Charles Bronson plays a boat captain named Joe Martin who seems be living the good life in the south of France.  He has a great job renting out boats to tourists!  He has great luck beating his friends out of big stacks of cash in poker.  He has a beautiful wife (Liv Ullman), and most importantly, he has about the biggest biceps I’ve seen in a movie not starring Arnold Schwarzenegger.  This idyllic existence falls apart when some men from his past show up and force him to use his boat to help them smuggle drugs.  It seems these guys feel like Martin owes them something since they had to go to prison for killing a cop, while ace driver Martin, escaped.  As you might expect, nobody’s plans go as expected and much action ensues!

The first thing that stands out in this film is the cast, that includes James Mason, Liv Ullman, Michael Constantin, and Jill Ireland.  Bronson’s European films uniformly had tremendous casts and this one is no different.  Even with these well known actors, Jean Topart as the villainous Katanga, is a real standout.  Second, this is the first of three films that Bronson completed with director Terence Young, who is most famous for kicking off the James Bond franchise with DR. NO, THUNDERBALL, and FROM RUSSIA WITH LOVE.  Young knows how to stage action scenes, and with the help of famous French stuntman Remy Julienne, the two men cook up some impressive car stunts and chase sequences.  Finally, Bronson himself exudes charisma and is in maximum physical condition in this film.  In a career defined largely by his supreme conditioning, this may be Bronson’s most impressive physical performance.

Charles Bronson became an international superstar when he went to Europe in 1968, where he made a series of good films with great international casts. COLD SWEAT doesn’t come together quite as well as some of his other European films like RIDER ON THE RAIN, VIOLENT CITY & RED SUN, but it’s still a fun film with good action sequences and an impressively pumped up Charles Bronson. And the film has never looked better. After decades of shabby VHS and DVD copies, Kino Lorber put out a very nice blu ray in 2019. It’s nice seeing the movie in such a high quality presentation.

Check out the trailer for COLD SWEAT below: