Henri Verneuil and actor Jean Paul Belmondo made seven movies together during their careers, and their best effort was "The Burglars." This crime thriller set in Athens pits a jewel thief Azad (Jean Paul Belmondo of "The Night Caller") against a corrupt, sleazy Athens cop, Abel Zacharia (Omar Sharif of "Dr. Zhivago"), who threatens to expose them if they don't share in the loot. Verneuil's adaptation of David Goodis' novel that he co-scripted with Vahé Katcha of "Two Hours to Kill" is far more exciting remake than original Paul Wenkos' film. The chief difference here is that Zacharia is a high-ranking policeman instead of a uniformed, squad car cop. Furthermore, the ending is superior, too, with the anti-heroic Belmondo escaping from the nasty cop. Sharif's death scene is rather unusual. The big chase around scenic Athens with Sharif in pursuit of Belmondo is genuinely exciting. Like Dan Duryea in the original "Burglar," Belmondo stumbles across a looker in a bar, Dyan Cannon, but with better results. She has an apartment where you have to clap your hands to activate the electric lights. Claude Renoir's photography is breathtaking, and Ennio Morricone provided an orchestral score that is unforgettable as are the opening credits. "The Burglars" proves that not all remakes are inferior.

The Burglars is a good entertaining movie to watch during leisure hours. The futile but reckless car chase sequence is compelling and Belmondo vs Omar Shariff is an exciting combination.Inspite of all the coercion and blackmailing by Zacharia (played by Shariff), the scoundrel played by Belmondo manages to escape at the end and the cop had to grapple in a heap of wheat flow in a silos tank. The theme music produced by Ennio Morricone has a subtle and beguiling tinge of danger and suspense.This movie is a much better entertainment than watching "Pirates of the Caribbean" or "The Mummy" or the recent "2012 end of the world" which can only be enjoyed by people sporting puerile imagination and fictional taste. A show of death and destruction, creepy images and fiction superimposed by computer animation and special effects does not correspond to good movie making.

I don't remember much of the film except for 2 events. One was Omar Sharif playing a game with one of the crooks. He had a glass of booze in his hand and stated to the crook that the more he drinks the worse his aim gets and every time he drank, his shots came closer to the crook. The crook gets away; however, he is wounded in the shoulder.I love the ending where Omar gets the gems; however, he is caught in a silo where grain is falling on top of him and in the end, only one of his hands with the gems is above the grain while the rest of his body is buried.The film is one of the unknown films that I did not known that Omar Sharif had made apart from Genghsis Khan, Lawrence of Arabia, The Far Palivion, and Night of the Generals.

Le Casse is an original cop & thieves movie, taking place in an unusual and exotic location (Greece) which adds to its strange atmosphere. Indeed, although the screenplay is a little bit weak at times, it's basically the story of a wide-scale duel between two men who are ready to fight to their last breath for wealth and glory. The duellists use the whole city for their confrontation, and the outstanding score of Ennio Morricone is here to indicate that the base line of the movie is not that far away from that of Sergio Leone's westerns: Le Casse is about human greed, tenacity and, in a certain way, sense of honour.Le Casse also makes me think of "Bullit". They're both slow-paced action movies with occasional explosions of violence. They're both quite silent (Belmondo does not talk more than Mc Queen)and the silence is punctuated by a very smart and eerie music which says more than any dialogue.**SPOILER**A viewer from Mexico made a remark regarding the car chase. He said it had no real connection to the story, because when Sharif finally catches up with Belmondo, they just exchange a few words and drive away. The reason why is that Sharif only wanted to know if Belmondo had the stolen emeralds with him in the car (which was not the case) because he wanted to get them before Belmondo hid them. He lets him go then because he knows where to find him. A few minutes, later, indeed, we see Sharif at the toys' warehouse. Now remember that during the robbery, the night before, Sharif opened the car of Belmondo and saw the toys: we can assume that he knew where they stored.