Fernando Di Leo’s La mala ordina (1972) follows two American mafia hitmen (Henry Silva and Woody Strode) out to kill a smalltime pimp (Mario Adorf) in Milan. But the smalltime pimp proves harder to kill than anyone thought and the bodies are piling up. The killings are fruitless and senseless; an exercise in nihilism that Di Leo’s crime films are known for.
There is a poetry to the way Di Leo stages and photographs violence. The kineticism of the performers is matched by the camera as it swings, pivots and swirls around the mayhem. This is violence as chaos; an eruption of misdirected energy that is just as likely to end a target as it is too wound an innocent bystander. These bursts of cinematic movement reflect cinematographically Di Leo’s nihilism.
La mala ordina finds Di Leo at his most bitter. He sees the student movements of the left as indulgent and useless while on the right he sees police and gangsters as part of the same problem. Power in a film by Di Leo is won through intimidation and fear, not intelligence and compassion. La mala ordina is a film of massacre after massacre that finds absolutely no redemption for anyone. There are only the dead and the survivors.
Yet there is a humor to Di Leo’s bloody mayhem. Sometimes there is a kitten underfoot or a soccer statue in frame that suggests a world beyond what is on screen. This reminds the viewer how absurd and how chaotic life is, even for gangsters. There is a humorous truth to having a shootout with a kitten underfoot. Even in such cold violent moments characters can suddenly be warm if only for a second or two.
But it is a man’s world in Di Leo’s cinema. The women in a Di Leo film are commodities that exist to bring out a new dimension of a male character or to arouse the spectator with an objectified body. Di Leo’s camera records women as the sum of sexualized parts, reducing them to breasts, legs and bottoms. Women serve the story and the spectator without any agency or urgency to call their own.
La mala ordina is a masterpiece of its genre but it won’t be for everyone. The misogyny and gratuitous violence might turn off some viewers. But for those with a taste for vintage cinema La mala ordina is a must-see picture. It’s a career highlight for Di Leo as a stylist and provocateur.
