Gian Maria Volonté

This Palme d’Or winner at Cannes 1972 is a searing portrayal of factory life. Directed by Elio Petri and starring Gian Maria Volonté, who plays a worker whose injury triggers a political awakening. With sharp cinematography and a haunting Morricone score, the film is a cornerstone of Italian militant cinema and labor critique.

The story of two anarchists who were charged and unfairly tried for murder when it was really for their political convictions.

A mysterious young American joins a gang of marauders led by the fearsome El Chuncho in a series of savage attacks to steal weapons.

An engrossing, Academy Award winning Italian film about a powerful police chief who murders his mistress, plants phony evidence and makes an anonymous call reporting the crime. The police unearth clues which point at the chief, but ignore them due to his stature.

In this classic, truly great spaghetti western, a keen, quick-witted bounty hunter and his fierce rival follow the bloody trail of a murderous outlaw.

The vagabond, gunslinging Man With No Name employs his wits to stir up an old vendetta between the two crime families that corrupted San Miguel.

A womanizing author is lured to a mansion by an older woman under the guise of working as a librarian, but the truth is far different.

During the 1960s Luciano Lutring committed more than one hundred armed robberies in Italy and on the French Riviera. To the media he was the ‘machine gun soloist’, a name he’d earned as he kept his weapon in a violin case. To the public he was a Robin Hood figure, one who only targeted the wealthy, stealing more than 35 billion lire during his criminal career. Wake Up and Kill was the logical extension of such fame. It became the first feature to commit Lutring’s story to celluloid, shooting having begun mere months after his eventual arrest. Capitalising on the breakthrough success of his performance in French television’s The Adventures of Robinson Crusoe, Robert Hoffmann is perfect as Lutring, bringing just the right amount of charisma and youthful exuberance to his first major big screen role. Directed by Carlo Lizzani (Requiescant), scored by Ennio Morricone, penned by the future screenwriter of Investigation of a Citizen Above Suspicion, and featuring that film’s star, Gian Maria Volonté, in a key supporting role, Wake Up and Kill’s true-crime thrills serve as an enthralling dry run for the poliziotteschi movies that would follow a few years later.

Andrea Artusi (Ugo Tognazzi) begins to have doubts about the loyalty of his beautiful wife, Maria Grazia (Claudia Cardinale). When doubt becomes an obsession, his behavior becomes completely crazy, stalking her relentlessly. Another great success of the Italian director Antonio Pietrangeli, also starring Bernard Blier, Salvo Randone and a cameo from Gian Maria Volonté.