Meurtres en cascade

In the first scene someone tries to shoot down Roy Scheider but kills his wife instead. That's not a bad start of an intrigue. But the problem here is the lack of motivation. We never learn who or why Roy Scheider had to be killed, and there are a number of assassination attempts. He works for intelligence, all right, but that is not enough. His boss seems to be Christopher Walken, who is expert on wicked roles, and he actually tells Scheider's wife's brother to kill him, but there is no motivation. The lack of any motivation here makes the film absurd in its forced effort to contrive a great action thriller, while nothing makes any sense. There is a girl who also eventually proves to have some desire to kill him because of some grandmother's trauma, which deviation from all sense and logic only adds to the nonsense of this ridiculous plot. Roy Scheider is always good and saves the film in many ways, but the only real value of the film is the fantastic score by Miklos Rosza, in collaboration with no one else than Bernard Herrmann, which adds to the film's character of being nothing else than a poor Hitchcock paraphrase.