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The Death Wish quintology. If that's the right word. 1974-94.

Started by Nelson Swillie, January 28, 2011, 03:39:25 PM

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Nelson Swillie

Michael Winner stopped making films some time ago and became a professional rent-a-celeb, boulevardier and occasional restaurant critic, largely because his last few movies stank. If you think this sounds harsh, take a look at Bullseye, Parting Shots and the stomach-churning Dirty Weekend. Really, there aren't enough films that feature forced fellatio, sex with obese men and Mike from the Young Ones terrorizing bag ladies, are there. But there was a time when the redoubtable 'friend of the stars' was capable of better things, and Death Wish is proof that Winner once had some degree of talent. A talent untroubled by considerations of subtlety, good taste and understatement, but talent nonetheless.


Billy Corgan, Richard Ashcroft and Jeff Goldblum (really) contemplate ultra-violence and the old in-out.

Death Wish, freely adapted from a Brian Garfield novel, tells the story of Paul Kersey (a fine performance from the late Charles Bronson, and a role he was born to play), a happily-married architect returning from a second honeymoon with his wife to the scum-encrusted "toilet" that was New York City circa 1974. Most directors make the viewer wait at least twenty minutes before hitting them with their first jolt of adrenalin-rushing excitement, but Winner can't wait that long, so within the first ten minutes we see Kersey's wife and daughter attacked and raped in their own apartment by three drugged-out hooligans. Even thirty-plus years down the line, it's a genuinely shocking scene; not even the presence of Jeff Goldblum as one of the most reprehensible and hateful thugs ever to smear a screen can diminish its impact. Kersey's wife dies and his daughter slips into a traumatized catatonic state (look quickly for Marshall Anker, the dumb sheriff from Last House on the Left during the snowbound funeral scene), prompting him to take a job in Tuscon to take his mind off things. In Tuscon, he meets up with a good-ole-boy property developer who invites him down to the gun club where Kersey turns out to be something of a sharp-shooter. Suitably impressed, the redneck presents Kersey with the parting gift of a handgun, which comes in useful during the second half of the film, during which the vengeance-crazed architect sets himself up as an easy target for muggers, only to wipe them out the moment things get nasty. Trivia fans take note - Clint Eastwood, Steve McQueen, Jack Lemmon and Frank Sinatra(!) all turned down the role of Paul Kersey before it was given to Charles Bronson.



Death Wish reads like simple, gut-level exploitation, and to a large extent that's exactly what it is, but Bronson's subtle, believable performance, the well-drawn characters, the effective NYC location shooting, Arthur Ornitz's grimy photography and Winner's knack for snappy action sequences help to rise the film above the sum of its parts and make it a minor classic. There's a lot of black humour on offer, some of which works (Vincent Gardenia's performance as the downtrodden, headcold-harbouring detective is always amusing), but some of which - such as the nose-picking hookers and the minor character whose dog "paints such marvellous pictures with his paws" - are simply perplexing. But then Winner, as has been noted elsewhere, Winner takes a strangely infectious delight in the depiction of violent anarchy and the gleefully absurd. This even extends to his direction - what has been dismissed as the incapable lensing of a hack in other quarters looks, especially with the passing of time, to be less the work of an incompetent hand and more the work of one who understood the artifice of cinema and delighted in all manner of naughty-boy subversiveness. From the use of the distorting wide-angle lens when Goldblum's thugs rush into the apartment block to the skew-whiff compositions and sudden, jolting long shots, Winner presents a visual sense as off-kilter as the depraved characters that populate his world. New York is little more than a glorified shooting gallery and low-rent carnival funhouse, whereas the Los Angeles of Death Wish II (which followed some eight years later) is a gaudy, neon-splashed, sickly-hued, sunscorched vista of mean streets, glowering hoodlums and jarringly surrealist touches. More than any other director, Winner took grindhouse sensibilites and ingredients and made them not only legitimate but part-way respectable.



Sadly, during the seven year gap between instalments in the ongoing saga of Paul Kersey, the world's unluckiest man, Winner's star diminished. Films like Won Ton Ton didn't help matters, so he returned - "desperate for a hit", to quote the then-head of the British Board of Film Classification James Firman - to his breakthrough success of 1974. Very little brainstorming was necessary - a simple remake of the original with a couple of twists would suffice, and Death Wish II, in spite of itself, was a box office success.

This controversial and infamously nasty sequel finds Kersey relocated to Los Angeles. His daughter (still mute from the horrors she endured in the first instalment) lives nearby in a sanatorium apparently staffed by God-fearing doctors and nuns. He has a housekeeper and a girlfriend (Jill Ireland, the real life Mrs Bronson). Things are just peachy. Unfortunately, because this is a sequel and has a Roman numeral after the title, someone has decided that it makes sense to have twice as much on-screen unpleasantness. And you know where this review is heading, right? THAT scene in which Bronson - the only man alive who could have the bad luck to get mugged whilst queueing for a Cornetto - finds that the horror that befell his family in the Big Apple has followed him to the City of Angels.

If you've made it this far, you'll no doubt have noticed that I have a soft spot for trash cinema and exploitative sleaze in general - I grew up during the video boom in England, and a lot of the first films I saw were entertainingly dreadful, so you could say I acquired the taste early - but the gang rape scene is so lurid, prurient and revolting, especially in its uncut form (I found a precert copy of this film in a junk shop), that it's well-nigh unwatchable. Not only that, there's absolutely no reason for its inclusion in the film other than to make the bad guys even badder and to rub the audience's nose in the grime. It's horribly out of kilter with the outrageous (bordering on ridiculous) shoot-'em-up carnage that follows, as is a similarly disturbing scene in which Bronson's mute daughter is raped (again) before jumping through a (closed) window to her death, a messy and graphic impaling on metal railings. This is Winner going for broke, playing his naughty boy games with the censors, and the fact that the BBFC cut nearly four minutes out of the cinema release couldn't have hurt the publicity drive one bit. Video was uncensored in England until 1984, so the first home release wasn't subject to such officious meddling, and I can only wonder how the 'lucky punters' who bought this thing after seeing it in the cinemas reacted. I'm guessing, however, that they didn't just mutter "I didn't see that bit at the ABC" and leave it at that!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6Ge2Slg56FI
A very heated debate with your man Winner regarding cuts made to Death Wish II.

Once you get past the opening salvo of misogynist sleaze, however, Death Wish II turns out to be (whisper it) pretty good fun, in a mindless, hideous, morbid, crowd-pleasing way. The violent thugs are lined up and shot down in the manner of an arcade game, Bronson is his reassuringly hard-faced, hard-arsed self and it's all unrealistic enough to put a decent amount of distance between the on-screen carnage and the viewer. There's also a goodly amount of cheese for connoisseurs, such as the hilarious 'street' dance moves from the ghetto blaster-toting freaks, drug dealers straight from central casting, a Faces of Death-style electrocution, rubbish dialogue from all and sundry and Jimmy Page's bizarre score which alternates between faux-classical passages, ear-splitting string-bending and weird electronic swoops...hang on, it's Spinal Tap! Let's hear it for Derek Smalls, he wrote this! In all seriousness, this is a hard film to like. The rape scenes make it objectionable almost from the get-go, and the set-up for Bronson's second bite at the revenge apple is revoltingly overdone by anyone's standards. Technically, it's about average, with Winner's restless direction taking in some bizarre set-ups and disorientating editing along the way, and most of the performances are flat enough to be medically classed as comatose. But if you're in the mood to see predatory hooligans wasted in various nasty ways, the final hour may be diverting enough to give you a few chuckles on a slow night.


Alex Winter - yes, him out of Bill and Ted - as a thug in Death Wish 3.

Which brings us to Death Wish 3. I had to watch this thing twice. The first time, I couldn't believe what I was seeing, so the second viewing was like a reality check. I hadn't dreamed it. To call this film deranged is like calling Keith Moon gently eccentric or Spike Milligan mildly amusing. Seriously, Death Wish 3 is one of the most demented and utterly wacko films ever released. The whole thing is so mind-bogglingly stupid, all you can do is sit there in stunned disbelief. Paul Kersey, the put-upon protagonist who had his entire immediate family and his maid wiped out in the first two films, returns to New York City - or, at least, a little-seen area of London mocked up as a hellish inner-city district of the Big Apple - and not only does his old army buddy (fresh from a beating by Bill from Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure - Alex Winter joining Laurence Fishburne and Jeff Goldblum in the "I had a cameo as a scumbag in the Death Wish series" hall of fame) die in his arms, he's also arrested by the local cops on suspicion of killing him. This is a run of bad luck that would even test the patience of Tex Avery's Droopy. Kersey is taken down to the station where he gets roughed up and locked in a communal cell with some hardcore thugs, none of whom are a match for the 65-year-old vigilante. After a quick bit of chatter about the rising crime rates, the Chief decides to spring Kersey ("I'm a real fan", he explains helpfully) to do his dirty work for him. And all this happens in the first fifteen minutes!


Black power salute delivered by a 65 year old honky. Respect brother!

Right...this is a film that doesn't so much stretch credibility as forget about it completely. Kersey returns to the besieged apartment block and finds out first-hand what a hellhole it is. The residents live in fear of thieves, vandals, muggers, robbers and all kinds of human scum under the loose command of a Willem Dafoe lookalike with a kind of reverse mohican, so our erstwhile "hero" gets to work, setting boobytraps, punching out speed-addled goons and blowing the creeps away. This plods on for about an hour, but Kersey is doing his job too well, stealing the police force's thunder, so he gets locked up again. This lasts about as long as it takes to have a shave, and the scene is set for a pulverising twenty minutes of cartoon carnage with a sky-high body count and some genuinely hilarious deaths, none moreso than the demise of the gang leader. And, this being a Winner film, there is one (unseen) rape and one attempted rape, but thankfully the focus is on pyrotechnic violence, of which there is plenty. I hate to say it, but it's all entertaining, in a cheesy, no-brainer kind of way, the production values are cheap and cheerful, the script is atrocious (I dare you not to laugh when Bronson, trying to stifle a laugh, tells his latest flame "Chicken's good, I like chicken" - profound stuff) and there are more laughs here than in several comedies I could mention. If this film wasn't made under the influence of a blizzard of cocaine, then I fear Winner and company had the shakiest grip on reality this side of Howard Hughes.



Which brings us to the relatively restrained (how could it be anything else, after the wacko third instalment?) Death Wish 4 - the Crackdown. Despite a dreadful script (some of the dialogue is downright retarded) it's surprisingly watchable and J. Lee Thompson's direction helps it zip along painlessly. This time, Bronson's battling organized crime rather than just bumping off random lowlife, and this makes for some decent set-pieces. Purists rate it as the best of the series after the original, and I'm going along with them. There are  no hackle-raising rape scenes (though the opening sequence seems to be leading up to one, it turns out to be one of Kersey's nightmares) this time, which is a definite plus, and the sheer proliferation of eighties stuff on show (video game nerds will love the amusement arcade and roller rink sequences) makes it a little time capsule, all by itself. But I can't really rate it any higher than a guilty pleasure.



Death Wish V - the Face of Death brought the series to a close in 1994, and you'd be hard pushed to find a more depressing piece of dross. This time, Lesley Ann Down turns up as Kersey's beloved, which means something terrible is going to happen to her, and it does - she gets her face bashed repeatedly into a mirror by a transvestite thug. But instead of looking disfigured and scarred for life, she simply looks like the beautiful Lesley Ann Down with a few prosthetic scabs. Bronson's salary for this was higher than the film's overall budget, and it shows. The film plods along at a snail's pace and the characters are two-dimensional generic villains - by the time the ringmaster gets thrown into a vat of acid (which are apparently commonplace in clothing factories) you're past caring, and the sight of a 74 year old Bronson going through his paces - in what turned out to be his last cinema film - is simply sad.

That's the Death Wish series. The first instalment's a legitimate classic. The second is legitimate exploitation that didn't so much nudge the boundaries of taste and discretion as trample all over them, and the thing got cut to ribbons and pilloried for its trouble - these risks would have been worth taking had the enterprise had something worthwhile to say about the nature of violence (as did Last House on the Left), but nobody was fooled for a minute. The third is stupid, relentlessly violent, cinematic masturbation. The fourth is an entertaining, if predictable, slice of instantly forgettable B-movie fluff. They all have their moments, but the law of diminishing returns kicked in sooner than it should have. As for the fifth, I wouldn't even recommend it to completists.




lipsink

Quote from: Nelson Swillie on January 28, 2011, 03:39:25 PM

Billy Corgan, Richard Ashcroft and Jeff Goldblum (really) contemplate ultra-violence and the old in-out.

And don't forget Bonnie 'Prince' Billy on the far left in Death Wish 2.



It was hilarious, as Charlie Brooker pointed out, that when a news programme incorrectly reported that Jeff Goldblum had died they decided to show a clip from 'Death Wish' (as opposed to one of his more famous roles) of him beating the shit out of a middle aged woman.

I've only seen the first 2 films and they're pretty bloody awful, aren't they? Bronson in the second film getting attacked while he's queuing for an ice cream: "That's the last straw!"

NoSleep

Amazing soundtrack to the first film by Herbie Hancock (Winner was a big fan of his Head Hunters album).

Nelson Swillie

Quote from: lipsink on January 28, 2011, 03:47:49 PM
It was hilarious, as Charlie Brooker pointed out, that when a news programme incorrectly reported that Jeff Goldblum had died they decided to show a clip from 'Death Wish' (as opposed to one of his more famous roles) of him beating the shit out of a middle aged woman.

Oddly enough, Goldblum also turns up in the 1976 Bronson film St Ives, again playing a thug, and this time Charlie ices him. Also in St Ives is a young Robert 'Freddy Krueger' Englund!

Nelson Swillie

Quote from: NoSleep on January 28, 2011, 03:48:56 PM
Amazing soundtrack to the first film by Herbie Hancock (Winner was a big fan of his Head Hunters album).

I couldn't agree more.

SavageHedgehog

I love these movies. 3 is the cult classic of course, but I believe a number of connoisseurs are beginning to appreciate the charms of 4, which has a larger-scale Commandoesque style of action; it's as absurd as 3 in many ways, but it's bigger and slicker. The first is, whatever you think of it, an archetypal film which along with Dirty Harry helped set the template for action movies as we see them now. II's insane sleaze-quotant and sloppy filmmaking puts a lot of people off, but on closer inspection it's actually a surprisingly strong continuation of the first movie, retaining some of the original's grit while edging towards the outlandishness of the later films which make them so popular among cultists. The last film is undistinguished perhaps, but it's actually more competant storytelling than the other sequels, and it's easy-going fun for Bronson/series fans. Granted, it is pretty shocking they didn't bother to retake a scene where Charlie's microphone distortion muffles half his dialogue!

If you like these movies, make sure to get this book:

Epic Bisto

SavageHedgehog, I agree with ye on two things: a) the third film is the best - I could quote every line of that film, it's absolutely bloody brilliant, and b) ditto on the book, that's a highly recommended read.

A VW sold me his DWII soundtrack (sorry but I've forgot who it was) - while not as good as Herbie Hancock's score on the original, Jimmy Page is quite good at the dirty, sleazy sound needed for the sequel. That theme with the violin bows is really cool and creepy*. But I still want a good copy of DW3's theme music...so dodgy but oh so catchy - love the sampled synth thing (ba-ba-bababa...dur-dur-dur-dur-dur-durdur!)

DW4 is really good as well, and it's got the beardy "FUCK ME!" robber from 'Robocop' as a gang leader. And Danny Trejo. And the dad from "It's Alive" as a right evil doer.

*EDIT TO ADD: Found it:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tHo03Y42OjM

Nelson Swillie

I watched V again last night and I still can't muster anything more than a "meh" face. Mind you, the imaginative deaths at the end are pretty good.

An tSaoi

I've only ever seen the first one, and was told to stay clear of the sequels because they weren't 'proper' films like Part 1, but your excellent write-up has inspired me to check them out.

Nelson Swillie

I think IV is the best of a bad bunch. III has a strong cult following but it's just too bloody stupid to take remotely seriously.

SavageHedgehog


Cohaagen

I have already made my definitive statement on Death Wish 3 already (http://www.cookdandbombd.co.uk/forums/index.php?topic=24765.msg1315402#msg1315402), and have nothing to add regards this work of heartbreaking fragility and beauty.

Eagle-eyed viewers who watched Full Metal Jacket on ITV4 the other week might also have noticed a scene where The Giggler from Death Wish 3 and Stomper (aka "Bonny Prince Billy" up there) from Death Wish II were sat right next to each other! Luckily they didn't share any dialogue, otherwise there might have been a creep criticality accident causing earring, facepaint and denim growth on anyone within ten yards

Doctor Stamen

Only seen the first two, the second of which has the best comedy hoodlums you're ever likely to see.  Sounds like I'm missing out having not watched DWIII...

Brundle-Fly

I noticed on IMDB, Bronson made quite a few movies with Winner. I've not seen their other 1970s collaborations, The Mechanic or The Stone Killer.  Much cop?

Egyptian Feast

Quote from: Brundle-Fly on February 01, 2011, 02:38:39 PM
I noticed on IMDB, Bronson made quite a few movies with Winner. I've not seen their other 1970s collaborations, The Mechanic or The Stone Killer.  Much cop?

The Mechanic is quite good. Not a classic by any means, but a good Bronson vehicle. The remake starring Jason Statham is out this week, coincidentally...

I haven't seen The Stone Killer, but Bronson + Winner is always a good combination.

Nelson Swillie

The Stone Killer is pretty good. Sadly not available on DVD, but well worth sourcing a VHS copy from Ebay like what I did.

Quote from: Cohaagen on February 01, 2011, 02:24:32 AM
I have already made my definitive statement on Death Wish 3 already (http://www.cookdandbombd.co.uk/forums/index.php?topic=24765.msg1315402#msg1315402), and have nothing to add regards this work of heartbreaking fragility and beauty.

This was poetry and this thread prompted me to give DWIII another watch two nights ago. Still incredible.

alan nagsworth

Holy shit when did that Winner interview re-surface? That was taken down a while back and I've been looking for it since. I'd forgotten about it in recent months though. So glad to watch it again. These films might be garish nonsense and Winner might be a cunt but he has a fucking great point about dramatism in films and artistic integrity (even if his own take on those subjects is shoddy). That bitch hasn't got a clue, and all I want to do all the way through that video is slap her face off.

Nelson Swillie

Someone on YouTube called 'BlocksVideos' resurrected it, along with this (completely unrelated but still fun) gem...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9_99aYyw5kE