rodrig58 This film is obviously inspired by A Fistful of Dollars directed by Sergio Leone. Henry Silva is not by far what is Clint Eastwood but, he is doing his best. Andrea Bianchi, the director, the same, is not bad. The other actors are also at height. True, the whole movie is a series of clichés and deja-vu but, even so, it manages to captivate, you can follow it to the end, it's not boring. The music signed by Sante Maria Romitelli is very good. The cinematography of Carlo Carlini is also good. And, the presence of the sex symbol Barbara Bouchet(who looks like a twin sister of Jill Ireland, once the wife of Charles Bronson) is the hot spice of everything, her white panties have a role by itself...

jrd_73 Andrea Bianchi the director of the gory zombie film Burial Ground and the sleazy giallo Strip Nude for Your Killer turns his subtle (ha ha) hand to the Italian crime film with Cry of the Prostitute. It's Yojimbo time! The feuding between two warring families in rural Italy has become so fierce that the heat is coming down on the big families in Rome. Henry Silva is a gun for hire sent in to stop the fighting. He does this by playing the two gangsters against each other, offering his services to first one and then the other. Bianchi provides more gore than expected for the genre but none of it is overly convincing: a fake severed head, a band-saw mishap, and a dead child that looks, well, like a mannequin (and the camera lingers over it!). The adorable Barbara Bouchet appears playing a washed up former prostitute who has turned to drink. She wears heavy make-up and looks less than flattering. Nonetheless, I was glad to have her. Silva was fine as well. There isn't much here to praise and technically the film is less assured than many others in the genre. Fans might like it more than I did though.

lazarillo Leave it to Italian sleazemeister Andreas Bianchi (here co-directing with his brother)to take a brutally violent and borderline misogynist genre like the Italian "polizieschi" and actually up the ante considerably. This movie begins with drug dealers trying to smuggle drugs into Italy sewed up in the body of a dead child(!), and it only gets more gratuitously violent from there. A brutal gang war is going between a traditional Italian mafia family and an Americanized godfather who has been deported back to Italy. Injected into this conflict is another Italian-American gangster, the protagonist (Henry Silva), and he begins to play the two rivals off against each other in the style of "A Fistful of Dollars" or "Yojimbo".Silva's character might seem like the good guy, or at least the kind of anti-hero Clint Eastwood played in "Fistful" and other Westerns (and later in "Dirty Harry" which was a big influence on the Italian polizieschi). But the Silva character himself is quite psychotic when it comes to women, specifically the masochistic prostitute/mistress of the American gangster (played by Barbara Bouchet). The first time they meet he violently sodomizes her. And when she comes back for more he beats her with a belt. Now I have to admit the description I read somewhere of a naked Bouchet being whipped by a belt did not exactly dissuade me from seeing this, but it's not an accurate one. She is not naked (at least in that scene) and he literally beats her to a bloody pulp. Even her boyfriend, who otherwise is content to throw the promiscuous girl at his erstwhile partner, is horrified by the brutal beating and vows revenge.This scene squanders any goodwill toward Silva's character (which may have been the intention, I don't know), but also toward the film itself--it's pretty hard to take even for someone like me accustomed to the casual misogyny of the genre. It certainly doesn't help that the actress is Barbara Bouchet, who along with Edwige Fenech and Rosalba Neri, was (and still is) one of the most popular European exploitation actresses of the era (although this probably would have been only marginally more palatable if it had been some anonymous Euro-bimbo). To its credit this movie at least can't be accused of glorifying any of its gangster characters like some other "polizieschi" tended to do. Still it might be a little bit too much for many viewers.

Luca-Canali! Personally, I didn't think that this film was too bad. I have seen tons of Italian crime / mafia films of similar ilk and there is definitely a hell of a lot worse out there!. I would advise those reared on Hollywood blockbusters and popcorn to steer well clear, but for those of us who enjoy these cheap and cheerful Italian productions with their inane dialogue and gratuitous violence and nudity then 'Cry Of A Prostitute' may well appeal. The mighty Henry Silva plays Tony Aniante who yo-yo's back and forth between two rival families in Sicily, playing both hands until he sees the moment to take the initiative. Yes, we've seen it all before but for me , the film is all about Henry Silva. His fans will be pleased to know that he gets maximum screen time in this one and has at least one classic scene, where he is being taunted by a couple of hoods in a café. One of them pours hot coffee over his expensive leather shoes and all hell breaks loose ("Clean my shoes motherf*****!"). Barbara Bouchet is as memorable as ever as the slutty, bored 'wife' of one of the mafia dons. Best scene has to be where she is flirting with Henry Silva by simulating fellatio on a banana at the dinner table... The action scenes are clumsy in places but fairly bloody (lots of slo-mo bursting blood squibs!) and the score is pretty good too. Right, now I'm off to watch Bianchi's mutli-million dollar epic 'Nights Of Terror'....