Word: bronsonism
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Surprise: a good Charles Bronson movie. Hard Times is unassuming, tough and spare, a tidy little parable about strength and honor. Against current Hollywood competition, which lately seems underthought and overextended, Hard Times is especially welcome...
...play, never has to even try once the cameras get rolling. Charisma, which is his excuse, is based on double takes and spiraling eyes and the ticks and flutters that make a face interesting, as long as the role doesn't demand any grey matter behind it. But Charles Bronson-his features wouldn't twitter a fraction if he were hit by a truck, yet he dominates this picture like the best of them...
...hard to figure. Somehow Walter Hill, who directed Hard Times, has brought out something in Charles Bronson that's never been seen before, and done so in a crass-commercial and silly-ponderous film. ("What did you say your name was?" That's speed speaking, and yes, he's in bed with a prostitute smoking cigarettes after the fact.) The script is cumbersome, the soundtrack amateurish, the crowd scenes lifeless, the final moral conflict dance like and played so badly that you actually oppose the hero's crowning heroics. Yet it is, particularly for director Hill's first effort, stunning...
...Maybe Bronson gets his lift from the visuals, then: he looks like a statue placed perfectly to fill in these scenes. Indeed, if there's one problem with Hill's tableau, it's that the period stuff looks a little stagy and flat (less so than most contemporary American movies set in the urban thirties, The Sting, Lady Sings the Blues, etc., but tacky compared to what the Europeans can do, maybe because they have the buildings and untouched sections of cities to do it with). In this case perhaps Bronson-the beaten face, the mistrustful eyes-is just another...
...BRONSON is more than a statue here. His character moves, and as it moves it appeals on an incredibly basic level. Somewhere in his bunched visage is a wizened hint of sensitivity, and it beams out in this movie of all others because Hill has found an atmosphere to fit. In hard times, the justification for total selfishness and materialism is just that-it's hard times, brother. Bronson's character is genuine here because the face-the lines and creases and years etched into it-embodies the spirit of the time and the long line of outcasts created...