I'm Gonna Get Those Bastards

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The other day, lacking anything else to do, I posted a lengthy quote from Vladimir Nabokov's Invitation to a Beheading. The natural progression from there is to write about Charles Bronson, of course, and to talk about, in microcosm, the career of one of the strangest movie stars America has yet produced. Bronson doesn't seem so strange on the surface -- he graduated from being a solid and dependable cog in ensemble machines like The Magnificent Seven, The Great Escape and The Dirty Dozen to the ensembles' mysterious hinge in Once Upon a Time in the West, one of the major films in which the seed of his subsequent vengeance-based career was planted, to eventually being one of the many go-to actors for portraying badassery in the 70s and 80s in films like The Mechanic and, his signature film, Death Wish.

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So that all makes sense. What makes less sense is those 70s and 80s films themselves, or at least some of them. The most notable, as in best-remembered, film to which the beginning of this era of Bronson's career can be pegged is The Mechanic, directed, as Death Wish would be, and the earlier Bronson Western Chato's Land was, by Michael Winner. The Mechanic (which has a remake due any day now) is a casually amoral film about a hitman, Bronson, who goes to rather absurd lengths to take out his targets in such a way that they don't appear to have been murdered. He eventually takes the son of one of his victims under his wing, but this young fellow, played by a fresh and ready to kill Jan-Michael Vincent, has his own plans, and the whole thing turns out to be, in theory, a cold-blooded and nihilistic battle of wits between the two.

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Apart from the fact that The Mechanic has a pretty cool ending, and that Jan-Michael Vincent was, at the time, the spitting image of Josh Hartnett (or rather, Josh Hartnett would eventually turn out to be the spitting image of Jan-Michael Vincent circa The Mechanic), the most striking thing about the film is how tired it is. Not in premise or story or anything, but just that nobody but Vincent, who has the scent of fame giving him a bit of a buzz, seems particularly interested in what they're doing. By this point, Bronson had switched from his earlier look from, say, The Magnificent Seven, which was that of a man who knows the world of men and of violence and of work, to his 70s' appearance. This look can perhaps best be described, despite Bronson's Lithuanian heritage, as "hungover samurai". And he just sort of shambles through the film, not suited for roles that call for him to smile, something you'd think he'd be able to avoid in The Mechanic, but no. He just looks, as I say, tired, as if he's already thinking "Welp, someday I'm going to be in Death Wish Part III, so I might as well prepare myself." And he hadn't even made the first Death Wish yet!

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That film came two years after The Mechanic and three years after Dirty Harry, the pro-vigilante (sort of), pro-violence-against-the-violent Don Siegal/Clint Eastwood sensation off of which Death Wish seems perfectly happy to leach. The nearly rabid support of private citizens shooting muggers in the face that Death Wish eventually takes as its mantel sat very badly with Brian Garfield, author of the source novel, but I have to say that, outside of certain particulars (the line about black muggers seems designed merely to shock and anger) I don't much care about that. Those who do, outside of Garfield, seem to presume that vigilantism is some kind of national problem, that Bernie Goetzes are a dime a dozen, when in fact films like Death Wish and Dirty Harry are simply plugging into an actual far-reaching frustration and fear and let the audience blow off some very impotent steam. Added to that, Death Wish, while nowhere near a great film, is actually less tired than The Mechanic, possibly because it's a good deal sleazier, and possibly also because it's trying to be "about something". Bronson, for instance, is quite good in the scenes where he's actually asked to do something. When his formally bleeding-heart character arrives at the hospital, where his wife and daughter have been taken after being brutally assaulted by a trio of thugs, Bronson -- who would never be accused of being overly demonstrative -- plays Paul Kersey's impatient fear right down the line, so that I could imagine passing through a hospital waiting room and seeing a man behaving just like him, before the horrible news is finally delivered.

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But Death Wish is only lively for a bit, and once Bronson's character becomes a folk hero, sitting around his well-appointed apartment and sipping at what I'm guessing is Expensive Liquor, Bronson is given nothing more to play, and he obliges. Paul Kersey stopped being an actual character about halfway through the first of five Death Wish movies, and it's almost as if Bronson can sense it, and, being the seasoned Hollywood guy he is, resigns himself to it early.

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Not having seen anywhere near all of Bronson's 70s and 80s crime and suspense movies (and if the truth be known, I'm writing most of this from my gut), many of them put out by Cannon (well-known for this sort of thing, going even further into outsized action violence once they got their paws on Sylvester Stallone, who would go on to deliberately evoke the Cannon style in The Expendables) and many directed by Hollywood veteran J. Lee Thompson, my instinct tells me that the nadir of this stuff, and maybe of Bronson's career, is Messenger of Death. Centering around a blood feud between two Mormon clans, of all things, Messenger of Death opens with the massacre of a family, women and children, which brings in Bronson's Garrett Smith, a Denver crime reporter. He sniffs out the truth, after a while, and the true villains turn out to not have Mormonism as their motives but rather water rights, and the rural setting of most of the film shifts to a richer peoples' party for the climax. Odd as its story is, the film is pretty rote for the most part, but what really matters is that I don't think I've ever seen a film more bored with itself than Messenger of Death. And that boredom is contagious. Made in 1988, the film features a more avuncular Bronson than you get in his 70s films, but there isn't a single moment in the whole film that isn't part of the plot. It just relentlessly moves forward, which might be good if not for the fact that the relentlessness comes from an apparent desire to just get the damn thing in the can. Of course, this leaves Bronson in as big a lurch as you'll ever see a good actor inhabit. He is, quite literally, not required to act at all. He's needed because he possesses Charles Bronson's face, and because somebody needs to say all the words in the right order.

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In 1971, Charles Bronson won a special Golden Globe for "World Film Favorite - Male" (an honor, of sorts, he shared with Sean Connery). His American stardom would follow, and the basis for this award was his overseas success. In 1972, The Mechanic began the real forward momentum of his career, and yet Bronson's best films were all behind him at that point. It wasn't all bad from that point on: as I say, I like parts of Death Wish, and Mr. Majestyk is nothing to sneeze at, for example. In 1991, Sean Penn cast Bronson in the role of patriarch of a troubled family in Penn's debut film as a director, The Indian Runner. It's been a while, but as I remember it Bronson is quite good, but the role is very small, as the character takes himself out early on. Bronson's career after this would include the fifth Death Wish movie, and a lot of TV.

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The point of all this isn't to rag on Bronson. I like him. I'll watch him in anything, really, because my God what a mug he had, and what a presence. But running parallel to the high-art young American upstarts of the late 60s and 70s, there were a bunch of filmmakers and actors from an earlier era whose job it was to keep the factory churning, and who weren't getting plucked for prime gigs. Bronson, Winner and Thompson all fit into that. They had success, and long careers, but the films themselves are odd, galumphing, often lazy affairs (even incongruous, or so it seems to me: there's something about J. Lee Thompson directing both the original Cape Fear and the slasher film Happy Birthday to Me that feels off), carried largely by the simple truth that Charles Bronsons, like Lee Marvins and Robert Mitchums, don't exist anymore, and were rapidly dying off by the time of Death Wish and The Mechanic. Speaking of not existing, neither do these kinds of B-movies. Today's equivalent, such as the remake of The Mechanic, have a lot of money behind them, and the hopes of a lot of money coming back in. So these things, these 70s and 80s Bronson films, fill a hole, however clumsily. Even when they're not very good, who would resist watching one of them on a Sunday afternoon? I mean, one of them that isn't Messenger of Death.

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But there's something to the fact that I have never seen Kinjite: Forbidden Subjects, starring Bronson and directed by Thompson, the team that brought us that dull-ass Mormon shoot-em-up, and yet desperately want to, right now, this minute. What this means, I don't know.