Scorpio (1973)

Michael Winner knows how to make a thriller; his back catalogue includes the Charles Bronson starring Death Wish (1974) as well as directing Bronson in the underappreciated The Stone Killer (1973). One of the reasons for this perhaps, is that The Stone Killer was released in the same year as Scorpio, a film that might well be Winner's finest.

Scorpio itself though, suffers from being very similar in tone to yet another excellent (and commercially more successful) thriller released in 1973, Fred Zinneman's The Day of the Jackal.

That's not to say it's not any good, it's a well-paced chase thriller that has early echoes of what the Bourne films would end up being in terms of influence (via The Fugitive [1993]) and does a very solid job of portraying the cat and mouse espionage feel of Cold War thrillers. Burt Lancaster's Cross is a CIA operative who is hunted by his former protege, Alain Delon's Scorpio, and in the style of the previous decade's James Bond films, the film country hops to glorious looking locations for various action pieces, most notably a serene looking Vienna.

There's overkill in terms of plot and set pieces, and this isn't as consistently thrilling as Zinneman's Day of the Jackal or close to the levels of The French Connection (1971) but it's a cogent piece of work with good performances from Lancaster and Delon that still draws you into its double crosses and chases. 7.3/10