A year before Michael V. Gazzo walked into the real Godfather, he was working on an Italian knockoff. Producer Edmondo Amati hired the playwright to polish the dialogue on The Counsellor, but Gazzo ended up rewriting the entire script. By 1974, he was playing Frankie Pentangeli in The Godfather Part II and earning an Oscar nomination for it. That kind of crossover wasn’t unusual in ’70s Italian crime cinema. These movies borrowed freely from Hollywood hits, imported familiar American faces and then tried to outgun the pictures that inspired them. Kino’s set collects three very different examples, each deserving a closer look.

The Counsellor (1973) is the most traditional of the bunch, a sober mob drama cut very much from The Godfather cloth. Thomas Accardo (Tomas Milian, Traffic) gets out of prison determined to leave the rackets behind, and his godfather, Don Antonio (Martin Balsam, 12 Angry Men), reluctantly agrees to let him go. Director Alberto De Martino shot in San Francisco, Albuquerque and Palermo, and all that location work gives the movie a polish that sets it apart. Riz Ortolani’s terrific score does plenty of emotional heavy lifting, too. It’s handsome, well acted and fairly predictable, but also the slowest of the three.

Then there’s Blazing Magnum (1976), the wild card of the set and easily the most fun. Ottawa police captain Tony Saitta (Stuart Whitman, The Comancheros) loses his sister at a Montreal college party and starts digging into what happened. His partner, Ned Matthews (John Saxon, A Nightmare on Elm Street), rides shotgun, while Martin Landau (Ed Wood) turns up as the respected doctor she had been seeing. Genre historian Roberto Curti points to its whodunit structure and tricks borrowed from Dario Argento (Suspiria), and he’s not wrong. The mystery gets increasingly slippery the longer it goes, but none of that matters once the movie unleashes its big car chase. De Martino reportedly improvised the sequence without storyboards, treating it almost like a jazz solo, and that anything-goes energy is all over the screen. The plot runs out of gas long before the car chase does.

Weapons of Death (1977) is the purest poliziottesco of the three, throwing us straight into Naples streets filled with Camorra bosses, crooked deals and plenty of gunfire. Mario Caiano spins the film off Umberto Lenzi’s Commissioner Betti series, even bringing back street kid Gennarino (Massimo Deda) from Violent Naples. Maurizio Merli’s Betti is gone, though, replaced by young Commissioner Belli (Leonard Mann, Night School), who has the badge but little power to touch Santoro (Henry Silva, The Manchurian Candidate), a bandit protected by the mob. Caiano came up making westerns, and you can feel it in the wide-open locations and especially a train heist staged with real frontier swagger. The plot isn’t much, and the movie can swing wildly from one tone to another, but after a while that unpredictability starts feeling less like a problem and more like part of the fun.