The Burglars

Azad and his team pull off a robbery in Athens. The target is a collection of emeralds and the job goes cleanly. The safe is opened, the stones taken and the team scatters. The trouble starts afterwards. A police inspector learns of it: Abel Zacharia runs the investigation, but his aim is not arrest; he wants the stones himself. He finds Azad and opens a negotiation. The men in the team do not trust each other. From then on the narrative turns into a pursuit and the two men keep changing places. Henri Verneuil directs. Jean-Paul Belmondo plays Azad and Omar Sharif plays Zacharia; Dyan Cannon and Robert Hossein are in the cast. It is a French and Italian co-production. The source is David Goodis's novel, adapted once before in America. Ennio Morricone wrote the music. The car chase was shot in the streets of Athens and is counted among the longest chase sequences of the period. Belmondo did some of the stunts himself, a practice that recurs across his career. The safe cracking is shown in detail and the mechanical process is the narrative's material. The matter it treats is trust; the coming apart inside the team takes more room than the robbery. Its limit is length; the narrative is long and its middle stretch grows heavy. Who it is for: viewers who like French crime films and Belmondo. Who it is not for: it is long, the plot thin, and the woman functional.