J.D. Cannon

The film opens with a grand view of Los Angeles, with a news broadcast in the background detailing an increase in crime in the city. The overview of the city goes on until the end of the opening credits where we zoom in on the new house of Paul Kersey (Charles Bronson) where the maid, Rosario (Silvana Gallardo), is preparing dinner. He seems to have picked up the pieces of his life to move on, as his girlfriend is KABC news/radio reporter Geri Nichols (Jill Ireland) and they both go and pick up Carol (Robin Sherwood) from the hospital and spend the day with her. Paul talks to the doctor, who says that despite her traumatic catatonia, she has begun to speak again. Her husband, Jack Toby, though not seen or mentioned, presumably divorced Carol. Paul, Geri, and Carol spend the rest of the afternoon at a carnival, where Paul offers to buy ice cream while the girls look around. While waiting in line for some ice cream, he gets mugged and his dollar bill is stolen by five gang members. At first Paul does not mind but realizes they also took his wallet. Paul manages to catch up with one of them (Jiver (Stuart K. Robinson)), but Jiver exclaims that he was not the one who took the wallet. Geri heads to do an interview with the senator while Carol and Paul go on a boat ride. The same five muggers who stole Kersey's wallet arrive at his house determined to kill him. The thugs break in, tightly bind, and gag, and then gang rape Rosario. Paul arrives home with Carol, only to get beaten unconscious when he walks in the door. Rosario tries to call the police, but the thugs hear the sound and quickly kill Rosario by bashing her head in. They then take Carol to their hideout, where one of the muggers rapes her. After the attack, she runs away from the thugs and jumps from a window, becoming impaled on the railings below. Geri arrives at the house as Paul regains consciousness and the police arrive. Lt. Mankewicz (Ben Frank) is one of the first on the scene, asking Paul about the identification of the muggers because the description was "a little vague". A short time later, Paul learns about the death of his daughter and is sent to the station to ID her. Later, Mankewicz asks Paul to view some photos at the station to jog his memory since Paul is the only witness. Paul declines by saying: "it won't do any good." The next scene is at a funeral that Paul and Geri both attend. That night, Paul pulls out a .32 caliber semi-automatic handgun he kept hidden in his closet, changes clothing, and rents a low-rent apartment in the inner city as his forward base of operations. After wandering around most of the night through the rough part of downtown L.A. Paul returns to his own house. Geri arrives the next morning and lets herself in, where she nearly discovers Paul's gun laying on a dresser. Paul quickly gets up and hides it. After Geri leaves, he calls a locksmith to have the locks on his house changed. The next night, Paul spots one of the muggers, Stomper (Kevyn Major Howard), and follows him into an abandoned hotel building as a drug deal is about to be made between his partner and two buyers. Kersey tries to be quiet as he can, but the others notice his presence when he knocks over a can. Kersey kills Stomper's partner, then orders the other two out of the room where he kills Stomper. The following evening, as he is patrolling the streets, Paul hears a scream coming from an underground parking garage where a man and a woman are being assaulted by four muggers. One of the muggers is Jiver, whom Kersey chased down the alley the day of his daughter's death. Paul opens fire on the muggers, killing two of them. Jiver is wounded, but he and the fourth mugger manage to get away. Taking a .45 caliber pistol off one of the dead muggers, Paul follows the trail of blood and manages to wound and kill Jiver at a warehouse across the street. Paul flees before the police arrive. The L.A. police quickly hear about the murders, as does the NY Police Department. Detective Frank Ochoa (Vincent Gardenia) is called by the LAPD to help. The Police Commissioner (Anthony Franciosa) thinks the vigilante killings may be done by Kersey again. Fearing that Kersey, when caught, will reveal that they let him go instead of prosecuting him, the NYPD sends Inspector Frank Ochoa to make sure that does not happen. Ochoa meets with Lt. Mankewicz, who suspects that Frank is hiding something. That night, Ochoa breaks into Geri's apartment where he meets Geri and tells her about Paul's past and recent vigilante spree. But when Geri confronts Paul, he quickly denies it, ascribing the tale to Ochoa's imagination. Paul drives Geri to work the next morning, where Ochoa is waiting. In order to keep tabs on Paul, Ochoa calls Mankiewicz and asks him to park his car near Paul's apartment (but he doesn't tell Mankiewicz about following Kersey himself). Another night later, Ochoa follows an unknowing Kersey from his house to his low-rent apartment and from there to a local square where Kersey spots the three remaining gang members who attacked him: Cutter (Laurence Fishburne), Punkcut (E. Lamont Johnson), and Nirvana (Thomas F. Duffy). Kersey follows the trio on a bus to an abandoned park, where a major drug deal goes down. Ochoa follows Kersey and sees him from a distance hiding in a bush, but decides to help Paul after detecting a spotlight heading in his direction. Ochoa warns Paul with a shot by shooting a gang member who tries to shoot Paul. Paul runs behind a tree as the gang members grab their guns and fire back. Ochoa gets shot by a hail of gunfire, but Paul manages to kill Cutter (who vainly tries to shield his head with a boom box) with a bullet through the face. Punkcut is also wounded by a gunshot to the chest, as is another gang member. Paul also shoots and kills the getaway driver and seller of the firearms, who plummets off a cliff to a fiery doom below. The final mugger, Nirvana, gets away. Paul goes over to Ochoa and asks him why he saved his life. Ochoa responds he had to side with Paul against the criminals, and tells Paul to kill Nirvana for him. Ochoa dies as the police arrive, and Paul escapes into the night. The police get the name of Ochoa's killer from a badly injured Punkcut by inflicting pain, who succumbs to his injuries and dies. A few days later, Nirvana (whose real name is revealed to be Charles Wilson) is found by the police hiding out in an apartment. Paul, monitoring the police radio frequency from an acquired radio scanner, tries to get to Nirvana to kill him before the police do. But in the apartment building hallway, Paul narrowly misses his opportunity for a kill when he gets slashed on the arm by Nirvana during a chase. Nirvana runs outside when he sees the police approaching and gets tasered, but with no effect due to the influence of PCP. He is finally arrested after stabbing several officers. Tried and found criminally insane, Charles 'Nirvana' Wilson is sent to McLarren State Hospital. Paul comes along with Geri to the hospital where she is interviewing Charles Wilson's doctor. The visit allows Paul to secretly steal a facility ID card and a white doctor's lab coat. Despite his plans for revenge to kill the last surviving thug who assaulted him, Paul has lunch with Geri the next day and proposes to her. Geri accepts. The night they plan to go to Mexico for their wedding, Paul uses his altered doctor ID and stolen lab coat to gain access to the hospital and confronts Wilson in the hospital meeting room. They have a violent fight and Kersey is stabbed repeatedly by Wilson with a scalpel. But when Wilson slams Kersey up against an electrical device, Kersey ducks the oncoming punch. Wilson's hand smashes through the machine and Kersey turns the power up, electrocuting Wilson. Donald Kay (Charles Cyphers), the head orderly on duty, witnesses Wilson's death, but sympathizes with Kersey and gives him three minutes to escape from the hospital before sounding the alarm. Geri goes to his apartment later that night and finds the scanned copy of the stolen ID. She realizes that Paul is actually the vigilante after she hears a report of Wilson's death on the radio. She puts the paper and the engagement ring on the table and drives off. Paul arrives home minutes later to an empty apartment. Five months later, Paul is at his office speaking to his clients about a party in celebration of a new architectural design. His boss Elliott Cass (Michael Prince) invites him to a party that very evening, and when Paul is asked if he's free, he answers: "What else would I be doing?" The movie ends with gunshots heard on L.A.'s skid row, implying that Paul will continue his vigilante spree undisturbed.

During the Cold War, the CIA orders free-lance operative Scorpio to assassinate his former CIA mentor Cross and a deadly cat-and-mouse game ensues. Cross is a CIA field agent, most of his tasks as an assassin. He has just returned to Washington DC from working on a case in Paris, he accompanied by Jean Laurier, code name Scorpio, a Frenchman who has long been mentored by Cross and who works as a freelance assassin. Scorpio pulled the actual trigger on the target in the just completed Paris case, and because of the nature of their work, Cross and Scorpio part company at Dulles Airport, neither having ever seen the other if questioned. Scorpio currently also lives part-time in DC with his girlfriend Susan and his flight attendant sister Anne. Cross' superior McLeod is surprised to see both Cross and Scorpio return to DC as the agency, through McLeod, had unofficially contracted Scorpio to eliminate Cross in Paris as it is well known within the agency that Cross plans on quitting, the threat that he could sell out to the Communists with the amount of knowledge he has too great a risk for the agency to take. Scorpio was seemingly the best man for the job in knowing Cross better than anyone else professionally. Scorpio is able to absolve himself in not carrying out that Paris mission on Cross on a loophole, he further able to renegotiate the contract to meet his goals more fully, namely to take over Cross' position within the agency. Cross discovers not only about there being a contract hit on him, but also that Scorpio is the hired gun. With a wide, loyal and diverse network both domestically and internationally, Cross is at least able to make it out of the country, he using that network to set up somewhere undetected and hopefully to bring his wife Sarah by his side once his new life is established. In the process, Cross will discover just how loyal his network is to him, with some former adversaries in his work, such as now Vienna-based Sergei Zharkov a former Soviet Communist agent, or if some are not who they purport to be in having a separate agenda. If it gets to that point, another question is whether Cross or Scorpio can pull the trigger on the other, each who may see the other as a mirror image of himself. —Huggo Cross is an old hand at the CIA, in charge of assassinating high-ranking foreign personalities who are an obstacle to the policies of the USA. He often teams up with Frenchman Jean Laurier, alias "Scorpio", a gifted free-lance operative. One day, the CIA orders Scorpio to eliminate Cross -- and leaves him no choice but to obey. Scorpio is cold-blooded and very systematic; however, as a veteran agent, Cross knows many tricks. He can also rely upon a network of unusual personal contacts, some dating back to the troubled years preceding WWII. A lethal game of hide-and-seek is programmed, but what are the true motives of every single player? —Eduardo Casais <casaise@acm.org>

It is about May of 1948 in a small northern Florida town. As the film opens, Lucas Jackson (Paul Newman) is using a pipe cutter to cut the tops off of parking meters. He is drinking, possibly drunk, but not violent. When the police arrive, he is peacefully arrested. Luke and three other men arrive at a rural Florida prison where they serve on a road gang performing hard labor. When he arrives at the prison, the warden reads his record. He remarks that Luke had been in the Army, attained the rank of Sargeant, was awarded several medals, but was discharged as a private. Something he did got him busted back down to the same rank at which he entered the Army. Luke is sentenced to two years. Dragline (George Kennedy) is clearly the leader of the prisoners. He is uneducated and illiterate, but smarter, stronger, bigger, and does not hesitate to exercise his power over them. Most of the prisoners willingly submit to Dragline, but Luke does not. There is no open opposition to Dragline, just a casual refusal to change his behavior in order to please others. Nevertheless, Dragline sees this as a threat to his power and dominance. The men leave at sunset and perform over 12 hours daily of grueling hard labor under intense heat and humidity on the side of the road cutting grass with a sickle or shoveling dirt. One of the new prisoners passes out the first day and another one tries to get out of the detail by sweeping, which was a trick played on him. Luke makes it the first day, but exhausted and barely able to get back into the truck. At the end of the first day for the new men, Alibi, the one who tried to get out of the hard labor by sweeping, is made to sleep in the box the first night, a cramped isolation unit outside to learn a lesson to not challenge the guards. After Luke says something that Dragline takes as a challenge to his authority, Dragline arranges for he and Luke to have a boxing match. Being much larger, Dragline simply pounds Luke into a pulp, but Luke will not give up, or stay down on the ground. What begins as a boxing match with enthusiastic prisoners and guards watching slowly turns into a sad spectacle. Prisoners begin to plead with Luke to lay down and refuse to get back up, and eventually Dragline himself pleads with Luke to simply stop fighting back, but Luke will not stop. The prisoners begin to walk away, unable to watch the sad scene any longer. Dragline himself wants the fight to end, and at one point has to catch the beaten and exhausted Luke from falling down, carrying him across his shoulder and gently setting him on the ground, only to have Luke use what little strength he has left to tap Dragline with one last punch. Finally, even Dragline cannot continue. The only men who are still watching are the guards and the warden, but the warden seems concerned about Luke's stubbornness and the guards remain indifferent. Luke becomes the prisoners' hero, and even Dragline is now respectful of Luke during a card game that night of having tricked a fellow opponent on betting with a bad hand dealt, giving him the name "Cool Hand Luke." On the chain gang, Luke encourages the other prisoners, by his own attitude and energy, to excel at their menial tasks. This not only encourages camaraderie among the prisoners, it deprives the guards of a stick to hold over the prisoners' heads. The prisoners are forced to shovel sand over a freshly tarred road, and they perform the job so quickly and with such a sense of competition that they complete the job early, and thus by default earn a few hours of relaxation, because there is no more road on which to work. On a Sunday, Luke's mother comes to visit him, visibly ill and dying of cancer or emphysema and still chain-smoking, and it is clear that Luke gets his independent streak from her. He admired her ability to live life on her own terms, and has tried to emulate that, but with much different results. During one very hot and rainy night, Luke decides out of the blue that he can eat 50 eggs. Most of the other prisoners oppose and that it's impossible or will kill him, but Dragline begins to take bets. Luke barely succeeds at it and collects all the money from bets. Soon after, Luke receives a telegram that his mother has died. The warden uses the death of Luke's mother as an excuse to lock him in "the box," solitary confinement in a hot wooden shed. The warden claims that men will often run away when their relatives die, so he locks Luke up until after Luke's mother is buried. This has the opposite effect, and Luke promptly escapes after being released from solitary. Luke is later caught, after mailing a picture and magazine back to his former fellow prisoners. He is double-chained, but escapes a second time. Again, he is recaptured. While Luke is becoming the "hero" of his fellow prisoners, it is a role he does not want. He admonishes them to "stop feeding off me," to stop living life vicariously through his acts. The guards and warden determine to break Luke's will. They force him to dig and bury, then re-dig and re-bury, a ditch. He is beaten and tormented, until he finally begs God to spare him from the warden and guards. They take this as a sign that he is finally a broken man, and Luke himself later admits that it did break him. A few days later, the guards have now made Luke a trustee. Nonetheless, when he is later given an opportunity, he seizes it and escapes again, stealing one of the prison trucks to make his get-away. This time, Dragline decides to go with Luke. Only later, after their escape, does Dragline weigh out the consequences. He had only two years left on his sentence, but now - if caught - will probably have many more years in prison. Dragline wants to team up with Luke, but Luke tells him that he wants to go alone. Luke has always been an individual, not a conventional leader, and does not want to take on that role now. Luke goes into a church, after being completely irreverent to God through the entire film, and asks God to help him escape. But the warden and guards arrive, and when Luke mocks them from the church window, he is shot. The local police want to take Luke to the hospital, but the warden insists that they take him back to prison instead. It is clear that Luke will not make it that far, but the warden heads off with Luke in his car. The one guard who always wears sunglasses is attacked by Dragline, and though Dragline is subdued, he managed to take off the guard's mirror-like sunglasses (and the warden runs over them with his car). In the final scene, Dragline is regaling the prisoners with stories of Luke's final moments, and it is clear that Luke is dead. He is the true anti-hero, never wanting to be anybody's role model, just wanting to live life on his own terms. But like the guard's sunglasses, Luke managed to unmask the injustice and hypocrisy of the system in which he was confined. Basically, he gave up his life over a parking meter, but in the final analysis he could not be broken by the system.