Charles Bronson had a long and successful working relationship with British director Michael Winner. Their six-film partnership began with the 1972 western Chato's Land and was cemented with The Mechanic (1972), with Charles Bronson playing a veteran hit man, and the box-office smash Death Wish (1974), the defining urban revenge film of the 1970s and the film that catapulted Bronson to superstar status in his fifties.

The Stone Killer (1973), their third collaboration, arrived in theaters less than two years after Clint Eastwood's Dirty Harry (1971) and turned the maverick cop into a cultural icon. Bronson plays New York police detective Lou Torrey, a loner cop in the Harry Callahan vein who prefers confrontation to dialogue. Bronson was 51 when he shot the film and while his craggy face betrays his age, he's very much the man of action on screen, running up staircases, climbing down fire escapes, chasing suspects through streets and alleys, and in one scene leaping straight up into the air and onto a table from a standing start, as graceful as a cat. After killing yet another suspect in a shoot-out, he resigns and relocates from the Big Apple to the LAPD, where he's partnered with a slow-witted bigot (Ralph Waite of The Waltons) and uncovers a conspiracy that leads to highest levels of the mob.

Based on the novel A Complete State of Death by British thriller specialist John Gardner, The Stone Killer combines three popular genres of the early seventies: the maverick tough-guy cop drama, the mob movie (The Godfather [1972] had been a critical and commercial phenomenon the previous year), and the military-style caper. The title, as explained in the film, refers to a hired gun, an out-of-town specialist contracted for a special project. In the case of this film, it is a career soldier (Stuart Margolin) brought in by East Coast mob boss Al Vescari (Martin Balsam) for a long awaited vengeance. As Margolin trains a squad of former Vietnam Veterans in the desert for a guerilla mission, the storyline jumps back and forth between the coasts and Winner shoots much of the action on locations on the streets of New York and Los Angeles to give the film a contemporary grit. JFK International Airport offers a notably memorable location for a key scene where Lou returns to deliver a prisoner to his old New York squad.

A veteran of the Actor's Studio in New York, Martin Balsam put on an Italian accent to play an old school Sicilian mobster who resists the big business ways of the new Mafia. The Academy Award winner was a respected veteran of dozens of supporting roles, playing everything from authority figures to criminals to everyday guys, but this was the first mob figure for the Jewish-American actor. He was well prepared for the challenge, however, after making a handful of Italian crime thrillers just prior to filming The Stone Killer. The actor developed a deep affection for Italy and bought a home there, shuttling between Europe and the U.S. in the final years of his career. His affection comes out in his performance; he is dignified, cultured, and loyal, a gentleman of a mob boss in a mafia culture of heartless businessmen with no feeling for tradition.

Norman Fell co-stars as Lou Torrey's Los Angeles boss, standing up for Torrey even when his methods get out of hand, and John Ritter has an early role as a uniform cop who gets picked by Torrey to back him up in his investigation. Three years later, Ritter and Fell were reunited in the hit sitcom Three's Company.

Reviews were mixed but Roger Ebert gave high marks, describing it as "probably the best violent big-city police movie since Dirty Harry... it offers stylish escapism at breakneck speed, and it gives us a chase and a gun battle that surpass themselves."

By Sean Axmaker