End Of The Game (aka Der Richter Und Sein Henker) (1975)

In 1948, a man (Robert Shaw) bets another man (Martin Ritt) that he could murder someone before his eyes and get away with it and does just that by murdering the girl (Rita Calderoni) they both love. Jump some 20 years later and the murder of a policeman (Donald Sutherland) becomes a pawn in the unfinished game between the two men, one (Ritt) a police commissioner and the other a powerful and rich man (Shaw). Based on the novella by Friedrich Durrenmatt (THE VISIT) and directed by the Oscar winning actor Maximilian Schell, this strange black comedy would seem to have been better played as a straight psychological thriller. I'm not sure audiences understood that it was a comedy (the actors play it quite straight) in 1975. While it's oddly compelling, it's still a failure in the sense that it doesn't accomplish what it set out to do. Ritt, best known as the director of such films as HUD and THE LONG HOT SUMMER, isn't much of an actor and seems to be giving an Oscar Homolka imitation. Jon Voight as a policeman investigating Sutherland's murder doesn't have the style for this kind of subtle comedy. The film seems strangely displaced, a German film with American stars filmed in Switzerland. The score is by Ennio Morricone at his laziest. With Jacqueline Bisset and Gabriele Ferzetti.