“I didn’t ask myself whether it was a fascist film or any crap like that,” Italian producer Dino De Laurentiis purports to have said in response to criticisms of 1974’s Death Wish: “I understood it was a story the public could identify with” [1]. Eight years after making that film, De Laurentiis returned to the vigilante genre with Fighting Back, a less successful effort directed by Lewis Teague, whose previous feature credit was 1980’s Alligator. Despite its disappointing box-office performance, Fighting Back pleasantly evinces the same concern as Death Wish with “a story the public could identify with” and rivals it as an exemplar from the heyday of the citizen-avenger action movie. Re-released on Blu-ray by Arrow Video last year – appropriately enough, on the Fourth of July – Fighting Back is a quintessentially American film deserving of rediscovery.
Opening with a montage of violence-related news reportage inspired by Sheldon Renan’s 1981 documentary The Killing of America, Fighting Back’s plot takes its inspiration from Newark vigilante Anthony Imperiale’s North Ward First Aid Squad and New Yorker Curtis Sliwa’s Guardian Angels, imagining the genesis of a similar group in the City of Brotherly Love. Whites are moving out of the Italian South Philadelphia neighborhood where John D’Angelo (Tom Skerritt) operates a deli advertising “The Best Italian ‘Hero’ in Town”. The local park has become a playground for vice merchants and violent crime is spiraling out of control. D’Angelo’s wife (Patti LuPone) is desperate to move after a harrowing encounter with a black pimp (Pete Richardson) causes her to have a miscarriage, but this incident, coupled with another in which a robber cuts a finger off his mother (Gina DeAngeles) to steal her wedding ring, sends D’Angelo over the edge and determines his quest for street justice.
Vince Morelli (Michael Sarrazin), a friend on the largely ineffectual police force, sympathizes and helps D’Angelo set up the Peoples Neighborhood Patrol, which promptly introduces itself to the community by busting up a sleazy bar that caters to the criminal element. Support for D’Angelo is overwhelmingly white, and the film makes no secret of the disproportionately black nature of the crime problem. Like the Reagan era itself, however, Fighting Back is both racist and embarrassed about it, resulting in somewhat muddled messaging. Jim Moody appears as Lester, a token black member of the vigilante group who serves as an alibi of sorts for D’Angelo. Clashing with this storytelling decision is the inclusion of Ivanhoe Washington (Yaphet Kotto), a black community organizer (possibly inspired by Amiri Baraka) who opposes the mission of the Peoples Neighborhood Patrol on the grounds that it victimizes impoverished blacks. For the target audience interested in vigilante action, Washington is an unlikable character whose social argument is uncompelling and whose refusal to help the Peoples Neighborhood Patrol presents him somewhat antagonistically. Nevertheless, the script does lend some credence to Washington’s critique of D’Angelo’s unconscious racism when the flawed hero is demonstrated to be overly hasty in assuming black responsibility for every crime. The resulting synthesis suggests that conscientious whites and select good blacks need to cooperate to get rid of the bad blacks and other criminals, regardless of race, who ruin things for everyone. Even so, the fact that Fighting Back’s crowd-satisfying climax is D’Angelo’s incendiary revenge against the black pimp who caused his wife’s miscarriage pretty well speaks for itself.
Typical for boutique home video purveyors these days, Arrow invited a pair of nakedly anti-white commentators – the sorts of assholes who capitalize “Black” and lower-case “white” – to offer their insights into the film in the form of essay contributions to the booklet included with the Blu-ray. For Rob Skvarla, for example, D’Angelo’s vengeance is “an act of domestic terrorism without consequences” and “Fighting Back is an effective film because it understands the people who make the streets unsafe – those who vote men like Frank Rizzo into power” [2]. The “Paul Kerseys and John D’Angelos of the world fight crime not through pursuing the unseen forces of capital that drive violence through white flight and disinvestment,” Skvarla complains, “but instead by killing the rapists, drug dealers, and muggers on the lowest rungs of civilization” [3] – because capitalism forces blacks to rob, rape, and murder after whites brutalize them by moving away, apparently. “Of course John denies he’s a bigot and to be fair, I think he’s not so much a bigot as he is conditioned by his culture to compartmentalize his racism,” writes the second essayist, Walter Chaw, with some perceptiveness: “Fighting Back in other words is more complicated than it appears to be as it struggles with its racism in exactly the same rationalizing, equivocal way as John” [4]. “The film ends with John winning the 5th Councilman District and a triumphant image of a gaggle of white kids having a snowball fight in the park recently cleared of its ‘undesirable’ elements,” Chaw continues his over-the-top assessment:
It’s a fascist outcome that suggests that power is self-righteously aligned in the manifest gentrification of minority spaces. You could say that showing something is advocating it, but I think Fighting Back is actually pretty clear about its message. John is repeatedly identified as a narcissist, a megalomaniac who makes other peoples’ pain his rationalization, and a full-blown violent racist with impulse control problems. He takes every offense as further justification for his worldview, and because he’s a white man, he’s rewarded for it. He’s Travis Bickle but now fully assimilated into polite society. He is the prototypical Reagan-era mainstream protagonist: emboldened by perverse religiosity and drunk on his own victim complex. He’s the monster. You can’t say we weren’t warned. [5].
What Chaw neglects to notice is that the movie was not made for him. D’Angelo’s hot-headedness and propensity to violence, while character flaws if judged by the standards of more conventionally upright movie heroes, are still relatably human qualities that endear him to the core audience of wronged and rightfully pissed-off white Americans whose cities had been trashed by integration. “You know how journalists are,” Fighting Back camera operator Daniele Nannuzzi confides:
One way or another, they want to attach a label to films. Sure enough, these films were also labeled to the point that the press called them ‘fascist films’. Films that promoted taking justice into one’s own hands. But they were nothing but films, actors, stories. So, what can you say? I’d say that what they [i.e., the vigilantes] were doing was right. Those people tried to clean up those places by themselves. But that’s against the law, I guess. At least if done by yourself. Still, it’s only a film. [6]
Given the collaborative and cumulative nature of its creation, it is difficult to assign individual responsibility for meanings in the film, but it is interesting to observe that, while Jews were not uninvolved, Fighting Back expresses a fundamentally Italian-American character. The screenplay, credited to Tom Hedley and David Z. Goodman, originated with Striking Back, a script by George Gallo that was explicitly about Newark vigilante Anthony Imperiale [7]. Arguably the most interesting aspect of the story is its celebration of an Italian-American solidarism transcending propriety and law. In addition to Morelli, the police officer who risks his career to join D’Angelo’s vigilance group, D’Angelo receives the blessing of mob don Donato (Peter Brocco), a pious Catholic, to go after a restauranteur who traffics heroin to the area’s youth. Dino De Laurentiis “liked to work with Italians,” recalls director Lewis Teague, who notes that Fighting Back’s cinematographer, Franco Di Giacomo, was Italian [8]. In addition to Di Giacomo and Nannuzzi, other notable Italian or Italian-American names among the crew are composer Piero Piccioni and producers Alex De Benedetti and Dino Conte, who, Teague reveals, “was connected in New York and New Jersey and at one point, especially when we were thinking we might shoot some of it in Newark because the Tony Imperiale story took place in Newark, it was felt Dino Conte would be very helpful with unions, like Teamsters and stuff” [9].
Fighting Back’s crime-induced miscarriage plot point is especially ironic in view of Conte’s 1965 conviction in connection with Genovese crime family associate Salvatore Granello’s attempt “to muscle into the juke box business in Nassau” by threatening “juke box czar” Irving Holzman and demanding $25,000 and a quarter of Holzman’s profits. “According to authorities, they threatened Holzman with a beating, broke into his home June 8, 1964, and pistol-whipped his wife,” New York’s Daily News reported: “They are also accused of telephoning his pregnant daughter and threatening to ‘kick her stomach in’” [10]. Nassau County District Attorney William Cahn described Conte as “basically nothing but a hoodlum worshiper who likes to hang around in the privy of the underworld” [11]. Conte, who purports to have been Granello’s bodyguard prior to the latter’s murder in 1970, was convicted again in 1972, this time for his involvement in an airport theft ring [12]. Styling himself “D. Constantine Conte” when he embarked upon a new career as a film producer with 1982’s Conan the Barbarian, he protested that he was not the same person as the Dino Conte with mob connections when he came under investigation by the LAPD’s organized crime intelligence division in 1983. “I’m not part of no Mafia,” he told a reporter: “Ask anybody you want in this town; I haven’t done nothing to nobody” [13].
Anthony Imperiale, meanwhile, whose defiance of black radicalism and violence during the sixties inspired Fighting Back, was unimpressed by the finished film, as he disclosed to Yvonne Chilik of the Associated Press not long after its release:
Imperiale, who began the AP interview by sprinkling holy water around his office to get rid of “bad omens”, said he has a newly strengthened Roman Catholic faith that makes him more reserved and more compassionate.
“I got religious a few years ago,” he said. “I go to church every morning and I read the Bible. But I didn’t become one of those super holy-rollers … Christ’s disciples were tough guys.”
Compassion, says Imperiale, is what separates his life from that of John D’Angelo in Fighting Back, a movie on vigilantes that Imperiale originally thought would be based on his life. But he only appears in a brief film clip […]
“That’s not Tony Imperiale’s story,” he said, adding that the movie “lost the concept of what my life is all about.” […]
New Jersey’s perennial political candidate says he bought back the rights to his story and is working toward a movie that will accurately portray his political career.
In 1971, Imperiale was elected as an independent to the [New Jersey General] Assembly. In 1974, he was elected as an independent to the state Senate. He lost a re-election bid to the Senate in 1978, but was elected again to the Assembly in 1979 as a Republican. He ran unsuccessfully for the Republican gubernatorial nomination last year.
Always, he has been controversial.
“I have dynamite in my car, people have shot at us … and I get threatened about three times a month,” he said.
His Park Avenue home is surrounded by a 6-foot high fence, an electric gate and a patrolling German shepherd. Inside the house, which is wired with two burglar alarm systems, two Siberian huskies roam the hallways. A 300-piece gun collection, including 150 rifles, is guarded by yet another barrier: if anyone breaks into the den through the window, tear gas cannisters would explode automatically.
Imperiale says he installed the system, patterned after the way German officers protected themselves during World War II, to “protect my family.” [14]
AP’s 1999 obituary for Imperiale indicated a softening of his demeanor late in life:
Suffering from kidney failure in 1995, Mr. Imperiale said he saw the Virgin Mary kneeling beside his hospital bed and decided to change his ways.
“All my life, I had teeth and a heart, but I only showed my teeth,” he said in a published report describing the incident. “I told her, from now on, I was going to show the gentleness of my heart.”
In the remaining years of his life, Mr. Imperiale did work to mend division in Newark, said Mayor Sharpe James. [15]
Today non-Hispanic whites make up only about 10% of Newark’s population [16], and last year the city’s current mayor, Ras Baraka – son of Imperiale’s old nemesis, Amiri Baraka – welcomed a new Harriet Tubman monument to replace a statue of Imperiale’s fellow Italian, Christopher Columbus, that was removed in 2020 [17]. The fate of Imperiale’s Newark justifies Daniele Nannuzzi’s assessment that the innocuous vigilante genre of the seventies and eighties consisted of “nothing but films, actors, stories.” The real and effective “fighting back” has yet to materialize on a significant scale.
Rainer Chlodwig von K.
Rainer is the author of Drugs, Jungles, and Jingoism.
Endnotes
[1] Ditum, Nathan. “Remembering Dino – The Key Films of Producer Dino De Laurentiis”: https://archive.ph/V283B
[2] Skvarla, Rob. “To Live and Fight in Philadelphia: Crime in Lewis Teague’s Fighting Back and the Vigilante Film”. Fighting Back [Blu-ray]. Hertfordshire: Arrow Films, 2023 [collector’s booklet], p. 12.
[3] Ibid., p. 8.
[4] Chaw, Walter. “Fear and Loathing in Philadelphia”. Fighting Back [Blu-ray]. Hertfordshire: Arrow Films, 2023 [collector’s booklet], p. 22.
[5] Ibid., pp. 22-23.
[6] “Danny-Cam” (special feature). Fighting Back [Blu-ray]. Hertfordshire: Arrow Films, 2023.
[7] “Enough Is Enough!” (special feature). Fighting Back [Blu-ray]. Hertfordshire: Arrow Films, 2023.
[8] Ibid.
[9] Ibid.
[10] “Juke Box Plays Jail Jive for 2”. Daily News (December 11, 1965), p. 1B.
[11] Pollock, Dale; and Ellen Farley. “Film Producer Denies Link to Mafia”. The Buffalo News (June 5, 1983), p. A-14.
[12] Ibid.
[13] “Moviemaker Is Under Investigation”. The Charlotte Observer (June 4, 1983), p. 20A.
[14] Chilik, Yvonne. “State Guns Down Imperiale’s Job”. The [Central New Jersey] Home News (July 13, 1982), p. 4.
[15] “Former State Senator, Newark Councilman Anthony Imperiale”. [Morristown] Daily Record (December 28, 1999), p. A14.
[16] https://www.census.gov/quickfacts/fact/table/newarkcitynewjersey/PST045222
[17] Kersey, Paul. “They Will Tear Down Every Statue to White Men in America: Columbus Statue in Newark, NJ Replaced with Harriet Tubman Monument”. The Unz Review (March 12, 2023): https://www.unz.com/sbpdl/they-will-tear-down-every-statue-to-white-men-in-america-columbus-statue-in-newark-nj-replaced-with-harriet-tubman-monument/