REVIEW OF THE ARTS
American Letter
Al Capp on a film for the vigilantes
The most significant artistic event in America in the last decade is the audience reaction to a cheaplymade, shoot-'em-up film called Death Wish, starring Charles Bronson. "Charles who?" Spectator readers may ask. Millions of filmgoers who don't read The Spectator Know Charles Bronson and adore hirn. So many millions as to have tnade him, today, the biggest box Office star in the world, his latest film the biggest money-maker, and the fashion-setter for producers Who will imitate anything that Makes a buck.
Bronson must be fiftyish now. He is of slightly less than medium height, with a lithe, boyish figure. His face is vaguely Oriental and e„.?(Pressionless, like a death-mask of Genghis Khan. He exudes maniacal Purposefulness and total indestructibility. After an increasingly undistinguished career playing supporting roles in films and TV, he vanished from Hollywood, and nobody much noticed he was gone.
Then the word seeped back that Bronson, who had been making films in Italy was becoming one of the biggest stars on the Continent. A couple of his early films were 'dubbed', noticeably inexpensively, and gingerly exhibited in third-rate US theatres. They broke box-office records.
, In the last year or so five of his laths were 'dubbed,' with more
care, and shown here: The Mechanic, The Stone Killer, The Valachi Papers, Mr Maiestyk and Death Wish. The first four made more money than any other films last year. Death Wish may make more money than any other film ever. The plots don't vary much. Mainly it's killing. No five minutes of footage in any Bronson film is without a killing. In The Mechanic, The Stone Kilter and The Valacht Papers he played a hired killer. In Mr Majestyk he killed hired killers. In Death Wish to judge by audience reaction, he plays Eveiyman.
Oddly, it doesn't seem to matter to Bronson fans whether he plays a criminal killer, or an amateur who kills criminal killers. The public loves him and the critics ignored , him. He was, clearly, beneath their notice. They quarelled among themselves about films nobody went to see except critics. Bronson's films were ignored on the possibly reasonable grounds that anyone who went to see them couldn't read. He might have gone along, happily, for years, making films that no one cared about except millions of filmgoers, if the critics hadn't noticed queues forming at Death Wish larger than those at The Godfather last year, or Love Story the year before.. And the response is different. At Love Story they wept; at The Godfather they shuddered. At Death Wish they break into applause and cheers throughout the film, and all but give it a, standing ovation at the end.
Bronson plays a successful New York City architect, although he doesn't seem quite bright enough. His father had trained him to be a crack marksman, but, because of a grisly hunting accident he saw as a boy, he had grown up with a horror of killing any living thing. He was a conscientious objector in the Kor en War, but served his full time in combat medical' corps. He is a liberal with all the decent liberal attitudes. He is not as grieved as his associates are, by the frightening statistics of street violence by young hoodlums in the city. He is grieved mainly that society has failed so many of its young.
He comes home one night to find his wife stomped to death, his newly-married daughter beaten to insensibility by young hoodlums. They have left an unmistakable clue. The walls of the apartment, and the bodies of the women, have been maniacally sprayed by a paint gun, the calling card of the berserk young. There are no other clues. No hope of identifying them from an examination of police pictures, or by a description. His daughter has become a vegetable. The weary police assure him they will do all they can, but they admit they can't do much. The incident is simply another statistic, along with a score that day, hundreds that month. There is no one in an audience here who doesn't know of such statistics, who doesn't ask what Bronson asks of his son-in-law: "If the police can't help us, what can we do?" And there is no one who hasn't heard the reply; "Nothing. We're civilised."
And no one has yet quarrelled with that reply. We concede that better education, better living conditions are a solution and we are willing to be taxed to near asphyxiation to pay for all that, but we wonder if there isn't some solution, to keep us unmugged, unmurdered, our homes unransacked, and our cars unstolen, while we're earning the money to pay for all that. Death Wish gives us another answer, one hidden in so many of us, that to see it erupt, is terrifying.
Our architect arms himself. He ;wanders alone, at night, through the 'unsafe' areas of the city. The muggers attack him. He kills them. As the bodies pile up, his exploits become front-page news. He becomes known as the vigilante.' Street attacks in the city go down from over 900 a week to under 500. The police are in a quandary. 'The vigilante' is helping them to do their job, but he isn't authorised to. To the authorities he is as vexing a problem as the muggers. But to the people in the film he is a hero. And he is to the real-life people in the audience. Neither the public in the film, or the public in the theatre gives a damn whether he's behaving legally or not. It is, obviously, the way they'd all like to behave, and, from their comments as they leave the theatre you get the chilling feeling that, one day, they may. "We need guys like him."
"That's telling it the way it is." "A few vigilantes around and we could take a walk at night."
A cheaply-made shoot-'em-up film has asked this question: can a nation continue to live in such terror, that a vigilante seems a Messiah?
Al Capp, the well-known cartoonist (creator of Li!' Abner), is writing regularly from the US for The Spectator.
Previous page
