Word: bronsonism
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...urban wilderness. A forest of skyscrapers supports a canopy of smog, the streets are a desolate and forbidding territory, human artifices like subway tunnels and telephone booths are derelict endeavors slowly returning to the soil, while primitive creatures roam about. Yes sir, this is the new frontier, and Charlie Bronson is its trailblazing pioneer in Death Wish...
...Bronson plays Paul Kersey, who we are supposed to think is a liberal because he was a Conscientious Objector during the Korean War and because he has refused to leave the city, staking his claim on Riverside Drive. Before long, of course, the wild ones invade Paul's domestic bastion and violate his wife and daughter, and then of course the wife dies and the daughter's brain turns to mush and she must go to a convent for the rest of her days...
Fresh from his fascistic triumphs as a vigilante on the sidewalks of New York in Death Wish, busy Charles Bronson is now giving equal time to liberalmindedness. As Mr. Majestyk, he plays a farmer trying to keep the Mafia out of his melon patch and a nice crew of Mexican migrants at work there, labor goons notwithstanding. Bronson's style is more suited to the open country than it is to the urban landscape...
...Charles Bronson, one of Hollywood's hottest actors (Death Wish, Mr. Majestyk), was really cooking with gas recently. On the set of his current film, Breakout, Bronson and Co-Star Robert Duvall were toying with the controls of a $250,000 helicopter when its engine suddenly overheated and caught fire. That unscripted event, of course, had nothing to do with Breakout's true-life tale of Adventurer Victor Stadter's copter flight into a Mexican prison to spring wealthy American Joel Kaplan. Nor, for that matter, did some of the scripted scenes; though the actual 1971 jailbreak...
Personal revenge is still an acceptable motivation in an action movie. But Bronson is not looking for his wife's murderers, though they are so manifestly weird that any reader of Dick Tracy would have a fair chance of finding them. No, he has become an abstract symbol of quick justice in a setting where every bit player is careful to complain that the courts are too slow, the cops too dumb. Moreover, he quickly becomes a pop-cult hero, photographed against magazine posters acclaiming the salutary effect his work is having on the crime rate. Even the police...