The Italian Job: Crime Busters (1976)

We all of us have guilty pleasures - for the likes of Max Clifford and Stuart Hall it is sexually abusing young women.  Mine are more modest, one of them is watching Terence Hill and Bud Spencer films.  Never heard of them?  Where were you in the seventies?  Despite their anglicised names, Hill and Spencer are Italian actors with careers stretching back to the early sixties.  They were first paired in a trilogy of straight spaghetti westerns in the late sixties, but found international fame when they appeared in the comedy spaghetti western Trinity is My Name and its sequel, Trinity is Still My Name.  Further pairings followed, all following the template established by the Trinity films, but increasingly using contemporary settings and international venues.  They always played more or less the same characters: Hill is a smart-arsed hustler, never as clever as he thinks, with an acrobatic fighting style, whose schemes inevitably drag him and his reluctant co-conspirator Spencer into conflict with crooks, big game hunters the police, secret agents and the like.  Spencer is always the big man of few words, with the fighting style of a bulldozer, who sports a beard and a bad temper and is usually proven to be somewhat smarter than Hill in the end, just less ambitious.

I must admit that I hadn't seen one of their films in a good many years, until I stumbled across the English-language version of Crime Busters on YouTube.  Shot in Florida, this 1976 entry in their canon is pretty typical of their output.  This time around Hill and Spencer are, respectively, an unemployed sailor and longshoreman, who can't get work thanks to the local mob's stranglehold on the docks, so turn to petty crime and, through a series of unlikely events, end up joining the local police force.  As ever, the first twenty minutes or so are taken up with the two meeting, falling foul of the mobsters, both individually, then together, trashing several cars and beating up numerous hoodlums in the process.  Naturally, as cops, in between trying to get sacked in order to avoid their notice period if they resign, they once again get involved with the mobsters and, through luck more than judgement, end up breaking up their drug running ring.  Whilst they are clearly incompetent, the running joke is that their boss is even more incompetent and consequently thinks that Hill is a genius.  As with all Hill and Spencer films, the plot, such as it is, exists purely as a device for manoeuvring them into a series of increasingly violent and chaotic brawls with various bad guys.  These are always played for laughs and are extremely well choreographed.  Crime Busters features three set piece brawls, all of increasing scale, one against a gang of youths in a café, another against a street gang in a football stadium and climaxes with the big brawl at the bowling alley and pool hall used by the villains as their base.

Italian made, with extensive location filming in Florida, Crime Busters only features one actual American actor - David Huddlestone as the police Captain - with the rest of the cast being dubbed Italians.  Also featured, in a sympathetic role and the closest thing to romantic interest you'll see in these movies, is Italian sexploitation favourite Laura Gemser.  She keeps her clothes on this time.  Oh, and writer/director E B Clucher is actually Enzo Barboni.  As I say, this is pretty typical of their output - an undemanding knockabout action comedy (but with an exceedingly irritating musical score) probably aimed at twelve year old boys. and the twelve year old in me still enjoys it on a mindless level. In their day Hill and Spencer were massive international stars, both together and individually.  At the height of their popularity in the seventies they even had imitators, in the form of 'Michael Colby' and Paul Smith, who were first paired in the spaghetti western Carambola and then went on to make their own series of films playing essentially the same characters as Hill and Spencer: smart arsed hustler and bad tempered big man with a beard.  Both Hill and Spencer are still around and still active, mainly on Italian TV.  Sadly their films don't seem to turn up on TV here in the UK much, although, as some were distributed by Columbia, now part of Sony,  I live in hope that some could turn up on Movies4Men, whose content is drawn from Sony's film and TV library.