Gian Maria Volontè leads a gang of thieves in Carlo Lizzani’s dynamic 1968 thriller that set the gritty tone for the following decade’s Italian crime noirs.

A one-time collaborator with neo-realist master Roberto Rossellini, the Oscar-nominated Italian filmmaker Carlo Lizzani (later director of the Venice Film Festival) delivered a defining moment in the poliziotteschi genre with this down and dirty, cinéma vérité-inspired thriller set in the seedy Milan underworld.

Tomas Milian plays a detective on the trail of a gang of merciless bandits, led by Spaghetti Western star Gian Maria Volontè (A Fistful of Dollars, For a Few Dollars More), in a story based on a real-life robbery gone wrong that took place in Milan in 1967. Mixing raw documentary style with violent action flourishes, Lizzani depicts a modern Italy rife with gangsters, gambling and prostitution, setting the stage for the renaissance of the crime film in the decade to follow. Bandits in Milan was selected for the Cannes Film Festival in 1968, before the year’s tumultuous events put an end to the festival.