Post by Eddie Love on Jan 9, 2011 12:59:34 GMT -5
During his heyday churning out Westerns and crime thrillers and cop movies Charles Bronson struck a very unlikely image of the box office champ. Weathered and craggy with wild, dirty, unkempt hair and an inscrutable smile, he was also a subtle and naturalistic actor. It’s odd to think now that someone so off-hand and unconventional was ever a big star, but he was – even more so overseas than here in the U.S. Some of his many vehicles are pretty unremarkable. However, two years before his one landmark picture DEATH WISH, he and that film’s director collaborated on THE MECHANIC, a film which, when viewed today, calls to mind the words “holy” and “shit”. I’ve seen most of Bronson’s 70s pictures, but only saw this film for the first time recently and I now rank it among the best thrillers of its era.
There isn’t a word of dialogue for the first quarter hour of this film as we watch Bronson go about his craft in the titular profession of a hitman whose marks look like accidents. It’s an audacious, hypnotic set-up and plays out amid crummy, 70s L.A. locations where Bronson fits in perfectly. We then see him in his lavish, opulent home that’s also very eye-catchingly 70s. It’s from here that he gets the instructions for his assignments from a shadowy syndicate.
Next there’s a slightly odd scene with a crime boss played by Keenan Wynn. He was a good friend of Bronson’s criminal fixer father and recounts a chilling story from when Bronson was 8-years old. (And what, Wynn was 15 – there doesn’t seem like that big an age difference between the two actors,) After Wynn is killed, Bronson takes the crime boss’s son (Jan Michael Vincent) on as an apprentice in his deadly profession.
As is customary, Bronson’s wife Jill Ireland shows up for a cameo and it’s a drippy romantic interlude with a sensational pay-off. Shortly after that there’s a sequence with a girlfriend of Vincent’s that is another extraordinarily unique set piece. It’s brilliantly written and performed and neatly sets the table for the film’s second half. The action escalates and the final scenes have that 70s Euro-crime flavor as the pair head off to Italy.
This movie has a simply great screenplay. It’s lean and methodical, almost a character study without being at all too elaborate or over-written. There are a number of deft, perverse touches and a sting in the tale. Michael Winner has a huge critical reputation in his native England and while I‘ve liked other of his films, this is easily his most exciting. It’s not dripping with style or atmospherics. It’s dark and unsettling, but in ways that the viewer is allowed to uncover ourselves. It’s less of a stylistic statement than a film like John Boorman’s fine, but overrated POINT BLANK.
It’s possible that the movie would play a little better with an actor more talented than Vincent in the second lead, but nevertheless the dynamic between the two works perfectly, and if his work is unpolished, it’s on the whole effective. Bronson, however, is superb, wholly believable as a rough-hewn sophisticate whose isolation leads him to strike up the alliance with the younger man.
I can’t believe this film doesn’t enjoy a higher reputation. THE MECHANIC is an ice-cold picture, very much in the 70s vein. Yet even for that era, this has to have been unique for a film to have as its protagonist a killer who is essentially the hero. And one who’s not shown as sinister in the least. A remake of this is coming out in the next few weeks starring Jason Statham and Ben Foster (the poor man’s Ryan Gosling) and if it retains half the balls of this picture, I’ll eat VHS copies of DEATH WISHES I thru V.
Released the same year as DEATH WISH, MR MAJESTYK is an Elmore Leonard adaptation and one of his first modern stories. It’s essentially a contemporary Western and bridges his early work in that genre with his later crime classics. It’s also one of the movie adaptations from this time period the author routinely disparaged, and while it’s okay, you can see why he might hold it in low regard.
Bronson stars as that Leonard mainstay: the underestimated common man with nerves of steel. In this case he’s a watermelon farmer (!) in Northern California who runs afoul of some locals who run a strange scam when they show up on his farm with drunken hobos to work his fields for a pittance. Majestyk though is partial to the Hispanic migrants who – we assume – he gives a fair wage. Anyway, the thugs he runs off press charges against him and he winds up in jail. While being transported Majestyk escapes along with the mob hitman (Al Lettieri) whose men attacked their prison bus. Majestyk tries to bring the mobster into the authorities to mitigate his own beef with the law, but Lettieri manages to escape and rather than skip the country, he stays to exact revenge on Bronson. I won’t spoil things, but let’s just say one way the hitman gets his payback is likely to give the comedian Gallagher a hard-on.
Bronson is good in the early scenes where he faces down the thugs on his farm. Later though, he does have these odd, flippant line readings that sometimes even border on the outright goofy. Letterieri is blustering, but not convincingly menacing. The Leonard hallmark of vivid whack-job villains would need to wait a few years to be fully realized on screen. (With John Glover’s epic turn in Frankenheimer’s 52 PICK-UP)
Like THE MECHANIC this picture is one where any car that veers off the road is likely to promptly burst into flames, more than a few do. There are some good off-road chase scenes towards the end. Otherwise, this is an okay programmer.
There isn’t a word of dialogue for the first quarter hour of this film as we watch Bronson go about his craft in the titular profession of a hitman whose marks look like accidents. It’s an audacious, hypnotic set-up and plays out amid crummy, 70s L.A. locations where Bronson fits in perfectly. We then see him in his lavish, opulent home that’s also very eye-catchingly 70s. It’s from here that he gets the instructions for his assignments from a shadowy syndicate.
Next there’s a slightly odd scene with a crime boss played by Keenan Wynn. He was a good friend of Bronson’s criminal fixer father and recounts a chilling story from when Bronson was 8-years old. (And what, Wynn was 15 – there doesn’t seem like that big an age difference between the two actors,) After Wynn is killed, Bronson takes the crime boss’s son (Jan Michael Vincent) on as an apprentice in his deadly profession.
As is customary, Bronson’s wife Jill Ireland shows up for a cameo and it’s a drippy romantic interlude with a sensational pay-off. Shortly after that there’s a sequence with a girlfriend of Vincent’s that is another extraordinarily unique set piece. It’s brilliantly written and performed and neatly sets the table for the film’s second half. The action escalates and the final scenes have that 70s Euro-crime flavor as the pair head off to Italy.
This movie has a simply great screenplay. It’s lean and methodical, almost a character study without being at all too elaborate or over-written. There are a number of deft, perverse touches and a sting in the tale. Michael Winner has a huge critical reputation in his native England and while I‘ve liked other of his films, this is easily his most exciting. It’s not dripping with style or atmospherics. It’s dark and unsettling, but in ways that the viewer is allowed to uncover ourselves. It’s less of a stylistic statement than a film like John Boorman’s fine, but overrated POINT BLANK.
It’s possible that the movie would play a little better with an actor more talented than Vincent in the second lead, but nevertheless the dynamic between the two works perfectly, and if his work is unpolished, it’s on the whole effective. Bronson, however, is superb, wholly believable as a rough-hewn sophisticate whose isolation leads him to strike up the alliance with the younger man.
I can’t believe this film doesn’t enjoy a higher reputation. THE MECHANIC is an ice-cold picture, very much in the 70s vein. Yet even for that era, this has to have been unique for a film to have as its protagonist a killer who is essentially the hero. And one who’s not shown as sinister in the least. A remake of this is coming out in the next few weeks starring Jason Statham and Ben Foster (the poor man’s Ryan Gosling) and if it retains half the balls of this picture, I’ll eat VHS copies of DEATH WISHES I thru V.
Released the same year as DEATH WISH, MR MAJESTYK is an Elmore Leonard adaptation and one of his first modern stories. It’s essentially a contemporary Western and bridges his early work in that genre with his later crime classics. It’s also one of the movie adaptations from this time period the author routinely disparaged, and while it’s okay, you can see why he might hold it in low regard.
Bronson stars as that Leonard mainstay: the underestimated common man with nerves of steel. In this case he’s a watermelon farmer (!) in Northern California who runs afoul of some locals who run a strange scam when they show up on his farm with drunken hobos to work his fields for a pittance. Majestyk though is partial to the Hispanic migrants who – we assume – he gives a fair wage. Anyway, the thugs he runs off press charges against him and he winds up in jail. While being transported Majestyk escapes along with the mob hitman (Al Lettieri) whose men attacked their prison bus. Majestyk tries to bring the mobster into the authorities to mitigate his own beef with the law, but Lettieri manages to escape and rather than skip the country, he stays to exact revenge on Bronson. I won’t spoil things, but let’s just say one way the hitman gets his payback is likely to give the comedian Gallagher a hard-on.
Bronson is good in the early scenes where he faces down the thugs on his farm. Later though, he does have these odd, flippant line readings that sometimes even border on the outright goofy. Letterieri is blustering, but not convincingly menacing. The Leonard hallmark of vivid whack-job villains would need to wait a few years to be fully realized on screen. (With John Glover’s epic turn in Frankenheimer’s 52 PICK-UP)
Like THE MECHANIC this picture is one where any car that veers off the road is likely to promptly burst into flames, more than a few do. There are some good off-road chase scenes towards the end. Otherwise, this is an okay programmer.
