Editor Reviews:

Amazon.com:
The prime minister of Eritrea is assassinated by political opponents, setting off a chain of events with global repercussions in the intelligence community. Burt Lancaster plays Cross, a CIA operative who dates back to the agency's earliest days as the OSS. Scorpio (Alain Delon) is a protégé of Cross, and one of Cross's best friends in a netherworld where everyone's allegiances, personal and political, are in question. Higher-ups within the intelligence agency decide that Cross knows too much and is better off eliminated; at first, Scorpio refuses the job until the CIA frames him on a phony narcotics bust and coerces him into the assignment. The two men play a game of global cat-and-mouse as Cross consorts with his Russian counterparts--fellow aging dinosaurs in a young man's game. Cross's links with the Russians go back to the days of the Spanish Civil War and the time when Cross was given the ironic label of "premature anti-Fascist" by the House Unamerican Activities Committee. The incredibly convoluted plot is rife with double-crosses and reverse double-crosses, in an environment in which nothing is quite as it seems and no one is to be trusted. Director Michael Winner infuses enough energy and excitement into the film's many action segments to make Scorpio worthy of comparison to John Frankenheimer's best political thrillers. Winner also throws in several curveballs, such as the zither music during a meeting in a Vienna café (shades of The Third Man) and the preposterous device of disguising Lancaster as an African American priest. Though not quite a classic, Scorpio is still an underrated espionage thriller that was well attuned to the political cynicism of the time. Best line: "I want Cross, and I want him burned!" --Jerry Renshaw

Rating : - Beats me
I wonder how many times I'll have to watch this film before I finally understand what happened? I've read the other reviews for clues, so I have a vague, very vague, idea of what was what, but I freely admit I'm still bewildered. Most of the dialogue seemed impenetrable, spoken in a code without a key, and the many locale changes made me dizzy. What exactly were the girls doing? What was it that was being shuffled around in envelopes? Who was taking those handy photographs all the time? Why didn't the two main characters shoot each other when they first had the chance? The story reminded me of ring-a-ring-a-roses --- bang, bang --- we all fall down. There was a lot going on all the time, so I sat out the nearly two hours, hoping for answers. I was still hoping when it ended. Most of the time I kept thinking that quite a bit of extra weight was being lugged around by the great Burt Lancaster at this time of his life, and yet he still seemed quite athletic. I'll watch it again, some time, but I'm not optimistic that the pieces will fall into place. Perhaps some kind reviewer will spell it all out for me at a later date. (2 days later). Well, I've watched it twice now, and it's actually much simpler than I first thought. I must have been half asleep the first time. Perhaps I was registering the key points more alertly, or else I was on the look-out for them. I might have given it another star if I'd been more awake, but it still seemed to ramble round the houses rather lengthily. The message would appear to be that the Cold War, at the time the film was made, was being managed by a bunch of bureaucrats with no beliefs in anything much except how to get promoted within whatever system they found themselves. People who were sticking spokes in their wheels tended to get whacked. The other message was that if you're going to be a traitor, or a hit man, don't get emotionally involved with your lady friends.