Tag Archives: Ralph Waite

Brad reviews THE STONE KILLER (1973), starring Charles Bronson!

Posted on by Bradley Crain

THE STONE KILLER opens in Spanish Harlem with detective Lou Torrey (Charles Bronson) following a young man, who had just shot a cop, into an abandoned building. When the young man refuses to turn himself in, and even tries to shoot Torrey, he gets blown away. In trouble with his superiors on the force, and being dragged in the press for the shooting, Torrey decides to change locations and continue his law enforcement career under his friend Les Daniels (Norman Fell) in Los Angeles. Soon after he arrives in Los Angeles, Torrey and his partner Mathews (Ralph Waite) are working a case against a drug dealer, when they arrest “Bootlace” Armitage (Eddie Firestone), a drug addict, but also a well-known hitman from New York. Torrey is delivering the “mechanic” back to New York for outstanding warrants when Armitage says that he is willing to give up some big information on “Wexton” in exchange for a reduced sentence. When Armitage is gunned down in what is obviously a professional hit, it’s clear that there is something going on that involves the name Wexton. We soon learn more as we meet mafia leader Al Vescari (Martin Balsam). As Vescari walks through a cemetery, he tells the leader of his operation, Lawrence (Stuart Margolin), of his plans to get revenge for a string of mafia killings that occurred 42 years earlier by using “stone killers,” in this case, former military men with no connection to the mob. As the film moves forward, Detective Lou Torrey and his fellow cops will eventually put the pieces together and find themselves taking on these “stone killers” and the mob! 

I’ll just go ahead and say up front that I’m a big fan of THE STONE KILLER these days, but that’s because the movie has grown on me over the years with repeat viewings. When I first watched the film as a teenager in the 1980’s, I enjoyed it as a tough cop film, but it wasn’t one of my favorites. I think that part of the reason I didn’t appreciate it as much back then is the more convoluted plot of the film. Most Bronson films have simple and easy to follow plot lines, but THE STONE KILLER includes a somewhat complicated mafia assassination plan, and it also sends the cops on wild goose chases that have nothing to do with the actual story. Watching the film as an adult, I appreciate Director Michael Winner taking us with him on some of those 1970’s flavored tangents that include getting to hang out with some hippies at an ashram, as well as some unjustly accused black militants. 

Even though the plot is more complicated than the average Charles Bronson film, director Michael Winner gives us some of the best action sequences of Charles Bronson’s career. There are two sequences in particular that stand out to me. After the impressive opening scenes where Torrey blows away the gun wielding young man in Spanish Harlem, it takes a while to get to the next extended action sequence, but it’s definitely worth the wait. The scene involves Detective Torrey in a car chase where he’s after one of the stone killers, Albert Langley (Paul Koslo), who’s on a motorcycle. In an era of great car chases, this is a doozy that features many amazing and dangerous stunts. The late 60’s and early 70’s are an embarrassment of riches for cinematic car chases and this one stands the test of time. The next great action sequence occurs later in the film when Detective Torrey and the cops bust the home and facility where the killers have trained for the planned massacre. Bronson is still in his physical prime in 1973, and his athletic prowess is clearly on display as he slides across floors, jumps on tables, and does anything else that is required to take down the bad guys. The film is not wall to wall action, but what’s here is as badass as it gets. 

Detective Lou Torrey is a really good role for Charles Bronson. In his best roles, Bronson is tough, but you can also tell that he cares about other people. That’s definitely the case here as he consistently shows empathy for some of the people he’s after. For example, at the beginning of the film, he has to shoot the young man in Spanish Harlem in self-defense, but he later explains to his sister that he didn’t want to do it, even expressing some understanding of how the young man may have found himself in that situation. A little later while arresting a drug dealer with his partner Mathews, Torrey is clearly disgusted when his partner uses racial slurs during the arrest. Torrey then talks to the man with respect and gets the needed information to arrest the man buying the drugs. There are further examples later in the film as he deals with other drug addicts and militants. I say none of this to insinuate that Bronson’s character is weak in any way. Rather, he seems to want to do his job and arrest criminals in a professional manner. He’s also a complex character in some ways as he will bend the rules to get what he needs if he has to. He does end up punching the car thief, Jumper (Jack Colvin), a couple of times during an interview. While this is definitely not legal, in the context of this film, it’s required in order to get to the facts of the case. Bronson is actually quite great in the film. 

Besides international superstar Charles Bronson, Michael Winner put together an amazing cast for THE STONE KILLER. Martin Balsam had won an Oscar a few years earlier, and he’s good here as the mafia boss with four decades worth of patience for revenge. Ralph Waite is also excellent as Bronson’s incompetent, racist partner Mathews. It’s hard to believe the guy would go on to play Papa Walton based on the ignorance he shows in both this film and in the Bronson/Winner collaboration CHATO’S LAND from the prior year. It’s fun watching both Norman Fell and John Ritter work together in this film, especially knowing that they would be making television history a few years later on the classic TV sitcom “Three’s Company.” The last two actors I want to mention are Stuart Margolin as the leader of the stone killers, Lawrence, and Paul Koslo as the bi-sexual badass musician Albert Langley. Both actors, especially Koslo, are good here and would have important roles with Bronson the next year as well. Margolin was an important character in DEATH WISH, and Koslo may have even outdone his work here the next year as a particularly slimy weasel in MR. MAJESTYK. Oh yeah, be sure to look for a short, uncredited cameo from B-movie queen Roberta Collins! I also want to shout out the musical score from Roy Budd, who also did the score for GET CARTER (1971). Thanks to Budd’s work, the opening credits are very cool and memorable. 

THE STONE KILLER was marketed as Charles Bronson’s “Dirty Harry” and meant to be his breakout hit in America. Unfortunately, while the film was an international hit, the actual grosses in the United States were respectable but not as much as the filmmakers had hoped for. As such, we didn’t get any more entries in the case log of Detective Lou Torrey and Bronson would have to wait another year for his American box office breakout with DEATH WISH. But that’s okay because THE STONE KILLER has stood the test of time as an excellent 1970’s cop film, emerging in my personal rankings as a major feather in the cap of Charles Bronson’s career. 

CHATO’S LAND (1972) – Jack Palance leads a posse after Charles Bronson!

Posted on by Bradley Crain

One of the most enjoyable things about being a dad is introducing your favorite things to your kids. I taught my son Hank the sports of basketball, baseball, and golf, and even now there’s nothing we enjoy doing more together than playing a round of golf. Of course, as one of the world’s biggest Charles Bronson fans, I’ve introduced him to many films starring my cinematic hero. It seems that two movies have stood the test of time and have gone on to become two of his favorite movies. The fact that THE DIRTY DOZEN (1967) is one of his favorites isn’t a big surprise as he’s always enjoyed playing video games set during World War II. The other, CHATO’S LAND (1972), was more of a surprise. A few years ago, when Hank was home from college, I asked him if there was a movie he wanted to watch. It could have been any movie in the world, and I was honestly a little surprised when he said he’d been wanting to watch CHATO’S LAND again. Needless to say, this dad was very proud. 

Charles Bronson is Pardon Chato, a half breed Apache who’s minding his own business and having a drink in the saloon, when a small-town sheriff decides to give him hell just for being a “breed.” Forced to kill the racist POS in self-defense, Chato heads out of town a day ahead of the posse led by the former confederate Captain Quincey Whitmore (Jack Palance). Whitmore may be leading the posse, but the Hooker Brothers (played by Simon Oakland, Ralph Waite, and Richard Jordan) are just as bigoted as the sheriff who was killed, and they set about bullying their neighbors into joining their hunt for Chato. A couple of the guys who go along because it’s “expected of them” are Joshua Everette (James Whitmore) and Gavin Malechie (Roddy McMillan). When the posse comes across Chato’s home and woman, some of the members decide the wise thing to do is rape her and tie her up as bait. This is clearly not going to work out well for the posse, even those who tried to stop the rape. Using his sneaky Indian skills and the help of a fellow Indian, Chato is able to create a diversion and rescue his woman, but his friend is killed in the process. With his friend murdered and his woman brutalized and raped, Chato is no longer willing to just run away. From this point forward, the hunters will become the hunted as he leads them all further into CHATO’S LAND. 

There are several things that I find interesting about CHATO’S LAND. This is the first of six films that director Michael Winner and Charles Bronson would make together. They would all be financially successful films with THE MECHANIC (1972) and the original DEATH WISH (1974) standing out as true 70’s classics. Charles Bronson’s last number one box office hit would be DEATH WISH 3 (1985), which would also be his final film with Winner. It should also be noted that the character of Chato would be an early precursor of the kind of character Bronson would go on to embody almost exclusively throughout the rest of his career, that of the quiet but deadly man of action. Chato only says 13 lines in the entire movie and most of those are in a Native American dialect. Chato doesn’t have that much actual screen time either, but his presence dominates every scene. He’s like the angel of death hanging over the entire proceedings waiting to strike, and Winner continues to build on this tension as the film moves towards its inevitable conclusion. It’s an incredible, physical performance that can only be delivered by an actor like Bronson. Finally, the film has an outstanding cast, a cast that Winner himself would call “as good a cast as I ever assembled.” In addition to Bronson, Jack Palance is excellent as the confederate captain who’s never gotten over losing the war, and who now finds himself losing the battle to control the men in the posse. James Whitmore and Roddy McMillan are solid as a couple of decent men who went along because they felt it was their duty to their neighbors, who now find themselves caught up in a bad situation with even worse men. And finally, Simon Oakland, Ralph Waite & Richard Jordan are the kind of men you love to hate as the ignorant and bigoted Hooker brothers. It doesn’t hurt your feelings at all to see those guys get what’s coming to them.

Overall, CHATO’S LAND is a very good western, dominated by Bronson’s presence in the same way that JAWS (1975) is dominated by a giant killer shark. It was also a hugely profitable film upon its initial release, guaranteeing that Bronson would continue to get starring roles in films backed by American studios. Bronson liked to work with the same directors once he felt comfortable with them, and his collaboration with Winner would prove to be extremely fruitful and help turn him into one of the biggest box office stars in America. Thanks, Michael! 

Made-For-Television Movie Review: Red Alert (dir by William Hale)

Posted on by Lisa Marie Bowman

The 1977 made-for-television movie, Red Alert, opens with a man walking through a cemetery on a rainy day.  As we watch Howard Ives (Jim Siedow) move amongst the tombstones, we hear his thoughts.  He’s a sad and bitter man, wondering why he’s wasted so many years of his life at work.  He thinks about someone close to him who has died.  He’s obviously very troubled.

(Of course, any horror fans in the audience will immediately recognize Jim Siedow from his role as the Drayton Sawyer in the the original Texas Chainsaw Massacre.  He was troubled in that film as well!)

Howard works at the local nuclear power plant.  Ominously, when the film cuts to the plant, the first thing we see is a leak of very hot water.  I don’t know much about nuclear power plants but I imagine any type of leak is not a good thing.  The water leak causes the computer that runs the plant assuming that a nuclear disaster is minutes away from happening.  The compound is automatically sealed off, trapping fourteen men (including Howard), inside the reactor.  As Commander Stone (Ralph Waite) tries to keep a possible nuclear disaster from occurring, two investigators (played by William Devane and Michael Brandon) try to determined whether the accident was the result of a malfunction or of deliberate sabotage.  When the local sheriff (M. Emmet Walsh) informs them that Howard Ives’s wife has committed suicide, the investigators look into the troubled man’s history.  Eventually, the two investigators realize that the only way to prevent a nuclear disaster is by risking their lives by entering the sealed-off power plant.  The two investigators attempt to do their work under the cover of night and without causing a panic.  Needless to say, it doesn’t work.  One of them calls his wife (Adrienne Barbeau) and tells her that she needs to leave the area.  She tells her mother, who then tells her neighbor and soon the airport is crowded with people looking to get out of town.

Red Alert contrasts the intuitive approach of the two inspector with Commander Stone’s insistence that every bit of a data be fed to his computer before any decisions are made.  Stone’s hands are so tied by protocol and red tape that he stands by while the fourteen men who are trapped in the nuclear power plant die.  Wisely, though, the film doesn’t turn Stone into a cardboard villain.  He’s very much aware of what will happen if the plant suffers a core meltdown.  When one of his assistants mentions that he hasn’t been given any instructions on how to evacuate the town in case the plant does explode, Stone tells him that no plans have ever been drawn up because the plans would be useless.  There would be no way to evacuate everyone in time.

In the end, Red Alert is scary not because it deals with nuclear power but because it presents us with a world where no one — not even Devane and Brandon’s heroic investigators — seems to know what to do.  Everyone is slowed down by a combination of red tape and their own personal angst.  Devane is a strong investigator because, as a widower whose only son died in Vietnam, he has no family to worry about.  Unlike everyone else in Red Alert, he has nothing left to lose.  In the end, the film suggests that the only way to save the world is to cut yourself off from it.

Red Alert is a compelling and intelligent thriller, one that is well-acted by the entire cast and which builds up to strong conclusion.  The film’s anti-nuclear message is a bit heavy-handed but I imagine it was an accurate reflection of the fears that people were feeling at the time.  Today, the film works best as a warning about bureaucracy and depending too much on AI to make important, life-or-death decisions.  In the end, it’s human ingenuity that saves the day and that message is timeless.

Retro Television Reviews: The Secret Life of John Chapman (dir by David Lowell Rich)

Posted on by Lisa Marie Bowman

Welcome to Retro Television Reviews, a feature where we review some of our favorite and least favorite shows of the past!  On Sundays, I will be reviewing the made-for-television movies that used to be a primetime mainstay.  Today’s film is 1976’s The Secret Life of John Chapman!  It  can be viewed on Tubi.

John Chapman (Ralph Waite) is a mild-mannered college president and a recent widower.  Everyone tends to assume that John grew up wealthy but John is actually the son of a bricklayer.  As he puts it, his father literally helped to build the college of which John is now president.  John has felt lost and directionless ever since the passing of his wife.  When his rebellious son (Brad Davis) announces that he’s going to drop out of college and pursue a career as a laborer, John is at first outraged but soon, he’s wondering if perhaps his son has a point.  Has John spent so much time cocooned in his college that he’s lost touch with the rest of the world?

John takes a sabbatical and pursues a career as a blue collar worker.  He discovers that it’s not as easy as he assumed.  Because John doesn’t want to reveal that he’s an academic, John doesn’t really have any references to offer up to potential employers.  Because he’s nearly 50, John is continually told that he’s too old for most of the jobs that he applies for.  When he goes into a bar and attempts to order a dry martini, he quickly realizes that he has no idea what it’s like to be blue collar.

John eventually does get a job, helping to lay water pipes.  His boss is the gruff Gus Reed (Pat Hingle), who John eventually discovers is not quite as fearsome a figure as he originally appears.  Once the pipe job is done, John gets a job in a diner and even pursues a tentative romance with a waitress (Susan Anspach) who, as she points out,  comes from a totally different world than him.  And yet, despite John’s efforts, his son remains unimpressed.  According to his son, John is just slumming.  He has the freedom to quit and return to the college whenever he wants.

Yikes!  John’s son is a bit judgmental and it doesn’t help that he’s played by Brad Davis, who was never a particularly likable actor.  (Davis later starred in Midnight Express, in which director Alan Parker used his lack of likability to good effect.)  Yet, watching the film, you can’t help but feel that John’s son has a point.  At times, it seems like John wants a lot of credit for spending a week working in the type of job that most people take because they don’t have any other option.  Indeed, you could argue that John’s project is basically keeping someone who really needs the money from finding a job.  It’s not like John gives up any of his money when he goes to work.  It doesn’t help that John Chapman narrates his story and his voice-over often feels like a parody of liberal noblesse oblige.

Fortunately, Ralph Waite was a likable actor and he plays John Chapman as being well-intentioned if occasionally a bit condescending.  The made-for-TV movie plays like a pilot and it’s easy to imagine a series in which John Chapman would have worked a different job every week.  It’s a slight but pleasant-enough made-for-TV movie.  Seen today, it works best as a time capsule, a portrait of a society still trying to find its identity in the wake of the turbulence of the 60s.

Happy Birthday Charles Bronson!: THE STONE KILLER (Columbia 1973)

Posted on by gary loggins

gary loggins's avatarcracked rear viewer

Charles Buchinsky was born November 3, 1921 in the coal-country town of Ehrenfield, PA to a Lithuanian immigrant father and second-generation mother. He didn’t learn to speak English until he was a teen, and joined the Air Force at age 23, serving honorably in WWII. Returning home, young Charles was bitten by the acting bug and made his way to Hollywood, changing his last name to ‘Bronson’ in the early fifties. Charles Bronson spent decades toiling in supporting parts before becoming a name-above-the-title star in Europe.

By the 1970’s, Bronson had begun his long run as an action star. THE STONE KILLER capitalizes on the popularity of Cop and Mafia movies of the era, with Our Man Bronson as Lou Torrey, a Dirty Harry-type who shoots first and asks questions later. After he kills a 17-year-old gunman in the pre-credits opening, Torrey is raked over the coals by the New…

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Lisa Reviews An Oscar Nominee: Five Easy Pieces (dir by Bob Rafelson)

Posted on by Lisa Marie Bowman

First released in 1970, Five Easy Pieces tells the story of a lost man named Bobby Dupea (Jack Nicholson).

When we first meet Bobby, he’s working at a California oil field.  He likes to go bowling.  He has a girlfriend named Rayette (Karen Black), who is a country music-obsessed waitress.  His best friend is Elton (Billy “Green” Bush), a friendly redneck with a memorable laugh.  Bobby may have a girlfriend and Elton may be married but that doesn’t stop either one of them from going out at night, getting drunk, and trying to pick up women.

Bobby seems to be just another blue-collar guy with a grudge against the bosses but it doesn’t take long to realize that there’s something different about him.  Bobby may be friends with Elton but it’s obvious that the two of them come from very different background.  No matter how much he tries to hide it, Bobby is smarter than everyone else around him.  When he and Elton get stuck in a traffic jam, Bobby spots a piano sitting on the back of a pickup truck.  Getting out of his car, Bobby yells at everyone who is honking and then climbs up to the piano.  He sits down, he puts his fingers to the keys and he starts to play.  Knowing Bobby, you’re expecting him to just bang the keys and make noise.  Instead, he plays beautiful music.

Later, Bobby steps into a recording studio.  Paritia (Lois Smith), a neurotic woman, is playing the piano.  The recording engineers joke about her lack of talent.  Bobby glares at them, annoyed.  It quickly becomes apparent why Bobby is so protective.  Paritia is Bobby’s sister.

Bobby, it turns out, comes from a wealthy family of musicians.  Everyone in the family has dealt with the pressure to succeed differently.  Paritia continues to play, despite not having much talent.  Bobby’s older brother, the buffoonish Carl (Ralph Waite), plays violin and has staid home with their father (William Challee).  Bobby, on the other hand, ran away from home.  He’s spent his entire life trying to escape from both his talent and his family.  However, when Paritia explains that their father has suffered from two strokes and might not live much longer, Bobby reluctantly decides to return home and try to make some sort of peace with his father.

It’s not as easy a journey as Bobby would have liked.  For one thing, Rayette demands to go with him.  On the drive up to Washington, they pick up two hitchhikers (Helena Kallionetes and Toni Basil), one of whom is obsessed with filth.  In the film’s most famous scene, an attempt to get a simple lunch order modified leads to Bobby losing control.

See, that’s the thing with Bobby.  In many ways, he’s a jerk.  He treats Rayette terribly.  While his family is hardly perfect, the film doesn’t hide from the fact that Bobby isn’t always the easiest person to deal with.  And yet, you can’t help but sympathize with Bobby.  If he seems permanently annoyed with the world … well, that’s because the world’s annoying.  And, to Bobby’s credit, he’s a bit more self-aware than the typical rebel without a cause.  When one of the hitchhikers praises his temper tantrum at the diner, Bobby points out that, after all of that, he still didn’t get the order that he wanted.

In Washington, Bobby tells Rayette to stay at a motel and then goes to see his family.  Bobby seems as out-of-place among his wealthy family as he did hanging out in the oil fields with Elton.  He ends up cheating on Rayette with Carl’s fiancee, a pianist named Catherine van Oost (Susan Anspach).

And then Rayette shows up for dinner…

Five Easy Pieces is a sometimes funny and often poignant character study of a man who seems to be destined to always feel lost in the world.  Bobby spends the whole movie trying to find a place where he can find happiness and every time, reality interferes with his plans.  Nicholson gives a brilliant performance, playing Bobby as a talented guy who doesn’t really like himself that much.  Bobby’s search for happiness leads to a rather haunting ending, one that suggests that some people are just meant to spend their entire life wandering.

Five Easy Pieces was nominated for Best Picture but lost to Patton.

A Movie A Day #238: Lawman (1971, directed by Michael Winner)

Posted on by Jedadiah Leland

In the 1880s, Jared Maddox (Burt Lancaster) is the marshal of the town of Bannock.  After a night of drinking and carousing leads to the accidental shooting of an old man, warrants are issued for the arrest of six ranch hands.  Maddox is determined to execute the arrest warrants but the problem is that the six men live in Sabbath, another town.  They all work for a wealthy rancher (Lee J. Cobb) and the marshal of Sabbath, Cotton Ryan (Robert Ryan), does not see the point in causing trouble when all of the men are likely to be acquitted anyway.  Maddox doesn’t care.  The law is the law and he does not intend to leave Sabbath until he has the six men.

Lawman starts out like a standard western, with a stranger riding into town, but then it quickly turns the western traditions on their head by portraying Marshal Maddox as being a rigid fanatic and the wealthy rancher as a morally conflicted man who does not want to resort to violence and who continually tries and fails to convince Maddox to leave.  In the tradition of Sergio Leone and Sam Peckinpah, there are no real heroes to be found in Lawman and, even when Maddox starts to reconsider his strict adherence to the law and refusal to compromise, it is too late to prevent the movie from ending in a bloody massacre.  Since Lawman was made in 1971, I initially assumed it was meant to be an allegory about the Vietnam War but then I saw that it was directed by Michael Winner, a director who specialized in tricking audiences into believing that his violent movie were deeper than they actually were.

Even if Lawman never reaches the heights of a revisionist western classic like Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid, it is still pretty good, with old pros Lancaster, Ryan, Cobb, and Albert Salmi all giving excellent performances.  The cast is full of familiar faces, with everyone from Robert Duvall to Richard Jordan to Ralph Waite to Joseph Wiseman to John Beck showing up in small roles.  In America, Winner is best remembered for his frequent collaborations with Charles Bronson.  Chuck is not in Lawman, though it seems like he should have been and Lee J. Cobb’s rancher is named Vincent Bronson.  Winner would not make his first film with Charles Bronson until a year later, when he directed him in Chato’s Land.

A Movie A Day #170: Chato’s Land (1972, directed by Michael Winner)

Posted on by Jedadiah Leland

Don’t mess with Charles Bronson.

That’s the main lesson that can be taken away from Chato’s Land.  In this western, Bronson plays Chato, an Apache who enters the wrong saloon and is forced to shoot a racist sheriff in self-defense.  Former Confederate Captain Quincey Whitemore (Jack Palance) forms a posse to track Chato down but soon discovers that his posse is not made up of the best and brightest.  Instead, most of them are sadistic racists who just want to kill Apaches.  Despite Whitemore’s efforts to stop them, the posse rapes Chato’s wife and kills his best friend.  Chato trades his white man’s clothes for a loin cloth and sets out for revenge.

Chato’s Land is historically significant because it was the first of many films that Charles Bronson made with Michael Winner.  The most famous Bronson/Winner collaboration was Death Wish, which also featured Charles Bronson as a man who seeks revenge after his wife is raped.  What is surprising about Chato’s Land is how little screen time Bronson actually has.  Most the film is spent with the posse, which is full of familiar faces (Richard Jordan, Simon Oakland, Victor French, Ralph Waite, and James Whitmore all report for duty).  It actually works to the film’s advantage, making Bronson even more intimidating than usual.  There’s never any doubt that Chato is going to kill every member of the posse but since almost every member of the posse is loathsome, that’s not a problem.

It’s possible that Chato’s Land was meant to be an allegory for the Vietnam War, which is probably giving Michael Winner too much credit.  (In an interview, the author of Death Wish, Brian Garfield, once shared an anecdote about Winner inserting a shot of three nuns into Death Wish and bragging about how the shot was meaningless but that it would fool the critics into thinking he was making a grand statement about something.)  Like most of Winner’s films, Chato’s Land is good but not great.  There are parts of the movie that drag and Jack Palance and Charles Bronson don’t get to share any big scenes together, which seems like a missed opportunity.  Bronson, who was always underrated as an actor, gives one of his better performances as Chato.  Chato does not say much but Bronson could do more with one glare than most actors could do with a monologue.  In Europe, Bronson was known as Il Brutto and Chato’s Land features him at his most brutal.

That’s Blaxploitation! 7: TROUBLE MAN (20th Century-Fox 1972)

Posted on by gary loggins

gary loggins's avatarcracked rear viewer

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One of the earliest Blaxploitaion films is TROUBLE MAN, a 1972 entry about Mr T…

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…no, not THAT Mr. T! THIS Mr. T…

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Thank you! This Mr. T is played by Robert Hooks, a tough talking private eye who drives a big-ass Lincoln Continental and “fixes troubles” on the mean streets of L.A. T gets hired by gangsters Chalky Price and Pete Cockrell to protect their crap games, which are getting ripped off by masked gunmen. Things go awry when Chalky shoots one of the heisters, a dude named Abby who works for rival gangster “Big”. Abby’s body is dumped and word is on the streets T did the killing. Police Capt. Joe Marx puts the heat on T, as does “Big”, so T arranges a late night summit between “Big”, Chalky, and Pete at Jimmy’s Pool Hall .  “Big” arrives, but before Chalky and Pete do, some cops raid the joint. These…

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Bronson’s Best: The Stone Killer (1973, directed by Michael Winner)

Posted on by Jedadiah Leland

Stone_killerAfter tough New York detective Lou Torrey (Charles Bronson) lands in hot water for shooting and killing a teenage cop killer, he moves to Los Angeles and gets a job with the LAPD.  Working under an unsympathetic supervisor (Norman Fell), saddled with an incompetent partner (Ralph Waite), and surrounded by paper pushing bureaucrats, Torrey still tries to uphold the law and dispense justice whenever he can.  When a heroin dealer is murdered while in Torrey’s custody, Torrey suspects that it might be a part of a larger conspiracy, involving mobster Al Vescari (Martin Balsam).

Vescari is plotting something big.  It has been nearly 40 since the “Sicilian Vespers,” the day when Lucky Luciano, Frank Costello, and Busy Siegel killed all of the original mafia dons at the same time.  Viscari has invited mafia leaders from across the country to attend a special anniversary dinner.  During the dinner, all of Vescari’s rivals will be assassinated.  To keep things a secret, Vescari will not be using any of his usual hitmen.  Instead, he has contracted a group of mentally unstable Vietnam vets, led by Lawrence (Stuart Margolin).

Charles Bronson has always been an underrated film star.  His legacy has been tarnished by the cheap films he made for Cannon and, unlike Clint Eastwood, he never got a chance to really take control of his career and reinvent his image.  But during the 1970s, not even Clint Eastwood was a more convincing action star than Charles Bronson.  Bronson may have never been a great actor but he was an authentic tough guy with a physical presence that dominated the screen.

It was during this period that Bronson made his first four movies with director Michael Winner.  Though Death Wish and The Mechanic are the best known, The Stone Killer may be the best.  Tough, gritty, and action-packed with a great car chase, The Stone Killer was filmed on location in Los Angeles and some of the best parts are just the scenes of Bronson awkwardly interacting with the local, California culture.  If you have ever wanted to see Charles Bronson deal with a bunch of hippies, this is the film to see.  The Stone Killer also has more of social conscience than the usual 70s cop film, with Bronson’s character not only condemning excessive police brutality but also his racist partner.

(Ironically, Bronson and Winner would follow The Stone Killer with Death Wish, a film that many critics condemned as being racist and which suggested that the police were not being brutal enough.)

The other thing that sets The Stone Killer apart is that it has a great cast, featuring several actors who would go on to find success on television.  Balsam, Fell, and especially Waite and Margolin are all great.  Keep an eye out for a very young John Ritter, playing one of the only cops in the film who is not portrayed as being either corrupt or incompetent.

Though it may not be as well-known as some of his other action films, The Stone Killer is one of Bronson’s best.