Charles Bronson achieved stardom relatively late in life, after surviving a harsh childhood as one of 15 children of Polish-Lithuanian parents in the coal country of Pennsylvania, service as an aerial gunner in World War II and close to 20 years as a hard-working journeyman actor in Hollywood movies and TV shows. (That’s him, for example, as Vincent Price’s evil henchman in the 3-D “House of Wax” from 1953.)
It wasn’t until the late ’60s when, as one of several second-tier American stars who had found reliable employment in European genre films, that Bronson began to attract a following. Seeing the soulfulness in his sad eyes and scar-thickened face, Sergio Leone cast him as the soft-spoken, revenge-driven hero of “Once Upon a Time in the West” (1968), a film far more successful in Europe than it was in its heavily cut American release; a starring role in the French thriller “Rider on the Rain” (1970), directed by René Clément, gained him new critical respect in America, though paradoxically in an art-house context.
Entering his 50s, and without much time to lose, Bronson exploited his sudden popularity by appearing in a series of undistinguished crime films, directed by assorted British functionaries (Terence Young, Michael Winner, J. Lee Thompson), usually on European locations. (One important exception was Richard Fleischer’s taut 1974 “Mr. Majestyk,” adapted from a novel by Elmore Leonard.) Sign up for the Watching newsletter, for Times subscribers only. Streaming TV and movie recommendations from critic Margaret Lyons and friends. Try the Watching newsletter for 4 weeks.
After the runaway success of Winner’s crude “Death Wish,” a Nixonian law-and-order fantasy with Bronson as a New York architect turned vigilante, Bronson seemed to abandon his ambitions as an actor and spent most of his late career walking through routine variations on the “Death Wish” formula (including four sequels), in frank pursuit of the paychecks that would allow him to maintain the large family he had founded with his wife (and frequent co-star) Jill Ireland. A waste of potential, perhaps — but for a man who had entered the coal mines at the age of 10, a choice Charles Bronson was entitled to make.
There was one film, though, that gave Bronson his due, that took a full and fair measure of his talent and significance and placed him in a context that summarized and extended his distinctive appeal.
Released in the fall of 1975, and appearing this month as a limited edition Blu-ray from Twilight Time, “Hard Times” was the first film directed by Walter Hill, who was then making a name for himself as an author of unusu ally literate screenplays (among them the scripts that became “The Getaway,” from Sam Peckinpah, and “The Mackintosh Man,” from John Huston).
Set in Louisiana in the early ’30s, “Hard Times” begins with a writerly gesture in the form of a visualized metaphor: a freight train that pulls slowly and steadily into the shot, a massive force moving along as quietly and confidently as will Bronson’s character, Chaney, who is revealed as an unpaying passenger looking out from the shadowy interior of a boxcar. Showing his stuff, Mr. Hill quickly shifts to more cinematic means as he crosscuts on a silent exchange of looks between Bronson and a pair of raggedy children watching the train pass from the bed of a pickup truck — kids who would probably have been Bronson’s age at this point in the Great Depression, in circumstances only slightly better than his own.
Where Bronson is seen long before he is heard, his opposite number, a New Orleans gambler named Speed (James Coburn), is introduced by his voice — booming out odds on a bare-knuckle fight from the depths of a warehouse that is being used as an after-hours arena. Mr. Hill is here introducing the character dynamic — in interviews, he refers to it as “the muscle and the mouth” — that would shape several of his early films, the best-known being the Nick Nolte-Eddie Murphy pairing in “48 Hrs.,” from 1982. The man of action and the man of words: a great combination for the movies (and a great filmmaker, of course, needs to be a little of both).
As he watches Coburn’s fighter go down to quick and ignominious defeat at the hands of the local champion, Bronson sees a chance to make some money and, as he later tells Coburn, to “fill in some in-betweens” — a parenthesis in a life we otherwise learn nothing of. With Coburn as his manager, Bronson moves through a series of illegal, no-holds-barred fights, the stakes becoming bigger as his opponents become more formidable. Despite Bronson’s impassive demeanor, he finds his solitude being compromised, as he is drawn into something resembling friendship with a prostitute (Ireland, making her required appearance); a rumpled, gentlemanly drug addict (Strother Martin); and, finally and unspokenly, Coburn, his opposite and brother.
Directed with great precision and sobriety, “Hard Times” itself seems the taciturn opposite of so much of the unruly, loquacious American cinema of the 1970s: released just weeks after “Dog Day Afternoon,” it seems to come from a completely different planet than does that Sidney Lumet film. But “Hard Times” is rooted in an older tradition.
At one point late in the film, as Bronson lies back on the bed in his dingy hotel room, thinking things over as he watches the blades of a ceiling fan rotate, Mr. Hill reconstructs a famous shot from Jean-Pierre Melville’s 1967 “Samouraï,” in which Alain Delon played another cool, enigmatic loner in a violent profession. (The Delon character was a hit man.) Mr. Hill is here acknowledging a complex genealogy, paying homage to a European homage to Hollywood genre films of the ’40s and ’50s. That lineage is part of Bronson’s DNA, too; he had to pass through Europe to find what made him most American.