April 3: National Film Score Day — Write about a movie that has a great score.

L’assassino dei poliziotti is also known as Copkiller, Corrupt, Bad Cop Chronicles #2: Corrupt, Corrupt Lieutenant and The Order of Death. After making movies about the Italian Communist Party, director Roberto Faenza was considered so politically incorrect that he had to go outside Italy to find funding for movies like this one.

Filmed in New York City and at Cinecittà Studios in Rome, this film stars Harvey Keitel as corrupt cop Lt. Fred O’Connor and former Sex Pistol John Lydon as the criminal that obsesses him.

O’Connor has been making money off drugs with Sgt. Bob Carvo (Leonard Mann, Vengeance Is a Dish Best Served Cold), which they invest in a Park Avenue apartment. However, Carvo wants out, as his wife—and O’Connor’s ex-girlfriend—Lenore (Nicole Garcia)—suspects rightly that he’s on the take.

Then, O’Connor meets Fred Mason (Lydon), who is really Leo Smith. He keeps claiming that he’s the Copkiller, a man who has been murdering police officers. When O’Connor catches him in his apartment, he ties him up. He keeps him captive, even going to interview his wealthy grandmother, Margaret (Sylvia Sidney), who tells him that after the death of his parents, he swore off their wealth and compulsively confesses to crimes that he didn’t commit.

This film plays with who the guilty person is—either the seemingly mentally ill Smith or the manipulative O’Connor—before flipping the script right before the dark ending.

So much of who Lydon is in this movie is, well, post-Sex Pistols Lydon, given to rants. The song “The Order of Death” from the Public Image Ltd. album This Is What You Want… This Is What You Get refers to the film, with the line “This is what you want… This is what you get” coming from the Hugh Fleetwood novel Order of Death that this movie is based on. As for Keitel, he’s essaying an early version of his character from Bad Lieutenant.

Backing it all up is a solid score by Ennio Morricone, whose career of more than four hundred films goes from classy fare like Days of Heaven and Cinema Paradiso to scumtastic stuff such as Hitch-Hike, Last Stop on the Night Train and What Have You Done With Solange?

You could also view this — instead of as a cop movie — as a film where two male closer than friends break up because of a woman, only for the jilted one to keep a young man captive and engaging in a BDSM relationship with him. That said, Keitel is, as always, great, and I wish Lydon was in more than just this one movie (and not just because the other film he had planned to act in was to be directed by Russ Meyer). He’s excellent in this.

You can watch this on YouTube.