Bad Sign

By JAY COCKS

SCORPIO

Directed by MICHAEL WINNER Screenplay by DAVID W. RINTELS and GERALD WILSON

It is over 20 years since Burt Lancaster appeared in one of the most infectiously giddy of all adventure films, The Crimson Pirate, bounding over battlements, leaping from one mast of a frigate to another. That movie seemed molded, in part, around his early training as an acrobat, to which he added his own vaunting energy. Lancaster's ebullient stunts, their seeming spontaneity and gleeful effortlessness, made him seem like a scruffier, scrappier Douglas Fairbanks.

If Scorpio does little else, it proves that Lancaster, after all this time, still has an enviable store of vigor. At 59, he is a little paunchier, a little slower, and he breathes harder on the run; but he can still haul himself up a scaffolding with the best. Director Winner sends him pounding around a construction site in Vienna, pursued by Alain Delon, who means to kill him on behalf of the CIA. Lancaster leads Delon and an accomplice a hectic chase through tunnels, up steel girders, across gangways. Watching Lancaster leave the youngsters in the dust gives an almost reassuring feeling of nostalgia, not unlike going to Old-Timers' Day and seeing a veteran hit one out of the park.

Lancaster, always good at playing brashness, was never an actor to show much warmth. His role in Scorpio--a double agent on the run from both East and West--gives him a chance to project the kind of dead-eyed savagery he has nearly patented as his own. He has the proper cunning and just the right kind of careful menace and restrained violence. He is not like a Graham Greene operative, haunted by guilt, shrouded in original sin. John Le Carre's world of moral acrostics would be alien to him. Lancaster plays a thug, an opportunist for whom commitment is solely a matter of expediency. But the movie does not give him much scope to develop any of this. Sometimes, standing on a dark street in Vienna while waiting for a contact, he looks uncertain and lost.

That is understandable. The script pretty well maroons him in a tide of bromides about the dirty business of spying. Winner, a director whose idea of filling the frame is to put something, anything--a sink, a vase--in the foreground of every shot, makes only occasional feints toward rescuing his star. However, there is a very clever, quietly brutal assassination scene. Some estimable players--Paul Scofield, John Colicos, J.D. Cannon--are present to lend support. There is even a certain obtuse symmetry to the carnage that closes the film. sbJay Cocks

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