The Stone Killer

A Los Angeles police detective, Lou Torrey, finds himself caught up in a Mafia scheme that reaches across the country. A Sicilian crime boss, Alberto Vescari, is settling an old score: he intends to wipe out the men he holds responsible for the deaths of his family decades earlier. To carry out the plan, he recruits hardened Vietnam veterans as a private army of killers. As the bodies mount, Torrey follows the trail of the organization and tries to stop it before the campaign of revenge is complete.

The film was directed and produced by Michael Winner, from a screenplay by Gerald Wilson. It was the fifth of the thirteen films Winner directed, arriving between The Nightcomers and Scorpio. Charles Bronson plays Torrey, with Martin Balsam as Vescari and supporting turns from Jack Colvin, Paul Koslo, Norman Fell and David Sheiner. An Italian and American co-production shot for Columbia Pictures with Dino De Laurentiis's companies, it runs 95 minutes.

The Stone Killer was released in August 1973. Audience reaction has been moderate rather than enthusiastic: on IMDb it holds a rating of 6.1 from around 4,300 votes, and on TMDB a rating of 6.3 from roughly 100 votes. The small vote count there suggests the title has limited visibility among that site's users, while the larger IMDb sample points to a modest but persistent following among viewers of seventies crime films.