MARK STEYN REVIEWS DEATH WISH, a 1974 period piece that Bill de Blasio is doing his best to make timely once again:
The Police Commissioner in the movie and the critics who reviewed it both called Bronson a “vigilante”. But, in fact, Winner is scrupulous about showing Bronson only shooting those who first threaten him. To be sure, he sort of goes looking for trouble. But in 1970s New York you didn’t have to look far: just go to the park, ride the subway, take an evening stroll. If some punk tried to do in my corner of New Hampshire what was done to Bronson’s family in Manhattan, they’d risk getting blown away. Because that risk is widely known, few such home invasions occur in his state. But what the NYPD calls vigilante justice in Death Wish most guys up here and in many other parts of the country would call self-defense. That’s why audiences cheered when the film was shown around America. The other iconic shooter of the era, Clint Eastwood’s Dirty Harry, was the proverbial maverick cop, but Bronson’s Paul Kersey is a much more resonant American archetype – the private citizen who acts in his own defense.
Would the film have been as effective with someone else as Kersey? Burt Reynolds? Ryan O’Neal? No. That’s where Bronson’s leathery weathered visage and those squinting eyes came into their own. You didn’t need to know the specifics – World War Two tailgunner, one of 15 kids of a Lithuanian coal-miner. You could see it in the crevices and grooves: Bronson was one of the last movie stars to project a sense of experience beyond cinema. Who does so now? Pretty boys like Tom Cruise? Strictly celluloid bad guys like Christopher Walken? Yet it’s Bronson who makes you see the whole point of movies: it’s a face made for close up. I don’t know what he was like as a fledgling stage actor in Philadelphia in 1947, but I can’t believe it had the power of the big screen. He’s a classic movie tough guy – an economic actor, taciturn and stoic; he exudes male strength rather than displays it.
Actually, Brian Garfield, who wrote the novel that inspired Bronson’s film once said on its Amazon page (this was in the late 1990s, if I’m remembering correctly) that he wanted Jack Lemmon to play the pious liberal architect turned urban “vigilante,” which would have been quite a shocking turn indeed. (On the Death Wish Amazon page, Garfield wrote something along the lines of “Would you want to mess with Charles Bronson??”) But then, in Bronson’s case, this wouldn’t the first time that a somewhat miscast actor became a superstar via the right role at the right time, as I noted in my own lengthy review of Death Wish from July of 2013, shortly before de Blasio became a household name. Here’s how my article concluded:
As Kyle Smith wrote this month, today he and fellow New Yorkers “grouse about soda bans and Citi Bikes. Twenty years ago, we worried about being mugged or murdered. Electing a Democrat who demonizes the police would ignore the luxury provided by two decades of safety.”
Who knows — the residents of Manhattan in the post-Bloomberg-era might well be saying to themselves, “Mister, we could use a man like Paul Kersey again.”
But then, the handwriting had long been sprayed upon the wall that many of Paul Kersey’s fellow New York liberal intellectuals harbored a death wish of their own.