Three Films Make A Post: He was a world-class criminal and a working-class hero.

The General (1998): This gangster movie by the great John Boorman about Irish burglar, robber (etc) and perhaps part-time national anti-hero Martin Cahill (portrayed by Brendan Gleeson with perfect nuance even when the character he portrays would deny possessing any of that) was all the rage with critics when it came out, and really doesn’t seem to be part of any conversation anymore. It’s definitely a John Boorman movie in its willingness to be peculiar: at times, it feels more like a very strange comedy than your typical biopic. It portrays its protagonist with as much sarcasm as it does reverence (though there’s some of that, also), understanding the very specific working class charm of the man as well as the fact that he also was a scumbag. Boorman is never willing to make any total statements about his subject, instead treating Cahill as the sort of complicated and contradictory person we all are, denying the audience the easy way of seeing him as a hero or as a villain, therefor denying the kind of easy judgement that sees everyone as either all-virtuous or all-bad that’s all the rage at this political moment in time.

Confessions of a Police Captain aka Confessione di un commissario di polizia al procuratore della repubblica (1971): If you go into this Damiano Damiani joint hoping for more typical hard-hitting Italian 70s cop movie fare, you’ll probably be a little disappointed, for as is so often the case with the director, he’s really only interested in providing as much of the exploitative stuff as he needs to let his social criticism go down easier with an audience. That approach is not always to my taste because it does tend to suggest a pretty patronising view on Damiani’s audience, but in this film, the director avoids most of the spirited monologing he loves so well and instead makes his points via the conflict between a bitter police captain (Martin Balsam) and an idealistic young D.A. (Franco Nero, cleverly and effectively cast against type), who want the same things but completely disagree on how to achieve them, arguing against political and societal corruption by showing what it does to individuals and their view of the world.

It’s a very effective film at this, and even better for the fact that this is one of the Damiani films where the director seems to have put as much heart and energy into the more generic crime elements as he has into the political side of the film, letting one enhance the other quite wonderfully.

Jaca Pocong (2018): A nurse (Acha Septriasa) is tasked to travel to a lonely country home to change an IV and make an injection, but quickly finds herself roped into a wake. Of course, there’s spooky stuff happening. And some of said spooky stuff in Hadrah Daeng Ratu’s Indonesian horror film is rather effective; the spookery is also rather generic in its nature, with only the not quite as worn out last act twist providing a hint of half-originality to the proceedings. It’s not a bad film before that, mind you, just one that seems so satisfied with standards shocks and suspense moments, it never gets too exciting.

On the other hand, it is crafted carefully enough that it also never becomes boring, so there’s that.

In short: Mitchell (1975)

Police detective Mitchell (Joe Don Baker) has few fans in his department. It’s not just his schlubby style and his somewhat dubious manners, it’s also his unwillingness to play politics. When influential mafioso Walter Deaney (John Saxon) shoots a Latino housebreaker in cold blood in the back, Mitchell quickly realizes that the man’s story about self-defence is a badly constructed lie. But when he wants to go for it, his boss calls him off, for apparently, there’s a big FBI investigation running (not that we ever get to see even a single FBI agent) for crimes more important than shooting Mexicans. Instead, as something of punishment, Mitchell is to alone conduct a solo twenty-four hour observation of another gangster, one James Arthur Cummings (Martin Balsam). In this case, Mitchell’s job is to annoy the guy so badly, he’ll talk business with the police. Mitchell, being as hard-headed as he is smelly, and not willing to take any murder lightly, swears to somehow arrest Deaney and get Cummings for something, too.

At least he is indeed an expert at annoying people, so there’s that. From here on out the film turns into a series of increasingly bizarre scenes broken up by standard 70s movie action, our man Joe Don having nice chats with Cummings, getting gifted the services of a high class prostitute (Linda Evans) by an unknown friend – content warning: hot Joe Don Baker action – and a plot about a hijacked heroin delivery develops.

Andrew V. McLaglen’s Joe Don Baker vehicle Mitchell was apparently the victim of a Mystery Science Theater episode (I wouldn’t know, I’m not the point and laugh kind of cult movie fan), but honestly, this isn’t a worse film than many a mid-70s crime/action movie. It’s certainly competently enough filmed by veteran McLaglen, with a couple of improbable but neat enough to keep me awake action sequences embedded into a mix of cop movie clichés; and hey, at least this violent movie cop is sticking it to the big guys (well, the kind of big guys like Cummings who apparently can’t afford more than one thug), seeking justice for the kind of victim movie cops – let’s not even talk about too many real ones - usually don’t cry any tears about.

Mostly, one’s liking for this one will depend heavily on one’s love for watching a sweaty Joe Don butt heads with John Saxon and Martin Balsam in often pretty peculiar surroundings. I take to that sort of thing like Joe Don Baker to free prostitution samples or Linda Evans’s character to Joe Don (I’d have to take the film much more seriously than it does itself or than I do to find these plot elements risible), so I had a fine time watching Mitchell.

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.

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.