Scorpio (1973)

Aging CIA agent Cross (Burt Lancaster) has been handling assassination business for the CIA for quite some years now, running freelancers and patsies to assist in the murders of heads of states and politicians the US would rather see dead. In the last couple of years, Cross has often used Jean Laurier (Alain Delon) – going under the codename of “Scorpio” as his freelance partner. The two men have grown somewhat fond of one another, as far as the age difference and the business they are in allows for this sort of thing at all.

So, when the CIA decides to get rid of Cross for some reason and decides to hire Jean to do the job after their own people have screwed things up rather badly, the younger man isn’t terribly enthusiastic about the job. It takes a faked case of heroin possession and a rather great job offer to convince Jean; but even then, his heart clearly isn’t in it, and he often seems to be outright looking for reasons not to kill Cross.

Cross for his part only wants out of the game completely. He could go over to the Soviets – he even has an actual friend there in the old school KGB operative Zharkov (Paul Scofield) – but there’s really no future in that. Plus, at a certain age, a guy just wants to live somewhere nice with his wife without having to think about death and destruction.

There are a lot of secrets and lies for both men to uncover during the whole affair, and eventually, both will pay with the last of their illusions about the world they move in, but also their illusions about the possibility of a normal life.

As the regulars among my imaginary readers know, I am not terribly fond of director/old sleazebag Michael Winner, and find many of his films unpleasant in a way that’s neither enjoyable nor instructive.

Scorpio, though, is definitely a film where this old criticism of mine doesn’t work, for everything here that’s brutal and unpleasant needs to be as brutal and unpleasant as it is to make the film work, to portray the world of spies and assassins the protagonists work in as cruel, cold and driven by an utilitarianism that has become so automatic it is now completely divorced from ideology, or passion, or even the idea that terrible things have to be done to reach a goal that is right. In this world, it’s obvious that Cross, as one of the last men standing of an old guard that still believed in things, needs to be destroyed; but then, as the film will eventually reveal, he has been corrupted as much as the rest of the world, he just wears a nicer face and perhaps tells himself that he is still different.

In fact, it’s Jean who will turn out to be the true innocent of the characters, still genuinely clinging to human feelings like love, and an idea of friendship that’s not secretly based on how useful his friends can eventually be to him. And of course, it’s this core of actual humanity that will be crushed during his hunt for Cross, until he has nobody and believes in nothing anymore.

Very atypical for its very cynical director, the film seems genuinely sad and angry about this state of affairs, treating the terrible things that eventually happen to all good people here with surprising dignity, giving them true emotional resonance by showing – a first in a Winner movie as far as I am concerned – a degree of restraint. The dialogue (script by David W. Rintels and Gerald Wilson) is uncommonly thoughtful too, meditating on things like the mechanisms of the spy world, but also the worth of ideology, or the relationship between aging men who have seen quite a few terrible things.


Which doesn’t mean that Scorpio is lacking in ruthlessness and brutality, Winner just manages to find the proper amount of both so he’s not losing the whole of the film to them. So no worries, fans of more traditional Winner outings, the action is still as brutal as it got in ‘73, the rest of Scorpio just isn’t buried under it.