Scorpio (1973)

When people talk of 1970s paranoia movies they often neglect to mention Michael Winner’s Scorpio but as well as being a spy thriller it has as much paranoia as the heart could desire.

At the beginning of Scorpio we are introduced to Jean Laurier (Alain Delon). He’s a hitman known as Scorpio. He’s a freelancer but he does a lot of jobs for a particularly sinister organisation. No, not the Mob. They at least have some ethics. He does jobs for a much more sinister outfit who have no ethics at all - the CIA. Scorpio often works with a CIA agent named Cross (Burt Lancaster).

Scorpio opens with the CIA assassinating a Middle East political leader. He’s an American ally but the US Government feels he would be a more useful asset dead. The assassin was Scorpio, working with Cross.

Scorpio had another mission which he failed to carry out. Now the CIA wants that job done. This begins a whole complicated series of events involving possible betrayals and possible double-crosses and lies and manipulations and conflicted loyalties.

Cross is now running. He’s been marked for death by the CIA but Cross is a very clever agent. Catching him and killing him will be immensely difficult and dangerous. You’d need someone as good as Cross. Scorpio is as good as Cross. Maybe.

But there are plenty of twists, and plenty of unanswered questions. Why does the CIA want Cross dead? What is the exact nature of the relationship between Cross and KGB agent Zharkov? They are friends, but strange friendships sometimes do exist between spies on opposite sides. It doesn’t mean Cross has sold out to the KGB, but it might mean that.

Another major unanswered question involves Scorpio’s motivations and intentions. Scorpio is not CIA. He’s a freelancer. Can the CIA trust Scorpio? Can Scorpio trust the CIA. None of the players in this game know if they can trust anyone, and the CIA don’t know if they can trust any of the players, even the guys who are supposedly working for them.

This is not a James Bond-style spy movie. It’s much closer in mood and spirit to the dark cynical pessimistic world of spy movies based on books by writers like John le Carré and Len Deighton - movies like The Spy Who Came In from the Cold and The Ipcress File. The main difference is that Scorpio does also include some great action set-pieces.

It’s interesting that Scorpio loves cats, which I assume is a nod to the first great movie about a hitman, This Gun For Hire (1942).

Casting Burt Lancaster and Alain Delon as the two spies was an interesting decision. Two actors with plenty of star power and charisma but sharply contrasting styles. Lancaster had a tendency to give flamboyant larger-than-life performances. Delon was always super-cool, giving very controlled subtle minimalist performances. Both actors were good at playing dangerous men but they did so in totally different ways. They complement each other perfectly.

Winner is a much reviled director. I suspect he’s mostly reviled because people disapprove so strongly of his monster 1974 hit Death Wish (and they invariably disapprove of Death Wish without actually understanding it). My impression is that a lot of people approach a Winner film in such a prejudiced state of mind that they decide it’s junk before they’ve even watched it.

Scorpio has some very definite affinities with Winner’s excellent 1972 The Mechanic (1972). In both movies there’s an older hitman acting as mentor to a younger assassin. In both cases the relationship is complex. Both movies deal with betrayal. In The Mechanic there’s a single level of betrayal whereas in Scorpio it’s like peeling an onion - you just keep finding new layers of duplicity and betrayal. There are double-crosses and triple-crosses and quadruple-crosses.

To try to pick holes in the plot is to miss the point. To criticise the movie on the grounds that the character’s motivations are insufficiently developed is also to miss the point.

As far as this movie is concerned the world of espionage is a world of meaningless futility.

It is all pointless. It’s just a game. There is no actual objective to the game. The only objective is to strengthen your own position by weakening someone else’s. It’s like a football match in which no player cares whether his team wins or loses.

The purpose of the CIA is to increase the power and influence of the CIA at the expense of other agencies such as the FBI (the CIA guys in this movie regard the FBI as a dangerous enemy.) The characters are all aiming to advance their own interests. The CIA chief McLeod (John Colicos) aims to maintain his position and perhaps move up another run on the ladder. The objective is his subordinate Filchock (J.D. Cannon) is to take over McLeod’s job. Scorpio is an outsider. He’s just a contractor. He wants to become an insider. Then he too will have power. Cross was an idealist once but now he has no idea what his aims are, other than survival. He is amused by the fact that his KGB opposite number, Zharkov, still has beliefs.

What’s interesting is that nobody knows or cares what the case is about. Some secrets were exchanged. Nobody cares what they were. They’re just poker chips.

The CIA are definitely the bad guys but they’re not so much evil as just totally amoral. The characters have no clear motivations because they believe in nothing but the game.

Scorpio is not a meaningless movie. It’s an intelligent provocative movie about the meaningless empty world of espionage. Highly recommended.

I’ve also reviewed Winner’s best-known movies, Death Wish (1974) and The Mechanic (1972). You can see certain common themes running through both these movies and through Scorpio as well.