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Goodbye & Amen



John Dannahay (Tony Musante, The Bird with the Crystal Plumage), a CIA agent stationed in Rome, is planning to overthrow an African government. But his plan goes wrong when a corrupt colleague starts shooting people from the roof of a hotel, taking an innocent couple hostage. Director Damiano Damiani (How to Kill a Judge) wields expert tension in this gripping espionage thriller, twisting and turning its tight plot to its sensational finale. Featuring a fantastic supporting cast including Claudia Cardinale (The Day of the Owl), John Steiner (The Case is Closed: Forget It) and Wolfango Soldati (The Heroin Busters), Goodbye & Amen is one of the great 1970s Italian action thrill rides, set to a haunting score by Guido and Maurizio De Angelis (Torso, Keoma).

LIMITED EDITION BLU-RAY SPECIAL FEATURES:

• New 2023 restoration of the film from the original camera negative presented with Italian and, for the first time on home video, English audio options
• Uncompressed mono PCM audio
• Audio commentary by Eurocrime experts Nathaniel Thompson and Howard Berger (2023)
• Interview with editor Antonio Siciliano (2023)
• Archival interview with Wolfango Soldati (2013)
• New and improved English subtitles for Italian audio and English subtitles for the deaf and hard of hearing for English audio
• Reversible sleeve featuring designs based on original posters
• Limited edition booklet featuring new writing by Italian crime cinema expert Lucia Rinaldi
• Limited edition of 3000 copies, presented in full-height Scanavo packaging with removable OBI strip leaving packaging free of certificates and markings

This one will "be a while" because it needs to be restored first, which will hopefully happen "next year some time."

A tightly constructed, nicely unpredictable hostage thriller that I felt was stronger that the (very good) Damiani films in the Cosa Nostra set. There are plenty of familiar tropes (the hero who's on the verge of being kicked off the case; the hostage who's stuck in the wrong place at the wrong time, risking a collateral disaster, for instance), but they get twisted in their resolution. For a film in which most of the action is confined to one hotel room, Damiani manages to stage a number of effective set pieces on a range of scales, with the lights-out finale being especially impressive. Its set-up is borrowed from the heist film, with a run-through beforehand just so you know that something is going to go wrong, but you're kept in the dark throughout and beyond the sequence as to what - if anything - that might be.

This post has been cleared by the bomb disposal unit as being free of spoilers. Or, "near enough is good enough," to give their exact words.