classicsoncall Well it appears that everyone likes the car chase scene here. It WAS rather well done, and the bonus was having one of the transport cars fall off it's rig on top of the Miller henchman (Romano Puppo) vehicle. You would think the nameless tough guy would have learned his lesson after getting the snot kicked out of him by Marco (Giuliano Gemma) the previous two times. Come to think of it, the liquor shop brawl was pretty classic as well.I saw this flick under the title "The Master Touch", and it seemed fairly apropos considering the plot. Kirk Douglas portrays a safe cracker just released from prison who gets the idea for one last heist after turning down a former employer in favor of going it alone. Except he doesn't go it alone, and it all might have worked out if pretty boy Marco had ditched the knife like Wallace (Douglas) told him to. The parallel heists were another bonus, with Marco's job providing the cover alibi Wallace needed to escape scrutiny for the million dollar take. I wonder if Miller ever figured that out? The film has one thing you're not likely ever to see again once you've seen it here. When Marco double crosses Wallace and steals the big bundle in the suitcase, Wallace gives chase across huge mounds of coal near the Hamburg docks. You have to hand it to the film makers, they tried hard to come up with something original.

lepoisson-1 Good: A superb car chase (worth the price of admission – they don't make them like that any more), some great fights (again, I don't see that kind of action in modern films), a decent heist, and a couple plot twists I didn't expect. Nice control of camera depth of field. This really could have been a great movie.Bad: The unappealing characters just sucked the joy out of this movie. Nobody's likable. I didn't like Douglas. I didn't like his wife. I didn't like the circus performer. There's nobody to root for. Also, after the final plot twist, you can predict the rest of the movie and by then I just didn't care.5 stars for the car chase and fights.

Michael A. Martinez There's a lot of other, similar, better foreign heist movies from this period, including the French AND HOPE TO DIE, and the Italian LAST CHANCE which I both found much more interesting than this work.The main thing this one has going for it is once-huge American star Kirk Douglas in a very meaty central role as a super-suave master thief akin to Clooney's character in the recent "Ocean's 11" series. The supporting cast is also good, though underused, with Gemma as a trapeze artist who Douglas tries to recruit into the life of thievery. Wolfgang Preiss (the guy who always plays Nazi bad guys in war movies) plays the main mob boss with Romano Puppo in a satisfying role as his head thug. Puppo and Gemma have numerous fight and chase scenes which are fun to watch but add absolutely nothing to the plot. Speaking of plot, this one conveniently glazes over all the details of the heist, except on how Douglas deals with the security system's sound recorder. His preparations don't appear to be particularly well informed yet he seems unswervingly confident about the whole thing. Hmmm....He also has a hot girlfriend/wife/lover/whatever Florinda Bolkan... who repeatedly tells him NOT to go through with the heist or she will leave him. These assertions make absolutely no impact on Douglas, who is single-minded in his pursuit of a big score... and then he is surprised later by all the double-crosses.It's worth tracking down, but not exactly the most cerebral crime caper from the period. A little more realism would have done this film an immeasurable service.

Hitchcoc Greed always gets the best of you. This is quite an entertaining yarn, involving the breaking of a massive safe, to steal a huge amount of money. Just out of prison, Kirk Douglas is the"Master" of the title in English. He is the new Jimmy Valentine. He doesn't hesitate a bit, getting involved with an acrobatic circus aerialist and dragging his long suffering wife into the fray. Of course, there's a complex set of technological hurdles that must be overcome. This is really the highlight of the film as Douglas masterminds all these machines, knowing the inner workings of enormous safes. We are left to trust that he has this kind of knowledge. Early on we know that he is the best. Somewhat like the battle at the end of Von Stroheim's "Greed," the adversaries are left to battle for their lives. The money becomes an albatross and therein lies the finish. There are a number of questions I would have asked as a perceptive viewer but it would reveal too much of the plot. Suffice it to say, there are some real holes, both in the script and in the reality of things. It's still a darn good theft film.