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The caveman's lament against order is voiced early on, after his suggestion of beach nookie is nixed by the missus. "We're too civilized." "I remember when we weren't." The preamble cuts from shimmering Hawaii to smoggy Manhattan (aka "the war zone," aka "the toilet") and sets up the acrid joke of Charles Bronson as a bleeding-heart architect concerned about "the underprivileged." Barbarians kill his wife (Hope Lange) and traumatize his daughter (Kathleen Tolan), though emotion doesn't enter those slit-eyes until he's smacked a mugger with a sock full of coins—afterwards, he steadies his nerves with a shot of bourbon and feels the high of meting out punishment. A trip to Tucson has the city slicker glowing while watching a mock-shootout, the gift of a Colt .32 completes the replacement of liberalism with "the old soldier custom of self-defense." Old West and great wars, it's all continued in New York alleys and subways. "The essential American soul is hard, isolate, stoic, and a killer," says D.H. Lawrence, Michael Winner carries on the English analysis with wide-angle lens at the ready. Despite some mild nausea following his first killing, Bronson becomes quite the gay desperado: The crime rate drops as he blows away comic-strip lawbreakers and reaches toward urban folklore, there's only the police inspector (Vincent Gardenia) to spoil the party. Once the ambivalence of Dirty Harry and Taxi Driver is scrubbed away, what's left is the double-dealing outrage of a Nixonian gorge-riser. (The cowboy buddy acknowledges the phallocentric connotations of the oversized revolver only to shrug them off, "this is gun country" after all.) Winner's sequels are more honest in their reactionary bloodlust. With Steven Keats, William Redfield, Stuart Margolin, Stephen Elliott, Jeff Goldblum, Christopher Guest, and Olympia Dukakis.
--- Fernando F. Croce |