THE life of Charles Bronson was tougher than any of the steely-eyed hard men he played on screen. As one of 15 children of Polish-Lithuanian parents he grew up in the harsh coal-mining country of Pennsylvania. He saw action as an aerial gunner in the Second World War and even when he took to acting as a way to drag himself out of his poverty he struggled for decades as little more than a make weight heavy in Hollywood B-movies and flimsy TV shows.
When Sergio Leone cast him as the quiet but deadly hero of Once Upon A Time In The West (1968) he should have secured his place at Tinsel Town’s top table. What happened instead was a run of low-key European films that never quite elevated him to the star status he craved.
It was that brash Brit Michael Winner who made Bronson an international icon with his crudely effective Death Wish series. Morally reprehensible and increasingly empty as that series of revenge thrillers were, it’s hard to deny old Charlie the right to a little time in the spotlight with all the financial riches such success brought for him, his wife Jill Ireland and their extensive family.
What it did do, though, was cloud the very real talent that lay beneath the sleepwalking killer with the bad tache that we all remember him for now.
One film from that era, though, does show Bronson as the big, bad brooding actor he was when he moved himself out of his safety zone. Hard Times from 1975, freshly reissued on Blu-ray by Eureka!, is a tough and tidy boxing film set in Louisiana in the 1930s and it captures Bronson at his smouldering best.
It was also the debut film for cult action director Walter Hill who at the time was more famous for penning impressively literate scripts for The Getaway and The Mackintosh Man.
Hill captures the desperation of Depression-era America beautifully and with Bronson’s turn as Chaney, an out-of-luck loner who hops a freight train and winds up in the fight game as he tries to make ends meet, lighting up the screen, this is a beautifully realised and oddly undervalued little two-fisted gem.
This is not Bronson’s film alone either. James Coburn is unforgettable as the low life hustler Speed, who promises Chaney the world and books him for increasingly violent, no holds barred illegal fights. As his pursuit of the big pay day continues, our taciturn hero falls in with a prostitute (Jill Ireland appearing yet again alongside her husband) and a down-on-his-luck drug addict (Strother Martin).
Hill shoots this bleak but beautiful tale of desperation with a real eye for the art-house set while always keeping one foot in the world of pulp and making sure the boxing scenes deliver an impressive thump of realism.
It’s a tough and brutal story at times but its also understated and spare and Bronson packs a serious punch at its core. It’s almost as if Death Wish never happened.
