Street People

Studio: Kino Lorber Studio Classics

Apr 16, 2020 Web Exclusive By Matthew Roe

I have seen many films starring Roger Moore and Stacy Keach, with my favorites being The Wild Geese (1978) and Batman: Mask of the Phantasm (1993), respectively. While I wouldn’t consider myself a diehard fan of either actor, I recognize their unique swagger and charm which made them such household names. But here we have an American International entry into the eurocrime genre which pairs the two together, and that pretty much explains all of what you’re going to get. Street People has bitsy flashes of intrigue, but is more or less what anyone could come to expect from a typical 70s movie involving crime jaunting around Europe.

An ancient cross being transported from its home in Sicily to a cathedral in San Francisco is discovered to be secretly stuffed with a huge stash of pure heroin. After a trio of transportation workers are murdered and the cross’s cargo is stolen by a band of opportunist bandits, a local criminal kingpin calls in his attorney Ulisse (Moore) to solve the situation. Ulisse turns to his friend and getaway driver Charlie Hanson (Keach), and they traipse across two continents to find the thieves and the merchandise. This straightforward story marches to the beat of a straightforward formula: an international chase with smartasses and beautiful women leads to a bloody final confrontation to determine the rightful dragon guarding the golden hoard.

Maurizio Lucidi has long been regarded as a premiere cult filmmaker of Italian genre pictures throughout the 60s and 70s, though I primarily know him as editor for Orson Welles’ unfinished 1972 feature adaptation of Don Quixote. In other words, this is the only film I have seen by Lucidi, and little urges me to continue through his filmography. While Moore and Keach have visible chemistry and they work well off one another on screen, the overall experience with the characters is tedious and so formulaic it can be hard to remain conscious during the final act of the movie. True, this could be more attributed to the barely focused screenplay penned by way too many people (six are credited), but Lucidi doesn’t do much with the material in any thematic or aesthetic sense to make it a unique experience.

The largest standout aspect of Street People is certainly the musical score by Luis Enriquez Bacalov, full of rolling baselines and fluttering wind instruments which came to hallmark this era in Italian film history. That and the fact that this movie is very evidently dubbed into English, like all international releases at the time. While fans of these kinds of genre films from this era will probably find a bunch to enjoy through this film’s 92-minute runtime, I have seen enough of these kinds of pictures to easily lose its more minute details in the shuffle. There just isn’t enough to make the movie all that memorable, especially when features like Duccio Tessari’s No Way Out (1973) and Ruggero Deodato’s Live Like a Cop, Die Like a Man (1976) use similar elements far more effectively.

However, this didn’t stop the marquee appeal of both Moore and Keach in the same film, so Kino Lorber has decided to release the film on Blu-ray for home consumption. The new 2k mastering of the print is buttressed by a videoed interview with Keach, a radio spot for the original release, and the original theatrical trailer. While collectors of the filmographies of either the film’s stars or its makers will see value in this release and have a fun time revisiting this work, there isn’t enough offered here to justify the asking price.

Though not a terrible film by any particular stretch, Street People also plays itself a little too safe to ever be considered a major standout in a time when Italian cinema was stretching all boundaries of filmic convention.

(www.klstudioclassics.com/product/view/id/6441)

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