Il Conto e' Chiuso: The Last Round

Revenge, southern style.

What do you get when you sum a mysterious martial artist, a poor man with a blind daughter and two rival mafia families? you get a fucking masterpiece! that's what you get!, a fucking underrated obscure cinema piece everyone should add to their "best of" list as soon as possible.

Il Conto e' Chiuso (something like, "the bill is paid" or "we're even") is  a 1976 action packed Italian mafia thriller directed by Stelvio Massi & written by Piero Regnoli. Known in English as "The Last Round", I guarantee you will love this film as much as we do. Besides, Leonora Fani is in it in a minor role that shows her acting skills in full.

A war veteran from southern Italy (played by the World Middle Weight boxing champion for over 7 years, Mr. Carlos Monzon) comes to a northern industrial town looking for work and gets tangled up with two rival clans of mafiosi. The plot of this sounds like another knock-off of "Yojimbo" (the Japanese film that inspired "A Fistful of Dollars" and any number of other spaghetti Westerns and Italian crime thrillers), but it's a little bit different in that the hero turns out to have a very personal vendetta against the leader of one of the rival mafia clans (Luc Merenda) and is not just a pure mercenary. Of course, there's a lot of stuff going on before you tell this is a revenge film. 

Fear the worker's union fist!

I love the sound of a firing gun.

First, our working class hero (see what I did there?, a John Lennon reference) Marco Russo (Carlos Monzon) arrives just in the nick of the time, seconds before a group of abused workers are viciously fired by Beny Manzetti (Gianni Dei), who happens to be the second in command in the Manzetti mafia family. Marco is a man of justice, so he uses his bare fists to do justice in no time. This evidently, pisses the mobsters off so they catch him off guard and get rid of him in the outer area of the city. Once our hero wakes up, he meets Nina (Leonora Fani) a  blind girl who offers him to stay at her place, and no, she's not offering exploitative derivative sex as you may be thinking, she's a good righteous girl. Later, she introduces her father, Sapienza (Giampiero Albertino), to our one man army. Casually, Nina & Sapienza will end up being the only friends Marco has in the film. 

Second, Marco is looking for a job. For reasons unexplained he seems to be unemployed and completely out of money. Coincidentally, the fight he had with the lowlife mobsters, called the attention of Rico Manzetti (Luc Merenda), the real deal of the family, who happens to be looking for more capable men to help him with very illegal businesses, so as soon as he's back in town, he's granted a hitman job. In the past, Marco served as a soldier during the infamous Vietnam war, so he's more than proficient in martial arts, knives & fire guns. 

Marco is in trouble dad.

You're going to work for the mafia, I can feel it Marco.

Third, Marco is not only a fantastic fighter, he's also a fantastic negotiator, and he's here to negotiate for himself and himself alone. The Manzettis have a long dispute with rival family, The Belmondos, you see, they both want to control the city but each group has equal force, so a gentlemen agreement is the only way out. However, Marco knows how to play his cards, so he uses this agreement for his own benefit. From then on, the film becomes an action packed revenge tale that keeps on getting better scene after scene.

Stelvio Massi is considered one of the greatest directors in the Italian crime genre. The Last Round's producer is Gabriel Crisanti who was responsible for a series of notoriously sleazy exploitation flicks in the late 70's/early 80's--"Giallo a Venezia", "Malabimba", "Burial Ground", and "Patrick Lives Again" among others. In addition,  Mariangela Giordano, Gianni Dei, and our muse Leonora Fani who've worked with Crisanti in other films, are all part of The Last Round's cast.

I'm rich and you're not, fuck you!

Shoot 'em down!

Whenever someone utters the name of Leonora Fani, they are instantly reminded of the sleaziest films she's worked in. Fani did it all in the 70's. She played a coming of age adolescent discovering sex, she masturbated in front of a kid (and even gave him a blowjob), she fell in love with a perv who drove her crazy, she played a girl who was into bestiality, and not to mention she was raped in several roles. Nevertheless, Il Conto e' Chiuso can easily be described as one of her few PG rated roles. When I watched this film for the first time I was like "great, she's playing an innocent blind girl, time to show some real acting skills" As a matter of fact, I for one, think Leonora Fani differs from most Italian sexploitation starlets because she can truly act. Nina's role, although minor, compared to other characters in the film, is a very challenging task. Playing a blind girl, is not that easy and believe you me, she kills it. Unfortunately, just as are you about to say "Yes, she's not naked in this one, she's only here for acting skills" you're reminded she was a sexploitation starlet known for being either fucked or raped in almost every movie she was in.

Mariangela Giordano, another Italian sexploitation regular, is also in the movie playing Rico's submissive wife, and Luisa Maneri plays her daughter Lisa. At the time The Last Round was filmed, she allegedly was 16 years old, thus making her topless sunbathing scene rather controversial. To make matters worse, Rico Manzetti (Luc Merenda's character) is sick and tired of his old wife, so he sends her into oblivion to die of starvation, while her under aged daughter is forced to take her place, if you know what I mean. In addition, the Argentinian TV star, Susana Giménez, has a minor role as a stripper and girlfriend of mafia boss Bobo Belmondo (Mario Brega) So, the gal value this movie has, increases by four.

Sunbathing.

Susana Giménez, Argentinian TV legend.

Although pretty much forgotten, The Last Round is a good example of a familiar story made fresh by the quality of its execution, as a stranger drifts into a decaying Italian industrial looking to settle an old score. But this violent modern-day (well, 1976) poliziotteschi is closer to Dashiell Hammett's Red Harvest than the first two films it inspired, Yojimbo and Fistful of Dollars, set in its own Italian Poisonville divided between two rival gangs that he soon sets against each other. Surprisingly, despite being directed by the sometimes more adequate than inspired Stelvio Massi, it's shot with striking visual imagination and remarkably fluid camera-work from Franco Delli Colli. The two leads are impressive too, with Luc Merenda a wonderfully effective and dapper villain and undefeated middleweight champion boxer and offscreen wife-beater and murderer Carlos Monzon a surprisingly effective leading man in the mould of a young Charles Bronson.

The movie was officially released in 2005 by NoShame on a fully functional Region 1 DVD. The release also featured an extra disc with the original soundtrack written by the legendary Spaghetti Western composer Luis Bacalov. Unfortunately, the DVD is currently out of print. 

Here's the movie trailer: