Commentary: Big Chuck, R.I.P.

Charles Bronson never gave interviews. He was as Old School as they come, a Robert Mitchum type in a world where most of the Robert Mitchum types had disappeared.

The polite way actors talked about it was that you shouldn't talk to the newspaper because it would destroy your on-screen mystique. Tough guys in print turn out to be not so tough. Glamor queens lose their glamor.

The brusquer version was that, hell, reporters are just a bunch of lowlifes who want to pry into your private life and tell lies and point out your every mistake -- the hell with em!

That's why you saw the same quotes over and over in the obituaries for Big Chuck last week. His public utterances could be contained on a couple of typewritten pages. The only people he talked to were people he knew, and when he knew someone, he tended to know them for life. Pancho Kohner was his agent for decades. He tended to work with the same directors over and over again, especially Michael Winner and J. Lee Thompson. He was married three times, the first two lasting more than 20 years and the second one, to love-of-his-life Jill Ireland, running from 1968 to 1990, the years of his greatest fame, and ending only with her death from breast cancer. He didn't remarry till 1998, and his widow, Kim Weeks, was at his bedside when he died.

He was a private man who didn't buy into all the agent's hype about needing to have your name in the gossip columns. He stayed away from the parties, preferring to stay home and paint. For several years I would contact him through Pancho Kohner to try to book him for a "Tough Guy Week" I was hosting on cable television, and each time his reply would be perfectly polite and perfectly immovable. "Charles doesn't do things like that."

Charles Buchinsky -- his Lithuanian birth name -- was from the era when producers would say, "Hey, you have an interesting look, be in my movie." He lucked out, actually. After serving in World War II, he was a roustabout day laborer, laying bricks, working at dive restaurants, picking onions, and -- the job that changed his life -- renting beach chairs on the Atlantic City boardwalk. Somebody told him "You should be an actor," and he soon packed up and went to L.A.

Why he didn't check out New York first, since that was the center of acting training and most of his life had been on the East Coast, isn't really clear, but he landed at the only place on the West Coast that had acting classes as strong as the ones where Brando and Dean and Malden were working in New York. That was the Pasadena Playhouse, which turned out almost as many great actors as the Actors Studio.

A lot was later written questioning Bronson's acting ability, by people who assumed he was a "natural" screen presence who didn't really act at all. In fact he was thoroughly trained and he worked hard. His limitations were not his talent or craft, but his looks. He listed his height as 5-11, but I think that might have been an exaggeration of five inches or so. He had a bulldog face, a flat nose and a swarthy aspect.

For a long time, in the era of the 1950s Western, all he could play was an Indian or an ethnic ranch hand. In "House of Wax," the horror film starring Vincent Price, he even played Igor, the deformed brain-damaged assistant. His first starring role came when low-budget producer Roger Corman used him in "Machine Gun Kelly" in 1958, and it was just successful enough to make it possible for him to move up to war movies and tough-guy roles.

Still he was never the protagonist. He was the weak one, the sly one, the sidekick. In great ensemble movies like "The Great Escape," "The Dirty Dozen" and "The Magnificent Seven," he held his own but was never the one you remembered. Then, like many struggling actors in the sixties, he discovered Europe.

In Italy, where he was known as "Il Brutto" (The Ugly One), and in France, where they called him "Le Sacre Monstre," his looks and quirkiness were finally an asset. Most of his defining roles in Europe were never seen in the states, but two were -- "Once Upon a Time in the West" and "Rider on the Rain." For the first time in his life he got legitimate notices from critics and accolades from directors.

Unfortunately, he was about 10 years too old for mainstream leads, even as American movies started to celebrate the offbeat and the bizarre. Dennis Hopper and Bruce Dern took the roles that Bronson would have played if he'd been born a little later.

His breakthrough movie, of course, was "Death Wish," and it probably represents the latest breakthrough of any actor in Hollywood history. He was 53 when he starred as mild-mannered liberal architect Paul Kersey, who turns vigilante after his wife is brutally murdered and his daughter raped by thugs. Yet, even though the urban revenge drama had been pioneered by "Dirty Harry" three years before, critics hated "Death Wish" and once again he was condemned as second-rate, the poor man's Clint Eastwood.

Despite the movie's huge box office, it took eight years before the first sequel came out, and that was because no studio would touch the subject matter. "Death Wish II," directed once again by Michael Winner, was produced by Hollywood outsiders, the splashy renegade Israelis Menahem Golan and Yoram Globus. It was even more violent than the first movie, and was later blamed for the Bernhard Goetz subway shootings in 1984.

There were three more sequels, in 1985, 1987 and 1994, all vastly inferior to the original, and since Paul Kersey's wife was dead after the first film and his daughter was dead after the second one, the screenwriters were eventually reduced to having Kersey fight mobsters in the Garment District who were muscling in on his fiancee's fashion business.

He actually made some much better action movies in the eighties, especially "Murphy's Law" and "The Evil That Men Do," but they were ignored by critics as Bronson had become a B-movie name with no cachet. Bronson's fans were always the working classes, the kind of people who would never trust a critic anyway, and their support made little gems like "White Buffalo" into evergreens that played as second features forever and then had long lives on video.

After "Death Wish," though, he always played the same character -- the reluctant man of action. In the early scenes he was almost lifelessly routine, with that blank-slate crinkly-eyed mug sharing a festive dinner with his woman or helping a young girl with her studies. Then some brutal crime would result in the death of the person he loved most, and the face would become sinister and businesslike. He became a holy avenger, making war on drug dealers, pimps, street punks and the creepy socipaths who populate our collective unconscious.

Once again, his career timing was a little off. If Paul Kersey had shown up in the early nineties, when conservative talk radio was taking off and Rudy Giuliani was cleaning up New York, he would have been hailed as a pop-culture icon. As it was, a few video devotees rented "Death Wish" and realized it was a period movie that didn't age very well.

Charles Bronson won't be remembered as a great actor, and he won't be remembered as a symbol of his times, but he should be remembered as a journeyman who made the most of what he had to work with. He knew how to strike the Garbo pose that lets the camera do all the work. He knew how to sell the key bits of dialogue. And he kept his mystique till the end, despite the efforts of lowlifes like myself to puncture it.

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To reach Joe Bob, go to joebobbriggs.com or email him at [email protected]. Snail-mail: P.O. Box 2002, Dallas, Texas 75221.