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All Luciano (Robert Hoffmann) is is a dairy worker, but this is a job that doesn't fulfill him one bit ... so when he meets night club singer Yvonne (Lisa Gastoni) at a fancy club, he pretends he's something bigger and in the process spends more money on her than he can hope to ever afford - so he picks up an ax for a quick grab-and-run robbery at a jeweller, and he also steals a car to impress her. It works out fine at first, and when she finds out the trutch about Luciano, she has already fallen in love with him, and he with her. Now she's had bad experiences with gangster Franco (Claudio Camaso) before meeting Luciano, which is why she wants to dissuade Luciano from his life of crime, but encouraged by his initial successes, Luciano plans more and more daring heists, and the fact that he soon proves himself superior to Franco, who time and again tries to get him in return for stealing his girl makes Luciano almost cocky ...

Now true, Luciano's crimes are all on the small-frye side but something about them and their daring appeals to the media, and he becomes a sort of elusive celebrity, so much so that he eventually has to relocate to France, then even the Netherlands ...

In the meantime, Inspector Moroni (Gian Maria Volontè) has tracked down Yvonne ... and sure, there's no charge at all against her - but he appeals to both her conscience and her common sense to at first persuade Luciano to give himself up, later to lure him into a trap, promising no harm will be done to him. It almost works out even, but then Moroni's French colleague (Ottavio Fanfani) has his own ideas about getting his hands on Luciano, and persuading Moroni to work together, he actually makes Moroni his pawn to lure him into much deadlier a trap ...

Sure, Wake Up and Die isn't a movie without its length, and sometimes it manages to tell its straightforward story a bit on the confusing, over-convoluted side - but that said, it's also all that made European genre cinema of the era so great: The leads are all the epitome of cool, the locations are priceless, the vintage cars great, plus the movie contains several sequences that are pulse-pounding to this very day (not only but especially the finale). And add to this a very elegant direction, a very clever screenplay, palpable characters that are neither black nor white (like most of us), and a first rate cast ... and basically you've got a movie that's pretty much pure excitement!

review © by Mike Haberfelner

 

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