A look at Charles Bronson’s career in light of the “Death Wish” remake.
Charles Bronson was too good for “Death Wish.” Or at least for that 1974 exploitation film to still be a big part of his legacy.
The new Bruce Willis remake brings to mind the original, and how it forever clouded perceptions of Bronson as an actor.
Bronson’s career lasted 50 years and encompassed “The Great Escape,” “The Dirty Dozen” and works by Tennessee Williams and Sergio Leone. Yet, he forever will be associated with one of the most simplistic films ever made — one in which a man whose wife has been killed and his daughter sexually assaulted exacts revenge by killing criminals with no link to the original crime.
Today’s streaming-service algorithms — the ones that suggest films you might like based on the one you watched — equate Bronson with Steven Seagal or Dolph Lundgren. This is in part because Bronson made four sequels to “Wish.” But that’s still just five of his 150-plus screen credits, and they do not tell his story.
Bronson, who died at 81 in 2003, was always tough, a World War II veteran with a muscular build and a face slightly too compact in arrangement of features to be classically handsome. He was a natural for roles in which fists and other weapons were wielded. His sometimes wooden delivery hardly mattered, since his appeal lay in his quiet magnetism.
Bronson’s screen presence was so steady that his trashier films, like “Wish,” did not stick to his reputation during his heyday the way they have in retrospect. He was a beloved figure, famously devoted to his wife and frequent co-star Jill Ireland, whose public battle with breast cancer helped raise awareness of the disease before she died in 1990.
Bronson also made interesting, non-simplistic films even after “Wish” made him a star. They are just not the Bronson films people remember.
Any actor who worked as often as Bronson did in the 1960s and ’70s could not help but brush against the psychologically complex themes and experimental ideas of the day. And by experimental, we do not mean films in which Bronson, a Lithuanian American, played Mexican or American Indian characters. Those were still products of Hollywood’s long-held casting philosophy of “Eastern European? Close enough.”
In 1966, Bronson played a crass pursuer of Natalie Wood’s character in “This Property Is Condemned,” which was based on a Williams play and followed the playwright’s template of female characters as variations on Miss Havisham and male characters as their virile, feral tormentors. Yet, Bronson still stood out, with his alternately creepy and moony portrayal of a man biding his time dating Wood’s mother while vying for the younger woman’s attention.
Bronson helped tweak the Western format by appearing as the harmonica-playing gunman in Leone’s 1968 epic “Once Upon a Time in the West.” Leone’s lingering closeups exploited Bronson’s fascinating stillness and the beauty of his face when devoid of his signature wispy mustache.
The mustache appeared in Bronson’s next revisionist Western, 1976’s “From Noon Till Three.” But all other aspects of that fanciful film lay outside Bronson’s comfort zone. His outlaw character beds a widow (Ireland) during a brief stop in an Old West