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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!
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