There was a time not so long ago when Michele Soavi was the golden child of Italian genre cinema. The man apprenticed at the feet of the greats working with the likes of Argento, D'Amato and Fulci before striking out on his own and building a library of his own acclaimed titles. But at the height of his popularity following the release of what is surely his masterpiece – Dellamorte Dellamore released on these shores as Cemetery Man – Soavi entered into a five year self-imposed exile to focus on his family, particularly his ailing son. By the time Soavi re-emerged ready to resume his career, however, the Italian film industry had changed drastically, largely falling apart over that span, and from 1999 until 2006 - when he made a return to Italian theater screens - Soavi has largely filled his working hours shooting projects for television.
One of those made for TV projects 2001's Uno Bianca is a two part film based on the true story of a notorious crime ring that plagued Italy for more than seven years, killing twenty four and wounding over a hundred more over that span. How did they get away with it for so long? How did they evade capture? They were thorough, immaculate, well trained and so very, very clean that for the first years of the investigation all that police knew was that they pulled their heists in a white Fiat Uno, from which the gang derived their name.
A compelling bland of fact and fiction – the gang is authentic, the methods used to bring them down punched up a bit to juice the entertainment factor – Uno Bianca is based on the book written by the two cops who brought down the actual gang and was reportedly made despite death threats against the film's producers issued by the actual gangsters. Kim Rossi Stuart stars as a young cop in a sleepy sea side town who has an ideal life and a child on the way until a day off refinishing a boat with his co-workers is interrupted by an explosion nearby. The Uno Bianca gang has struck the town, moving away from their regular hold ups in favor of an extortion scheme. The cops set up a sting operation that goes badly wrong and with one killed and another seriously wounded it is up to the two survivors to fight against a system blinded by bureaucracy and bring the gang down themselves. In real life this evidently involved a year and a half long stake out, in the film it involves deep cover infiltration.
In the early going the made for TV roots are fairly evident. Soavi plays things straight and the film could easily be mistaken for any one of a number of similarly themed efforts. But, Soavi being who he is, that is not the case for long. While there are very few stylistic flourishes to tip people off that this is by the director of Cemetery Man Soavi is undeniably a master of suspense. As the film progresses he subtly picks up the pace, the camera gradually becoming more fluid, until by the end of the first part – the film is split over two DVDs to match its broadcast origins – the tension rises to an undeniable peak as the heroes come to understand the true nature of what they're up against. And once the tension swells it never again releases, the entire second part of the film playing out as a nerve wracking game of cat and mouse. If you are looking for geysers of blood or a series of raging gun battles you will be disappointed, the film is too respectful of its roots to stray too far away from a realistic approach, but Soavi takes his limited budget and builds a compelling story driven by well layered characters.
While NoShame's DVD release is still very good it does not quite live up to the ridiculously high standards they have generally set for themselves. Image quality is excellent but for some perplexing reason they have presented the film in a letterboxed 1.66:1 rather than giving it an anamorphic transfer. Each of the two discs contains various special features – interviews on disc one, behind the scenes reels on disc two – but all play primarily like EPK material rather than in depth analysis or discussion and, unfortunately, Soavi himself does not factor into any of them in any significant fashion. The strongest of the bonuses is the enclosed booklet which, in typical NoShame fashion, delivers a wealth of information about both the film itself and all of the principal players. Once again NoShame proves here that no other label does a better job of educating their audience and placing films in context than they do.
Uno Bianca is something of a conflicted release. Most who find it will do so because of Soavi's earlier work, particularly Dellamorte Dellamore, but this is so far away from his early cinema work in theme and style that it's difficult to believe it was made by the same man. There are, however, enough vintage Soavi flashes to comfort the faithful over the initial time it will take to convince them that his growing body of crime films – he's done several others for television and his recent return to cinemas also falls into this genre – are not without their own charms. As for me, I'm just happy he's still out there and still working.