Live Like a Cop, Die Like a Man (Uomini si Nasce, Poliziotti si Muore, 1976) was directed by Ruggero Deodato, before he acquired a reputation in international film circles for wretched excess with his notorious gut-muncher Cannibal Holocaust (1980), which became something of a cause célèbre due to its inclusion of genuine animal slaughter. A former assistant director for neorealist filmmaker Roberto Rossellini, Deodato had cut his teeth in the Italian film industry as an efficient journeyman and came to this project on the heels of his successful erotic thriller Waves of Lust (Una ondata di piacere, 1974). Working with a script by Fernando di Leo (a fine director in his own right of such poliziotteschi classics as The Italian Connection with Henry Silva and Woody Strode and Caliber 9 with Mario Adorf and Frank Wolff), Deodato torques Live Like a Cop, Die Like a Man to the black comic level of Richard Rush's Freebie and the Bean (1974), although Gordon Parks' The Super Cops (1973) also comes to mind in a tale of renegade detectives upholding the letter of the law by any means necessary.
Marc Porel and Ray Lovelock play Alfredo and Antonio, borderline sociopaths inducted into a special squad of the Roman police force and charged with hitting crime where it lives. Operating in anonymity out of a secret headquarters run by chief Aldolfo Celi (a decade past his turn as Sean Connery's one-eyed nemesis in Thunderball) and acting on the cues of paid informants, Alfredo and Antonio are committed to stopping crime as it happens... and in some cases even before it happens, as when they mercilessly gun down a gang of stick-up men on their way to a heist. Barely held together by a throughline concerned with the squad's investigation of mobster Renato Salvatori (popular leading man of films by Rossellini, Luchino Visconti, Vittorio de Sica and Costa-Gavras), Live Like a Cop, Die Like a Man mostly jumps from one outlandish setpiece to another as Alfredo and Antonio take extreme measures to maintain a semblance of law and order. Neorealismo is effectively nonexistent, with the partners crashing a hostage situation astride a motorcycle and engaging in a ménage à trois with the capo's Swedish girlfriend while the villain stands ready to push down the T-plunger of a megaton of cop-killing explosives.
The absence of an American ringer in Live Like a Cop, Die Like a Man is likely the reason why it never enjoyed theatrical distribution in the States. (Even domestic cop films were on the wane in the second half of the decade.) The film's rarity, and the fact that interest in poliziotteschi in this country is traditionally low, makes the DVD release from Raro Video welcome; the care and respect Raro has put into the product makes it doubly so. Remastered from the original 35mm negative, the anamorphic transfer is excellent, with vivid chromatics - blood spatters are profondo rosso! Soundtrack options run to Italian and English dubs; the English translation is British-inflected, with snitches not squealing but "grassing" and nickel and dime racetrack betters called "punters." Raro offers an overlong making-of featurette, with testimony from Deodato, Lovelock and others. While Lovelock poo-poos rumors of onscreen competition between himself and the late Porel (who died in Morocco in 1983) and reminisces about contributing original songs to the film, Deodato discusses the gnarly eye gouging scene and its influence in the ear amputation from Sergio Corbucci's Django (1966), as well as the aborted plans for a sequel. Raro rounds out the complement of extras with a loop of Deodato's earlier commercial work.
For more information about Live Like a Cop, Die Like a Man, visit Raro Video. To order Live Like a Cop, Die Like a Man, go to TCM Shopping.
by Richard Harland Smith
