The Valachi Papers (1972)

This Dino de Laurentiis production directed by Terence Young just about managed to beat The Godfather to the cinemas, but didn’t make much of a splash there; nor is it as well-remembered as even the least of Coppola’s gangster movie trilogy would eventually become.

Which certainly has a lot to do with how little this rates in any aspect compared to the Coppola film. Instead of turning the true crime plot about real life Mafia goon turned federal witness Joe Valachi (Charles Bronson) into an exploration of a man’s relationship to the criminal world he betrays, or even just an actual exploration of anything but the surface of that world, this just races through plot points probably taken from the book this is based on, hitting on anthropological bits of Mafia rituals, murders and Valachi’s love life (Jill Ireland inevitably makes her appearance there) in turn, but never stopping to connect any of this to become something you might want to call an actual narrative.

Watching this, it’s not difficult to imagine Martin Scorsese suffering through it as well, only to think he can certainly do this better by using actual themes and characters and even – gosh! – connecting those, while keeping to the life-long scope of the film, coming up with Goodfellas in the process, a film that’s directly comparable in its scope and basic set-up, but does everything right The Valachi Papers can’t even seem to imagine doing.

Despite the gritty visual quality native to movies made at this point in time, there’s a blandness to the film that’s more than just a little infuriating, a feeling as if nobody involved could actually be bothered to add any personality or depth to the proceedings. The sloppiness of the period parts – where no attempt seems to have been made to hide out of period background details to a degree even I noticed it – adds further to this air of a film that’s just not bothering. Which, as always, leaves the question why a viewer should.

Cold Sweat (1970)

Original title: De la part des copains

Korean War veteran Joe Martin (Charles Bronson) is living with his wife Fabienne (Liv Ullmann) and her daughter Michèle (Yannick Delulle) at the Côte D’Azur, working his own small boat charter service. The marriage seems somewhat tense thanks to Joe suffering from what we’d now call PTSD. He’s drinking too much and holds back emotionally. As it turns out when one a rather nasty character from Joe’s past named Whitey (Michel Constantin) turns up one summer evening, Joe has also been holding back some facts from his past, as well as his actual name.

You see, seven years ago, he was part of break-out from a military prison organized by one of his former commanding officers, one Captain Ross (the very American James Mason). When Katanga (Jean Topart), one of the other members of the group, murdered a random cop for not much of a reason during the break-out, Joe was having none of it, simply taking off with the escape car, leaving the rest of the men to fend for themselves.

For some reason, Whitey really needs Joe’s boat now, to transport something to or from a Turkish vessel anchored somewhere in the area, and he’s certainly not the kind of guy unwilling to threaten a wife and a kid (if available). Joe, on the other hand, is not the kind of guy to tolerate that very well, killing Whitey and getting rid of his body rather efficiently – with a little help from Fabienne.

Of course, this is not he end of the couple’s problems, for soon enough, the rest of the former break-out gang – Ross, Katanga, and one Gelardi (Luigi Pistilli), turn up. They, too are very much into threatening families and really want Joe’s boat, as well as, probably, a bit of vengeance. So our protagonist agrees to their demands, until the right moment comes to make his displeasure known more violently.

In theory, Cold Sweat is a French production, but it’s one of those international joints that really don’t feel specifically regional apart from its setting. The cast is a merry mixture of people from all over the globe, as is good tradition in European genre filmmaking of this era. Rather less common in this sort of thing, the director isn’t French or Italian but veteran British filmmaker Terence Young.

The script, indeed written by two Frenchmen, is based on a novel by Richard Matheson and follows the Gold Medal paperback style of late 60s, early 70s thriller, something a lot of French filmmakers (and one assumes producers) seem to have admired quite a bit. For good reasons, too, because this style of the thriller, with focussed plots that still manage to squeeze in some surprisingly deep characterization, and an update of a noirish philosophical outlook tend to adapt really rather well to the screen, often without there being too big of a need for major changes. Unfortunately, I can’t say if the film at hand does actually make many changes to the plot, because this is one of the Matheson books I’ve never gotten around to reading.

As it stands on screen, it’s a fine bit of early 70s thriller in any case, with sharp plotting, not terribly deep but effective characterization and a real sense for the tense set-up followed by a follow-through that always escalates the drama of any given situation. As we all know, Young was a wonderful director for this kind of thing, usually not showing himself beholden to the stodgier style of some of his British contemporaries but using the increased technical possibilities of changing times in filmmaking to the fullest.

Particularly the film’s final act where is Joe racing and scrabbling to save his loved ones through ever increasing problems and dangers is absolutely fantastic. There’s a brilliantly done car race against the clock that isn’t even the film’s proper climax to enjoy, for example. The sequence is edited and shot so sharply, Young can even check in on the quieter tension between the surviving rest of the characters during it without lessening its impact, instead ratcheting up the suspense with this device, as it is meant to do but all too often doesn’t.

Acting-wise, Cold Sweat is mostly a fine proposition, the cast of character actors performing just as good as you can expect them to (which is why people like I love character actors often more than the proper movie stars – consistency and quiet capability is the thing), Bronson’s suggesting much about Joe’s inner life by tensing and untensing his shoulders (seriously) and also gets some pretty fun tough guy lines, while Ullmann provides a stock character with actual life. The only problem spot here is James Mason, or rather, James Mason as played by his bad, oh so bad, American accent, a thing so awesome (like giant tentacled monsters are awesome) it apparently does not leave room for much of an actual performance.

But then, he would have been dubbed by someone just as bad in most Italian movies, so we do at least get to experience what this great actor believed Americans sound like.

Cold Sweat is obviously still a wonderful piece of European/International thriller.

Death Hunt (1981)

The early 1930s, Canada, the Yukon territory. A trapper named Albert Johnson (Charles Bronson) has just returned to the area to reclaim a way of life he followed before he became a spy in World War I (and did whatever guys like he do after that). When he sees local influential asshole Hazel (Ed Lauter) attempt to kill his own dog because it was losing a dog fight, he intervenes, making Hazel and his gang of violent cronies his bitter enemies. Hazel does his best to escalate things when it turns out that Johnson isn’t one to be easily killed by the likes of him, eventually managing to set the – very unwilling and generally tired – local Mountie Millen (Lee Marvin), his partner Sundog (Carl Weathers) and newly arrived rookie Mountie Alvin (Andrew Stevens, quite some time before he became one of the kings of Skinemax) against the trapper.

Because Johnson is a very dangerous man when riled, and a master at survival in dangerous circumstances, things escalate into a huge manhunt that makes the national news, making any idea of a peaceful solution nearly ridiculous.

Peter R. Hunt’s Northern Death Hunt is a wonderful film, basically doing nothing whatsoever that could destroy its balance, and doing very many things very right indeed.

The character work is strong throughout: Hunt makes excellent use of those elements of Bronson’s external stoicism that can suggest a combination of compassion and stubbornness when used properly (and Bronson clearly liked to do that when a film gave him the chance, and so applied himself fully in these situations instead of going through the motions of being Bronson), showing all the complexities of the character despite him only having a handful of dialogue scenes.

This ability to work via the body language of veteran actors also produces quite a resonant relationship between Marvin and Bronson despite them never meeting between glances through binoculars. Of course, these two are constructed as very parallel characters, decent men of violence who see their ways of life coming to an end, and not liking the replacement at all. It’s not that the film is getting all melancholy about the great times of frontier barbarism, mind you: it’s clear that nearly everyone populating these last spaces ruled by the old ways is a violent thug of some kind, cruel and callous; the film’s just as clear about the fact that the new ways of living coming up North now are not really any less terrible – they just like to pretend they are.

The film works wonderfully as a grim adventure movie with quite a few great set pieces, atmospherically filmed. The environmental dangers of snow and ice are ever-present, and, the film seems to suggest, are outward symbols of everyone’s mental states, which generally aren’t terribly healthy. The film takes some rather clever detours when it puts its mind to it, using tropes of the Western and revisionist Western but giving them interesting little twists to turn characters more human. Somewhat surprisingly, but certainly fitting in this context, for a film whose view on human nature seems to be rather cynical as a whole, Death Hunt shows a decided tendency to give every single side character (all played by wonderful character actors) something to be beyond their premeditated genre role, even fleshing out some of Hazel’s shithead henchmen as if they were proper human beings. The most impressive thing is not just that Hunt had the immense ambition to add all this humanity to his icy chase movie, it’s that he managed to do this while keeping the film ticking away like clockwork, ending up with a film that’s sprawling when thought about, but which feels tight and focussed while you watch it.

Three Films Make A Post: Evil Gets Rebooted

Aurora (2018): Yam Laranas’s horror film about coastal inn keeper Leana (Anne Curtis) having to cope with a terrible ship catastrophe on a reef just outside her inn, and getting drawn into a desperate attempt tot salvage the corpses the coast guard pretends aren’t there, is an interesting film in the way it mixes elements of a very serious drama about poverty and how the ship catastrophe ripples out into causing all kinds of personal catastrophes for Leana (and others) with very matter of fact, and somewhat generic South East Asian ghost movie tropes. The film’s at its best when it focuses on the former elements, given Curtis – an actress with a pretty broad range – many an opportunity to shine. The most effective horror moments are really those that concern themselves with either the physicality of death or simply the mass of the dead on Leana’s doorstep; the more typically generic parts of the film are perfectly competent, but not more.

Through Black Spruce (2018): Speaking of genre films about poverty that are at their best whenever they are not focussing on the standard genre tropes, Don McKellar’s film concerns Cree woman Annie Bird (Tanaya Beatty in a performance that’s as complicated as the character she’s playing under a veneer of straightforwardness that’s clearly armour) travelling to Toronto on the trace of her missing twin sister, and the travails of her uncle Will (Brandon Oakes) coping with nasty people at home. It’s a slow, somewhat ponderous film, much more interested in drawing a portray of its First Nation characters by watching them closely in undramatic moments, interactions that breathe the frustration of being poor, brown, pushed to the side, and accepted as a symbol and a thing rather than a person, than in hitting the standard plot beats in the standard moments. Consequently, while there’s nothing wrong with the film’s more typically thrilling scenes, they do seem to distract from its actual strengths sometimes.


10 to Midnight (1983): For my taste, this is one of the lesser movies featuring Charles Bronson that J. Lee Thompson churned out. But then, my tolerance for scenes of policemen whining about the horror of having to respect the law they are supposedly protecting and the usual nonsense about the insanity defence as an easy out is pretty damn low. To be fair, the film does put some effort into giving Bronson an actual human motivation for faking evidence for once. What the film’s motivation for its desperately slow middle part is, I can’t really figure out, though.

Death Wish V: The Face of Death (1994)

Somehow, vigilante serial killer Paul Kersey (Charles Bronson) has ended up with a cosy place in the witness protection program. Even if we don’t ask ourselves if a guy with his body count can belong to the category of “witness”, he sure as hell won’t need any protection, for he has most certainly killed everyone who might be tempted to do him harm for the sins of his past, as well as anyone he could be a witness against in a court of law.

Anyway, even though every woman in his live has been killed off to motivate him to another killing spree, our thick-headed protagonist still hasn’t understood he’s cursed (or he’s happily hoping for an excuse for another spree), and has romanced fashion designer Olivia Regent (Lesley-Anne Down). This one’s even bringing a child for additional dramatic potential! Now, Olivia has an ex-husband who just happens to be a tough Irish gang boss named Tommy O’Shea (Michael Parks). Tommy really hasn’t let go of his former wife mentally, and has also insinuated himself into her business as his own private money laundering service. Once she realizes this, encouraged through some moral support by Paul, she’s willing to have a nice little chat or three with the local DA (Saul Rubinek).

Tommy does of course get wind of this, so Olivia first gets her face smashed into a mirror by Tommy’s only vaguely competent henchman (for reasons doing the deed in drag) and killed a couple of scenes later. You know what happens next.

Though, to be fair to Allan A. Goldstein’s only entry into the Death Wish series, which fortunately is also the final film of the series before professional talent void Eli Roth (alas) came along, just might actually surprise you with something. Too bad the surprise is in how boring the director manages to make Bronson’s little killing spree. As regular readers (imaginary or not) will know, I’m not a fan of the first two movies in the franchise, but Michael Winner did at the very least manage a consistent tone of nastiness and unpleasantness with them, whereas Goldstein can’t even shoot a scene of a guy in drag shoving Lesley-Anne Downe’s face repeatedly into a mirror in a way that makes a viewer at least a little queasy. It’s blandness taken to the level of high art.

If that whole scene, or the one where Bronson kills a guy with poisoned cannoli, do suggest to you the general inspired craziness of the very Cannon third or even just the in comparison to this one highly lively fourth Death Wish, you will alas be disappointed too. There’s a quality to Goldstein’s direction that makes even a cannoli-based murder boring to watch.


The director doesn’t get much help from anyone involved in this either: Michael Parks’s big bad and his henchmen are just not terribly interesting; Bronson phones his performance in; and the script by a cast of dozens (including Goldstein again) is disjointed and slow, wasting half of the film on setting up everything even the dumbest audience member understands is coming and is indeed waiting for, until Bronson gets to the – pretty mild – murdering. You’d think that by the fifth movie, at least the reasons for anyone to still watch a Death Wish movie would have been clear to anyone making it, but clearly, I am rather overoptimistic when it comes to the basic sense of some people in the film business.

The Stone Killer (1973)

After a public outcry following his having killed a black teenager in actual self defence (!), experienced New York police lieutenant Lou Torrey (Charles Bronson) loses his job (!) and moves to another big city police department “on the Coast” (that’s at least how all characters will describe the place). A couple of years later, a professional yet drug-addled mafia killer is murdered in Torrey’s custody while he’s bringing him from the Coast to New York. His following investigations put Torrey on the track of a plan to murder the heads of the Mafia. Mafiosi Al Vescari (Martin Balsam) has a plan of vengeance forty years in the making. In a stroke of genius, he has hired and trained a small army of military veterans, thrown away by society after using them, as his kill squad.

As I’ve explained a couple of times here, I’m usually not terribly satisfied with the filmic output of regular Charles Bronson director Michael Winner. However, there are a couple of films in his filmography where he used all his powers of cheap cynicism and his lurid sensibilities for good, resulting in films that are as good as anything in the crime, thriller and action genres they belong to. For my tastes, The Stone Killer is such a film. It is not quite as great as The Mechanic but still is a brilliant series of action scenes and more set in front of the backdrop of all sorts of grimy 70s places Winner grimed up a bit more.

There’s something more to the film, too, for while you can see the beginnings of the classic Bronson character he would increasingly live in after the first Death Wish, Torrey is actually an interesting mix of a character. There are elements of the Dirty Harry style cop who doesn’t seem to think twice about using violence to reach his goals, beating people up and getting into public shoot-outs, but Bronson also gives the character a world-weariness not based on the law not allowing him to shoot more people. As a matter of fact, this is a Bronson character who seems to support gun control (!!!), who tempers casual racism in his language (though he interestingly enough very consciously does not use the N-word, unlike other characters) with actually fair behaviour towards black people. The film even sees him having a decent relationship with the local Black Panthers, and usually preferring de-escalation as a police tactic. Why, the film even suggests Torrey is feeling bad even for the people he kills in self defence. It’s not the sort of thing that you’d expect in a Bronson/Winner film – even this early in their partnership – but it turns Torrey into a character who is more interesting than a perfect killing machine would have been.


Speaking of killing, the film is a rather interesting portrait of its time, not just because Winner shoots in quite a few authentic looking, atmospheric locations, and works from a script full of fantastic hard-boiled dialogue for his 70s character actors to chew on. There are also a lot of snide – this is still a Michael Winner joint – remarks about the mental health of US society of the time (with obvious parallels to the now, if you look for them), particularly in the film’s suggestion that shipping off a whole generation of young, poor people to war, letting them suffer through traumatizing events and teach them how to kill and then ignore their problems once they come back home, might just not be a terribly healthy idea, particularly not in a society quite this fixated on violent solutions to all problems. As it will turn out, in 1973, not even Charles Bronson’s violent solutions resulted in more than a change of leadership for the great and the corrupt.

In short: The Mechanic (1972)

Arthur Bishop (Charles Bronson) is working as a hitman for a large, secretive criminal organization. He is specialized in murders prepared and executed in complicated ways that make them look like accidents. Bishop clearly prides himself on being rather good at his job, yet his late middle age has brought him some existential discontent. It’s not just that he gets bad news from his physician, nor that his latest job was killing an old friend, Big Harry (Keenan Wynn), after he asked him for help, it’s something deeper, though we can be pretty sure it’s not a “conscience” or anything silly like that.

When Bishop meets Harry’s son Steve (Jan-Michael Vincent), it is very much love at first sight between the two, as if they had recognized each other as one of a kind at once. Steve, it turns out, is a sociopath and an asshole, and as such ideal for the profession of professional killer. Arthur decides to teach him his trade.

If you have any thoughts about Simon West’s remake of this one, just banish them at once. West’s movie leaves out everything that’s interesting about this Michael Winner film, leaving an empty husk of an action film where something much more thoughtful belongs. Yes, I’m surprised myself to use the term “thoughtful” to describe a Michael Winner film – or to actually like one so much I’m tempted to call it brilliant - but in The Mechanic, the old sleazebag managed to fuse his lurid tendencies and the required men’s adventure style violence with well-formed observations concerning the nature and character of his protagonist and his apprentice. Why, the longer the film goes on, the more it turns out to be deeply interested in questions of ethics, in the rules men of violence observe or not, and in exploring the conceptual borders between order and chaos. There’s also quite a bit about generational differences to be found here.

All that while his film also delivers on the fronts one typically would expect of a Winner/Bronson joint: there’s quite a bit of action, of course, though it is much less sloppily directed than typical of Winner. There are also some moments that made this viewer deeply uncomfortable – particularly the suicide sequence comes to mind – but for once, these moments are in a Winner movie for a thematic reason, making points about these men and their world where no woman even has an actual character name (the homosexual subtext hardly bothering with the sub at all). It’s not at all what I’ve come to expect of Winner.


Bronson and Vincent are perfect for their roles. Bronson uses his calm presence acting in the best way possible, applying nuances of posture and scowling in ways that often suggest much about the things his character would never be able to say to anyone. Vincent’s cocky smugness is terrifically on point here, suggesting that where Bishop has hidden depths and a hole he doesn’t know how to fill, Steve just has a hole that doesn’t need filling.

In short: Caboblanco (1980)

1948. A bunch of characters of dubious morals and shifting allegiances – as played by Charles Bronson, Jason Robards and his ever disappearing and reappearing bad German accent, Dominique Sanda, Fernando Ray and Simon MacCorkindale – are after a ship full of Nazi gold that was sunk somewhere close to the deeply corrupt Peruvian town of Cabo Blanco. Shenanigans, melodramatic outbreaks, and random stuff happens.

This is one of the many Charles Bronson films directed by J. Lee Thompson, but it certainly isn’t one of their best team-ups. The film’s main problem is the screenplay. The script doesn’t really seem to know what it wants, and throws in all kinds of adventure and spy movie tropes without ever bothering to do much with them for longer than one scene or so. Which is too bad, for some of these scenes taken for themselves are rather effective or entertaining; they just don’t add up to a whole.

Parts of the film play as an attempt at an homage to classic Hollywood adventure and romance movies, but Bronson, as much as I love him, sure ain’t no Bogart (or Cary Grant, for that matter), and worse, the script never quite grasps what actually makes something like Casablanca work, so it includes a lot of cargo cult style writing that copies the surface but clearly doesn’t get what the surface elements are actually good for. The actors all seem to be in different films, stylistically: Robards – as is his wont – wildly swings between scenery chewing and moments where he is chilling and pathetic, Bronson is Bronson and therefore completely fails to convince as a romantic lead, something that certainly isn’t helped by the obvious trouble Sanda has acting in English which leaves her in turns wooden and overly melodramatic. MacCorkindale’s just plain bad and looks like he’s not even trying, while Fernando Rey obviously knows he’s Claude Rains’s character from Casablanca and acts appropriately.


On the positive side for the lover of strange films like me, this lends the whole affair a disjointed non-sequitur quality that threatens to reach a dream-like quality more often than not, and sometimes actually does. The best bit of the film when it comes to this sort of thing is certainly the climactic confrontation between the four main characters (fortunately without MacCorkindale) in the bar of Bronson’s hotel that involves full-on Italian-style lighting, a potentially explosive jukebox and a parrot, among rather more normal accoutrements like guns. It’s the sort of scene that would have made wading through a much more boring film worthwhile; in the context of Caboblanco’s general strangeness, it’s the cherry on the cake.

Three Films Make A Post: WARNING: If you've ever been hypnotized, do not come alone!

Devil in the Dark (2017): Tim Brown’s film concerns two estranged brothers trying to rebuild bridges by going on a camping trip in an area that has a dark connection to something strange that happened to the younger brother when they were children. Something monstrous has been calling to them.

This is one of these perfectly decent, competently realized horror films that just never manage to truly capture anything dark, interesting, or insightful, plodding along well enough through its running time without ever hitting the right spot that would turn the film exciting in any way, shape or form. In this particular case, I’d argue this would have been a better film if it had started from where it stops and went onwards from there (probably with strategic flashbacks), because the last minute or so actually does manage to capture the imagination.

The Creature Below (2016): This British Lovecraftian indie is not as slick as Devil in the Dark but felt much more interesting than the US film. While the story isn’t particularly original when you know your Lovecraft pastiches, there aren’t terribly many long-form films going that way. Director Stewart Sparke manages to tell a tale of cosmic horror on a personal scale, trusting in a good performance of lead Anna Dawson to portray her character’s slow descent into properly Lovecraftian madness. There’s some awkwardness with a not exactly ideal sound mix, the special effects aren’t always great (unless in those moments when they absolutely are), and the verbatim quotes from HPL in the dialogue don’t really work, but these aren’t exactly show stoppers in indie horror of the really independent sort. Otherwise, the film is atmospheric and flows well and even ends on a high note in one of its best shot scenes. Okay, and on iffy CGI, but I didn’t find myself caring about that at all.

House of Wax (1953): André de Toth’s film is probably the best wax figure cabinet horror movie ever made (which is actually a surprisingly strong field as sub-sub-genres go), featuring as it does silly 3D gimmicks, what is one of the founding – and thoroughly great - performances of Vincent Price’s career as a horror actor (I do count his radio performances, nit pickers), an early larger – and pleasantly creepy - outing for Charles Bronson before he took that name, comic relief that is often not terribly odious, a wrily presented sense of the macabre, and a use of colour in a period set horror film that to me seems to prefigure things like Corman’s Poe cycle or the part of the Italian gothics that were shot in colour.

De Toth being de Toth, there’s also quite a bit of barely suppressed subtext concerning eroticism and male obsession with an imaginary ideal (potentially sublimated into art) that really shouldn’t work with the gimmicky nature of the kind of cinema that uses ping pong balls swirling at the camera to really prove its 3D merits but does.

In short: The Dirty Dozen (1967)

Two months or so before D-Day. Deeply impolitic Major Reisman (Lee Marvin) is given the mission to quickly turn a dozen men convicted to death or decades of hard labour into a small commando unit that will parachute behind enemy lines on the day of the Allied invasion and attack a castle full of high-ranking Wehrmacht officers on R&R. All in exchange for the possibility of a commuted sentence. Reisman’s men (among them characters played by Charles Bronson, Jim Brown, John Cassavetes, Telly Savalas, Donald Sutherland and Clint Walker) range from the unlucky over the socially maladjusted, to guys who shouldn’t be in any army even at wartime, and the downright homicidally maniacal, so he has his work cut out for him turning them into some kind of team.

Because that and the suicide mission just aren’t enough to fill two and a half hours of movie, Reisman also has to cope with the obstructionism of the excellently named Colonel Everett Dasher Breed (Robert Ryan).

Given how many Italian, Japanese, and other movies I’ve seen that operate on this film’s basic plot - though they are usually an hour shorter and more focussed on the climactic mission - it’s a bit of a surprise I have only now come around to watching Robert Aldrich’s original “men of dubious moral fibre on a suicide mission” film. Well, it does make a degree of sense to keep something good for last.

And say what you want about The Dirty Dozen, it’s impossible not to at least call it a good film. I’d even go with excellent, but then I have a weakness for quite this well-developed machismo.
The cast is of course brilliant, and they turn what could be a bunch of boring clichés into a lively crew of misfits whose interactions are generally a joy to watch, even in the handful of moments when the film goes off for a bit of unfunny humour (of a sort that is certainly not improved by the score just barely avoiding slide whistles after each joke). These are the only moments in the film that do feel like filler, otherwise this two and a half hour movie feels much shorter, and rather more personal than epic.

Among the film’s other pleasures are a deep disregard for authority and generals not played by Ernest Borgnine, a cynical view on war as well the self-consciousness to know that the mission the audience wants their heroes to fulfil is indeed brutal and rather horrible. Aldrich does manage to make us root for the characters without pretending the things they heroically do are in itself heroic or all of them are particularly nice people.

Which is pretty much the holy grail of action movies and films about cool violence, a having its cake and eating it too that shouldn’t work at all but does so rather brilliantly. It’s a film that tells a war adventure story without wanting to lie too much about what a war adventure actually entails.

Past Misdeeds: The White Buffalo (1977)

Through the transformation of the glorious WTF-Films into the even more glorious Exploder Button and the ensuing server changes, some of my old columns for the site have gone the way of all things internet. I’m going to repost them here in irregular intervals in addition to my usual ramblings.

Please keep in mind these are the old posts without any re-writes or improvements. Furthermore, many of these pieces were written years ago, so if you feel offended or need to violently disagree with me in the comments, you can be pretty sure I won’t know why I wrote what I wrote anymore anyhow.

Wild Bill Hickock (Charles Bronson) returns from his showbiz career to the West to fight against destiny. Hickock is plagued by a recurring nightmare about battling a gigantic white buffalo (that looks very much like the mechanical construct it is) on a snowy, disquietingly artificial looking plateau. He usually wakes up from the dream with guns blazing. Hickock believes that his dream enemy really exists and that he has to find and kill it or be doomed in some inexplicable way.

The gunman has too much of a history in the West, and so uses the pseudonym of James Otis, but he can't help meeting old enemies like Captain Tom Custer (Ed Lauter) or his former love Poker Jenny (Kim Novak), saying goodbye to various parts of his old life in one way or the other.

Hickock's also quite good at making new enemies, like Whistling Jack Kileen (Clint Walker, in the Western surroundings a much more convincing actor than in any of the non-Westerns I have seen him act in), who follows Hickock into the mountains when the gunman and an old acquaintance, the trapper Charlie Zane (Jack Warden), move out into the mountains where Zane was nearly killed by a rock fall caused by the white buffalo.

Also hunting the strange animal is Crazy Horse (Will Sampson), now going under the moniker of Worm. The animal had attacked one of the Oglala villages and killed the war chief's daughter, leaving him without his name and position until he can wrap her body into the buffalo's pelt.

Despite Hickock's racism and Worm's distrust of white people, the two men recognize the kindred spirit in the other when they meet and help each other in their desperate hunt as best as men like them are able to.

The White Buffalo surely is one of the weirder Westerns to come out of the US, and not at all the typical late 70s Bronson vehicle I would have expected from a director like the usually very down-to-Earth J. Lee Thompson. It's as if Thompson and his star (also not exactly known to feature in flights of fancy) had had a very peculiar dream of making a sort of movie they didn't usually make themselves.

The film is a strange mixture of the scepticism and semi-naturalism of the revisionist Western and the feeling of utter irreality one usually only finds in dreams, the naturalistic elements so peculiar in and of themselves that they are only bound to strengthen the dream-like aspects of the movie.

I suspect this wavering between the hyper-real and the completely unreal will be what truly makes or breaks the film for a given viewer - either you will be sucked in by the mood of mythical doom by the way of both Moby Dick and Jaws embedded in a semi-cynical (and very dirty) interpretation of the Old West, or you will just be annoyed by the way everything in the film feels just a little bit off. Often, the two antithetical impulses of The White Buffalo seem to wrestle each other until either the naturalism or the irreality decide to give up for a scene or two and let its enemy do its own thing.

This feeling of two forces fighting each other runs through the whole film. It is there on a plot level with the obvious duel between the men and the animal (which sometimes seems to stand in for a self-destructive part of their nature, sometimes to want to say something about the nature of the Old West it just can't bring into precise words), and in how the older, less dumb Hickock fights against the consequences the actions of his brash younger self still leave him to deal with decades later.

It can also be found in the film's handling of dialogue full of realistic (or rather realistic sounding, I certainly don't know how people of the time and place actually spoke) jargon and phrases my modern ear needed to work hard on parsing, that is spoken in a consciously artificial sounding way that permanently points out its own artificiality.

And this feeling is also there in the contrast between some fantastic (well, if you're like me and like to look at snowy mountains and Bronson Canyon) looking location shots and the beautiful yet obviously fake sets that make up most of the movie's night sequences and interior scenes.
Somehow, all this strangeness and contradictoriness comes together to form one of the most dream-like Westerns I have ever seen, the sort of film that dreams itself being Moby Dick as written by an opium-addicted Western pulp writer.

Apart from being as damn peculiar as films come, The White Buffalo is also a very slow film without the clear and strong plotting that is typical for most US Westerns, though not necessarily those of the revisionist type. Here, again, the slow drifting feel of a dream comes to mind. I find it difficult to imagine a rhythm that would fit this movie better. Its mixture of myth, historical figures which carry their own myths around their necks, and a still romantic view of an historical era that pretends to be a sceptical and unromantic view would fit badly into something straight and fast.

That also seems to have been what Thompson thought, and so his camera work tends to the unhurried and slow throughout, giving even shoot-outs something ponderous, as if time in The White Buffalo would not function in quite the same way as the audience understands it. I suspect the influence of especially Leone's Spaghetti Western here.

Thompson, or probably Richard Sale's script, also point out the moral complexity of the life at the frontier from time to time, in short political discussions between Hickock and Worm, or the rather sobering way Zane isn't able to treat Crazy Horse as a fellow human being at a point where most other films would have the frontiersman and the warrior become grand friends, but as thoughtful as these moments are, they only make the film's actual thematic core more muddled, like that of Moby Dick after 150 years of interpretation. Say a dozen things and each and every one of them can be found somewhere in the movie, but don't expect any of them to be "what the film is about".


To me, that's not a bad thing in a dream-like semi-naturalistic Western about Wild Bill Hickok and Crazy Horse hunting a supernatural white buffalo; it's rather what I want from it.

In short: Messenger of Death (1988)

Denver, Colorado. The family – wives and children all - of Orville Beecham (Charles Dierkop), member of a Mormon splinter sect who think Utah-style Mormonism is just too gosh darn modern, is murdered by a shadowy figure with a shotgun. The police as represented by Chief Barney Doyle (Daniel Benzali) haven’t got a clue beyond putting Orville in custody for a time.

Fortunately, experienced, public-minded - and as it will later turn out two-fisted - reporter Garret “Gar” Smith (Charles Bronson) takes an interest in the case. At first, his investigation points in the direction of a religious feud between Orville’s father Willis (Jeff Corey) and Willis’s brother Zenas (John Ireland). At least, these two guys loather each other so much they believe the other responsible for the murders; and seeing that their respective – hopefully fictitious - versions of Mormonism put a heavy emphasis on smiting evildoers violently to save their souls, Gar suspects there just might be a bloodbath in the making. Quite unlike most other Bronson characters, Gar is set against this sort of thing and does his best to prevent further violence. He’s particularly keen because he suspects somebody else is using the family problems for their own nefarious plans. Hint to other potential conspirators: don’t repeatedly send your own company water trucks to murder a journalist, especially not one played by Charles Bronson.

For the standards of a late-period Bronson movie, Messenger of Death is strikingly original. Not only isn’t our hero a crazed vigilante, he also isn’t killing anyone at all during the course of the film. The film’s first half or so even sees our hero putting all of his effort into understanding a situation to prevent further bloodshed! Basically, this is bizarro Bronson land where everything you thought was true about Bronson characters is wrong.

If you’ve watched enough Cannon era Bronson, this J. Lee Thompson film is a bit of an oasis of sanity, with Bronson presenting a laidback confidence that makes Gar actually rather likeable, even suggesting a degree of personhood. He even seems mildly shaken up by violence. And while the conspiracy plot makes only a tiny amount of sense, it does so in low-key conspiracy thriller way instead of your usual Cannon craziness, certainly making the film less uproariously entertaining than the norm but providing a more human-sized kind of thriller that has its own charms.

As a director, Thompson seems rather more at home here than in Death Wish land. He’s not turning out a particularly energetic film (though there are two fine action scenes and a handful of solid suspense sequences in the movie), but there’s a relaxed rhythm to his work here that fits Bronson’s performance. Messenger of Death feels like two elderly gentlemen who know each other’s strengths and weaknesses quite well are making a somewhat friendlier film than anything they’ve done in quite some time, and enjoying themselves doing it.

As an admirer of the Thompson/Bronson films, I’m pretty happy about this.

In short: Death Wish 4: The Crackdown (1987)

After his very impressive killing spree in New York, serial vigilante Paul Kersey (Charles Bronson) has retired from the business and is working as an architect in Los Angeles again. He has already acquired a new family in form of girlfriend and journalist Karen Sheldon (Kay Lenz) and her daughter Erica (Dana Barron). But don’t worry, Kersey will soon enough find a reason to murder again, for Erica dies of a cocaine overdose. After Kersey kills the dealer responsible, he is contacted by a mysterious millionaire (John P. Ryan) who convinces him to think bigger and stop the drug problem once and for all. To that goal he provides Kersey with arms and information about the two major LA drug operations.

Kersey’s soon in his serial killing groove again, despite the usual incompetent (George Dickerson) and corrupt (Soon-Tek Oh) cops on his trail. He even has a plan he must have read in a Punisher comic: provoke the two drug groups into a gang war, because that sort of thing has never cost innocent lives, right?

After the sheer insanity of Death Wish 3, J. Lee Thompson’s The Crackdown is a bit of a let-down in its insistence on being only general action movie dumb instead of completely out of its mind, and of being mildly tasteless instead of a Michael Winner film. There’s just no way a competent little action film without all too much that’s memorable can look exciting compared to the force of nature that came before.

Of course, I don’t really see how the sequel ever could have topped what was going on in part 3, particularly that film’s final half hour. This goes even more so with someone like Thompson in the director’s chair who seems somewhat lost in the kind of explosion fest this tries to be, coming more from a classical thriller background as he does, and sometimes looking as if he struggles to get quite as unsubtle as the material needs him to be. Consequently, the best directed scenes here aren’t the large shoot-outs or the roller rink massacre in the end, but the smaller skirmishes when Bronson fights only a handful of guys, because then the rules of the thriller apply instead of those of the 80s action film, Cannon style.

The Crackdown is still decent entertainment, mind you, for while Thompson isn’t putting his best foot forward, there’s enough basic competence here to keep the film moving, and such a mass of explosions, dead bodies and general carnage (if you just pretend you haven’t seen the true meaning of these words in Death Wish 3), the worst thing I have to say about it is that it doesn’t feature particularly memorable explosions or carnage.

The Evil That Men Do (1984)

The ever so subtly named Doctor Molloch (Joseph Maher) has been working for quite a few dictatorships of one stripe or another - the film doesn’t seem to care which kind and just hates ‘em all, of which I approve. He’s the man to go to when you need a lecture on torturing somebody to death with a demonstration on a live subject, and everything else you might find particularly disgusting. Curiously, he doesn’t speak with the expected fake German accent but does British upperclass.

Anyway, one of Molloch’s latest victims is the journalist George. George’s death is the last straw for Hector Lomelin (José Ferrer), a psychologist heading a clinic for the victims of people like Molloch. Because he’s protected by many powerful men from many different countries, there’s no hope of the law of any country ever being any use against him, so Molloch has to die. Hector goes to a friend of George, the retired killer Holland (Charles Bronson) to hire him to kill Molloch. Holland is a bit reluctant at first, but a little session with a bunch of video tapes of Molloch’s – generally only called “The Doctor”, so he’s a trademark infringer too - surviving victims telling of their experiences changes his mind.

Holland has to act fast, too, for the country Molloch has been employed in for some time now tries to pretend it holds itself to the usual standards of human rights and wants the Doctor to disappear from their soil as quickly as possible.

Holland starts his investigation disguised as a tourist. To be less suspicious he needs a woman and a child for a bit of pretend family life. Because the script gods demand it, the family of choice are George’s widow Rhiana (Theresa Saldana) and her daughter, so nothing at all can go wrong here, and there certainly won’t be any kidnapping of daughters going on, no sir.

But seriously, while taking Rhiana being Holland’s own idea sounds utterly preposterous, J. Lee Thompson’s film does make rather good use of her, giving her the job to react like an actual human being to Holland’s cold acts of violence, with all the messy emotions at work you’d expect. For the people Rhiana sees Holland kill have murdered (or are at least co-responsible for this) her husband in the most cruel way, after all. While Rhiana certainly is coming to trust Holland, the expected somewhat icky love story between the two doesn’t really happen, and she’s certainly never coming round to seeing violence Holland’s way.

Of course, this not being a Deathwish movie, and it being directed by the good one of Bronson’s two core directors of this era, J. Lee Thompson (imagine a long rant about the misguided rediscovery of sleazoid hack Michael Winner here), Holland is never actually explaining how he sells his violence to himself via a self-righteous monologue or three; the closest the film ever gets is him telling Rhiana that he doesn’t see killing as she does, which doesn’t sound very satisfying, but does suggest he’s a man who never tried to look at himself from outside much. In fact, if anyone here is influenced by anyone else’s view, it’s probably Holland starting to see himself a little through Rhiana’s eyes.

The film does never clearly resolve this issue. This might come as a disappointment to some but I think it’s refreshing to find a film looking at a messy mix of differing morals and ideas of what is right and wrong and not feeling the need to have one character or the other come on over to the other’s side completely as a way to tell the audience what it is supposed to think.

Apart from that, this is a typical, calm Thompson film, lacking the showiness and the sleazy nastiness of a Michael Winner movie and putting actual competence and some moments of shocking violence that are indeed meant to be shocking in their place. Thompson’s probably one of the least flashy directors I know, but the man did know how to go from moments of calmness to short and sharp outbreaks of violence and action, and back to calmness in an organic matter like few others, never showing many a thriller and action director’s fear of the moment when nothing explodes.

Death Wish 3 (1985)

After various acts of vigilantism in other cities, mass-murdering vigilante Paul Kersey (Charles Bronson) returns to his native New York (in large parts represented by London, England, because of course it is) to visit his old friend Charlie. Alas, Charlie is murdered by a the multi-racial (hey, we’re for equal opportunity slaughter, one can’t help but might imagine the film saying) gang dominating the poor area he’s living in right before Kelsey arrives.

The police finds Kersey gun in hand over the dead body, and so decide he’s clearly the killer, arrest him, and torture him a bit. This is the most enthusiastic law enforcement in this film will ever get about fighting crime before the grand finale rolls around, so cherish the moment. This approach to police work naturally causes our mass-murdering vigilante hero to complain about the police ignoring his constitutional rights. Lucky for him, police Lieutenant Shriker (Ed Lauter) is one of his biggest fans (when he doesn’t punch him in the face), so our hero only has to spend a night or so behind bars where he makes the acquaintance of what will become the movie’s main bad guy. What are the odds! Afterwards, Shriker presses Kersey to go out and do his vigilante thing, otherwise he’ll rot in jail – as if our hero wouldn’t go on a killing spree in any case.

Which he does, helping out various elderly tenants, getting them killed while he’s at it, putting in five minutes for the most perfunctory romance plot ever written into a film just to get the woman killed too (as if Kersey would need that as a motivation for a bit of a rampage), and so on, and so forth, until the whole thing culminates in twenty minutes of mind-bogglingly bizarre carnage.

I’ve repeatedly gone on record about how much I loathe the first two Death Wish films, their ethics, their tone, and their shitty direction by crap artist Michael Winner. Death Wish 3 on the other hand is one of the greatest gifts the silver screen ever made to humanity, a conglomeration of stupidity, inanity and full-out insanity that just barely resembles anything you’d call a movie but that tickles every damn fancy I might even imagine having, reaching the kind of insanity you’ll otherwise only find in a very select group of Italian action movies made in the 80s.

It is often very difficult to discern which parts of Death Wish 3 are actually meant to be funny, and which just are. Because frankly, everything except the rape scenes (which the film really could have gone without, but Winner never seems to have been able to pass up on a rape or three in his movies) here is funny in one way or the other – be it Bronson’s “just a day in the office” facial expression when he shoots down a whole horde of “creeps” (as everyone in the film calls the gang members) with a large machine gun, or the way chief bad guy Fraker (Gavan O’Herlihy) calls in more bodies for the grand finale via a phone call to what I can only imagine to be “1-800-Dial-A-Henchhorde”. Said bodies, by the way, arrive in form of a motorcycle gang that must be rather conflicted, seeing that a lot of them are wearing Nazi paraphernalia while other members are black.

No matter, though, for Charles and various characters we have never seen before but who are clearly inspired by all the violence he has inflicted on the creeps – who complain about Bronson’s harsh “justice” with statements like “They killed the Giggler, man. They killed the Giggler!” – blow away all comers. Cue scenes of elderly people cheering while a whole bunch of people (the Internet suggests a body count of 78, 52 of which are Bronson’s responsibility, and I don’t think the Internet is exaggerating this time) are mowed down, and buildings catch fire. It’s a thing you really needs to see to believe, and even then you just might not be sure you’re not hallucinating.

I’m very fond of Bronson’s decision to attempt to go for a performance even more deadpan than his usual style, making Kersey the kind of guy whose reaction to the death of his grand-daughter-aged new girlfriend (who basically throws herself at him after they’ve exchanged two sentences, perhaps three) is just the same he shows when he shoots a guy (the Giggler) in the back during an absurd trap involving a camera bag and ice cream – none whatsoever. Of course, that’s probably the only way anyone involved in this thing could be expected to keep a straight face.

What else is there to say? So much, for there’s really no minute going by here that does not contain a new helping of insane action movie nonsense of the highest order. It’s beautiful, ridiculous and enough to justify the existence of all five Death Wish films.

Breakheart Pass (1975)

An Army train secretly carrying diphtheria medication, a doctor (David Huddleston) and replacement soldiers led by Major Claremont (Ed Lauter) for Fort Humboldt, has to cross the Rocky Mountains. The train also carries US senator Fairchild (Richard Crenna) who accompanies his fiancée Marica (Jill Ireland) to her father, the highest officer of the Fort. Apart from the Doctor and the senator, nobody else on board knows about the diphtheria situation, and that will only change when the train will have reached the point of no return.

On the last stop before that point is reached, the train rather unwillingly picks up Marshal Pearce (Ben Johnson) who has just rather accidentally caught former doctor, con artist and murderer John Deakin (Charles Bronson). Ironically, Deakin will turn out to be the ideal detective when a series of curious accidents and murders begins to hinder the train’s journey.

Though Tom Gries’s (who was also responsible for the fantastic Will Penny) direction seems a bit perfunctory and TV movie like from time to time, lacking a bit of edge and sometimes even the sense for making the best out of some of the film’s set pieces, Breakheart Pass still turns out to be an excellent film. The script by Alistair MacLean based on his own novel provides a surprisingly clever, and often cleverly surprising mixture of the mystery and the Western genres, both working well together not just because of the relative (there are of course other genres mixtures of its type) novelty of the mix but because MacLean (and perhaps Gries) actually seems to have a very clear idea which parts of the Western genre and which of the mystery film mix well and which don’t.

Some of the film’s better red herrings are more effective if the audience involved has some working knowledge of the Western genre and its clichés and habits because they are at times running against exactly these expectations. Not with a grand gesture of deconstruction or from a position of ironic knowingness, as much as from the more practical kind of view the sort of commercial writer MacLean was for better (in this case) or for worse (in many other cases) comes to reach with experience in his craft, using the expectations of an audience against it not to necessarily to make it think about genre structures and what they might mean but to provide it with the joy of surprise. One might complain that this approach lacks a certain depth, but then one should by all rights be too entertained by the little games MacLean is playing here to care.

I certainly found myself too entertained to complain. Watching Breakheart Pass, I also found myself appreciating many of the little things the film does right: how it introduces the Bronson character as a man focusing on using his brain instead of using his brawn to make the latter scenes when Gries’s depiction of the action becomes more exciting and our hero suddenly does use his brawn a bit surprising and certainly more exciting, while still emphasising the character’s intelligence before his propensity for physical violence; the way Bronson makes tiny little shifts to his at this point well established screen persona that actually make his performance here very convincing; the excellent supporting cast of character actors doing what these people always do in the best, the worst, and the most mediocre films; the moments of witty dialogue that generally come when you least expect it; and how the film implicitly suggests more mysteries should end with a climactic Indian (and these are “Indians”, that is, a bizarre product of unexamined clichés, suppositions and plot functions rather than Native Americans, which are of course various generally mistreated culture groups who have little to nothing to do with Hollywood’s Indians) attack instead of a chunky guy with a fake Belgian accent explaining the plot to people assembled in a room.

All the competence and these minor delights probably don’t turn Breakheart Pass into what people are bound to call a classic, but it’s such a fine example of unassuming yet not stupid genre filmmaking, I can’t say I care if that’s the case or not.

Technorati-Markierungen: american movies,reviews,mystery,western,tom gries,charles bronson,ben johnson,richard crenna,jill ireland,ed lauter

In short: St. Ives (1976)

Former crime reporter, now hapless professional writer who doesn’t get his book done and recreational gambler who can’t win, Raymond St. Ives (Charles Bronson) is hired by the eccentric rich Abner Procane (John Houseman) to work as his middle man in re-acquiring Procane’s stolen journals. Rather curiously, the thieves asked for St. Ives by name, but Procane doesn’t seem all that distrustful about it, and St. Ives acts as if this sort of thing happened to him every day. Which, come to think of it, is pretty much his reaction to everything.

Unflappability is a useful trait to have for St. Ives, too, for the handover of the money the thieves demand for Procane’s precious diaries goes very wrong indeed, and dead bodies start to pop up around our hero with a certain disturbing regularity. Instead of getting dissuaded by this minor piling up of bodies, the intense interest of dumb cops Deal (Harry Guardino) and Oller (Harris Yulin), and the friendly persuasions of his old cop friend Blunt (Dana Elcar), or by various attempts on his own life, St. Ives allows himself to be drawn into the situation further and further, teaming up with Procane, his live-in assistant Janet (Jacqueline Bisset), and his pet psychiatrist Dr. Constable (Maximilian Schell) for some rather dubious plans.

Frequent Bronson director J. Lee Thompson does his best to help the actor transition into a somewhat different persona than his usual kind, the kind of charming rogue with morals you’d find Roger Moore overplay and have turn out as an insufferable smart-ass. Bronson is certainly willing (who wouldn’t be, in his case) but I don’t think he’s actually convincing in a role that demands more smiling and a very particular kind of swagger instead of dead-eyed glaring and quite a different kind of swagger. That could have been quite a problem in a more involved film but this Ross Thomas adaptation does hold deeper human emotions at arms length for most of the time and can therefore live with the central performance that is more trying to be convincing than it is actually convincing.

In fact, part of the film’s semi-comedic charm lies in the sense of old-fashioned stylization with a big nod to Old Hollywood Thompson tries to maintain, and often manages rather successfully to build, turning the film into one giant homage to film’s of an earlier time. And, while Bronson isn’t looking too convincing with his new persona, he still is fun to watch, enough so that I think it’s a bit of shame he only got to let loose this way very seldom during the rest of his career; I wouldn’t be surprised if a few more films of pseudo-Saint shenanigans had turned Bronson into as much of a pro in this kind of role as he seems have to been in doing his usual shtick.

Be that as it may, the film at hand is a sometimes charming, sometimes very 70s, piece of old-fashioned entertainment, the sort of thing I’d call “diverting” if that did not sound quite as damning with faint praise when what it actually means is that St. Ives fulfils its function as an escapist piece of entertainment excellently, and there’s never any shame at all in that.

Technorati-Markierungen: american movies,in short,j. lee thompson,charles bronson,john houseman,jacqueline bisset,maximilian schell,mystery,crime

Three Films Make A Post: Blood-curdling giant fly creature runs amuck!!!

Le Saut de l’ange (1971): This is a grim, rather cynical revenge movie by Yves Boisset about a bloody election in Marseille, or rather Jean Yanne coming back from a self-imposed Thai exile to take revenge for his wife and kid who are (quite uselessly) killed for reasons of politics and money he doesn’t actually have anything to do with anymore. In Boisset’s hands, it is a somewhat dry, deliberately paced crime movie with jabs of intense, sharp violence, a basic feeling of hopelessness, and a sense of barely repressed political anger. It is, as they say, quite a good film if you like that sort of thing, which I do, particularly when it includes the handful of moments of brilliant filmmaking this one does, moments when the film stops being dry completely and somehow turns its quite down-to-earth idea of how horrible violence works mythical without actually changing its posture at all. Call it alchemy.

Because Boisset is a director of taste, the film also features fan (that would be me) favourites Gordon Mitchell, Senta Berger and Sterling Hayden.

Espion, lève-toi (1982): Speaking of Yves Boisset, there’s also this spy movie with Lino Ventura as a French sleeper agent situated in Switzerland who finds himself reactivated only to stumble through a business so labyrinthine, he doesn’t even know if the people who tell him he’s working for them are actually who they say they are. On the pacing level, this is also rather slow, but it is again a sure-handed slowness the film needs to get to breathe. It’s less overtly violent than the older movie but that’s because it is really much more useful for the film’s goal of having its audience share its protagonist’s feeling of alienation and confusion to keep the violence off-screen and ambiguous.

If you’re the type to enjoy films that are structured like a peculiarly nasty kind of chess – abstract until they become all too personal – like I sometimes do, this is a pretty perfect example of it. Parts of the film are really about what very abstract strategic goals do to the people who are part of the strategy, the moment when the blind and indifferent forces of politics turn against you, or rather, use your personal loyalties, your humanity, to make you their chess piece until its time for you to disappear forever.

Breakout (1975): If there’s a place in your heart for middling 70s action movies, that’s where Tom Gries’s film probably lives. It’s not a bad film at all, but one that doesn’t make enough use of a great cast (Charles Bronson! Robert Duvall! Randy Quaid! Jill Ireland!), and could do quite a bit more with the basic set-up of a charming rogue (surprisingly enough Bronson) trying to get an innocent rich American (Duvall) out of jail because he’s rather fond of the rich man’s wife (Ireland). And money. I know, it’s “based on a true story” but when has that ever stopped a movie from changing the truth into something more entertaining?

Despite its lack of depth, it’s still a fun enough film, if only because it provides an opportunity to witness Bronson smile and emote and wisecrack.

Technorati-Markierungen: french movies,american movies,action,thriller,spies,yves boisset,jean yanne,gordon mitchell,senta berger,sterling hayden,lino ventura,charles bronson,robert duvall,jill ireland,randy quaid

On WTF: The White Buffalo (1977)

There is only a disappointingly small number of Westerns that incorporate elements of the weird and the fantastic, but from time to time, one stumbles about one of those few in places where one least expected them.

In this case, buried in the filmography of J. Lee Thompson and Charles Bronson and financed by good old mad Dino De Laurentiis.

It's a film about Wild Bill Hickock and Crazy Horse hunting a not completely natural white buffalo, and my write-up on WTF-Film explains why I loved it.

 

Technorati-Tags: american movies,j. lee thompson,charles bronson,will sampson,jack warden,clint walker,fantasy,western,reviews,other places