they usually shoot at the driver, Merenda replies "Shooting me wouldn't stop the car." Boccardo is just window-dressing here with even theor love scene – set to "There Will Be Time" by the band Osanna with whom Luis Bacalov collaborated on the score for Di Leo’s Milano Calibro 9 – feels merely obligatory while Merenda's scenes with Randone provide the film's true emotional hook. Conte (who died the following year) looks even more tired here than in some of his other Italian films from this time – the last one being the dreadful late entry Exorcist-ripoff Cries and Shadows – but its less distracting here as he bristles at being referred to by Pascal as just a “mouthpiece” and later proves just who is actually the interchangeable one in the organization. Singer Rosario Borelli (Brothers Till We Die), in one of five films he made with Merenda (and one of four with Di Leo), is an interesting presence as Domenico's partner Giratto, also on-the-take but seemingly genuine in his sympathy at a funeral scene late in the film. Although the film was produced by Galliano Juso (Heroin Busters) rather than his regular producer Armando Novelli (Madness), Di Leo's other regulars are on hand: composer Bacalov (misspelled “Bakalov” in the English credits), editor Amedeo Giomini (Door Into Darkness), assistant director Franco Lo Cascio (Loaded Guns) who later directed porn as "Luca Damiano", production designer Francesco Cuppini (The Frightened Woman) whose showcase here is Sandra's gallery and loft apartment, stunt coordinator Gilberto Galimberti (2019: After the Fall of New York), and cinematographer Franco Villa (Giallo in Venice) whose work here is colorful yet effectively quick-and-dirty. The film’s two car chases were coordinated by French stunt driver Remy Julienne presumably a perk of this being a French co-production given the lower budget. 
Video
Unreleased theatrically or on video in the U.S., Shoot First, Die Later was first available in English-friendly form as an Itailan import DVD from Raro which was the only title released separately on DVD and Blu-ray from the concurrent Fernando Di Leo: The Italian Crime Collection - Volume 2 which included the English dub and 'dubtitles" for the Italian track. Raro's Radiance Films-distributed 1080p24 MPEG-4 AVC 1.85:1 widescreen Blu-ray comes from the same master with an improved encode over the single-layer VC-1 encode of the U.S. disc where the darkest blacks crushed. The U.K. encode retains the baked-in grading of the master which has its limitations being more than a decade old but the few blood red suggest that the rest of the subdued color scheme is deliberate. Shadow detail and blacks could be improved with a new scan – as evidenced by the newer 4K restorations of Di Leo's "milieu trilogy" – but the new encode is free of the blockiness evident on the earlier Blu-ray. 
Audio
The film can be viewed as either separate English or Italian versions – identical apart from the title sequences – with respective English and Italian DTS-HD Master Audio 2.0 mono tracks as well as English SDH or English subtitle translation. The dubbing of the English version was directed by Frank Von Kuegelgen and features the familiar voices of Pat Stark dubbing Boccardo, Carolyn De Fonseca dubbing a foxy journalist (Spasmo's Monica Monet), and Von Kuegelgen himself dubbing Merenda while the two Portuguese gun-runners sound like they were dubbed by guys doing Speedy Gonzalez impressions (or, at least, voice actors who borrowed from their repertoire of spaghetti western). 
Extras
New to the disc is am audio commentary by film critic Travis Woods who admittedly "waxes pretentious" about the film as Di Leo pushing the conventions of the genre as far as they can go – noting that his next film Loaded Guns added comedy which is usually indicative of the end of genre cycle – and that Merenda's flat performance is that of someone dead inside after selling out and that rewatching the film highlights the obligatory scenes as both concessions to the genre template and performative actions of corrupt social and political entities. He also discusses the differences between the film and William McGivern's source novel “Rogue Cop” and how the changes in adaptation worked for the better thematically. Two interviews have been carried over from the import 2012 Italian disc but are seemingly older since Di Leo died in 2003. In "Master of the Game" (24:58), Di Leo talks about his love of noir but starting out in westerns because they were in demand, stating that the distributors have more say in what projects get produced than even bigger producers (which Di Leo says is why Fellini moved onto television when his later films were not profitable). He also discusses his run-ins with authorities over his films – including the police in response to this film and the church on Brucia, Ragazzo, Brucia's portrayal of the female orgasm – and makes the connection between Shoot First, Die Later and the earlier Naked Violence – the latter which he does not regard as part of the polizziotesco genre – with their “humanized” police protagonists and the un-commercial choice of Pier Paolo Capponi in the lead as opposed to Guiliano Gemma or Franco Nero). He also contrasts his corrupt cop here with the neurotic protagonist of Elio Petri's Investigation of a Citizen Above Suspicion).  "The Second Round of the Game" (21:20) features he recollections of assistant director Lo Cascio and editor Giomini, as well as actor Merenda. Merenda reveals that he took the role because the part was more complex and ambiguous than some of the other roles he had taken before. Lo Cascio talks about his beginnings as an assistant under Di Leo, as well as the differences between Di Leo’s approaches to the genre and others. Giomini waxes on Di Leo's ability to cut out chunks of the film for pacing and fix it in the dubbing (often rewriting the script to smooth over the gaps). Giomini also discusses Di Leo's communist background and suggests that the well-to-do Di Leo inserted characters in his scripts to comment on the fascist tactics of the police as a way of keeping true to his ideals (in the case of this film, we have the chief of police that tells his officers to include a few hippies in their quota of arrests). Similar English and subtitled Italian theatrical trailers (3:21 each) are also included in 1080p. 
Packaging
The limited edition of 3,000 copies is presented in full-height Scanavo packaging and includes a booklet featuring new writing by Sam Moore (not provided for review).
Overall
Shoot First, Die Later may or may not be Fernando Di Leo's definitive statement of the Eurocrime genre but Raro Video's Radiance Films-curated U.K. Blu-ray is a nice upgrade to the earlier U.S. edition.
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