“The key to Bronson is the repressed fury, the constant feeling that if you don’t watch the screen every minute, you’ll miss the eruption,” he said. In 1974, Michael Winner, the British director of Bronson in “Death Wish,” “The Mechanic” and “The Stone Killer,” offered his view of the middle-aged actor’s on-screen appeal to the New York Times. But in the wake of starring in one of the biggest-grossing films of 1974, Bronson was firmly established as star in his own country.
“Death Wish” spawned four far-less successful sequels over the next 20 years. Of the negative reviews for “Death Wish,” Bronson responded: “We don’t make movies for critics, since they don’t pay to see them anyhow.” Noting that the picture spoke to a national fear of and frustration over street crime, Champlin wrote that the film “is nasty and demagogic stuff, an appeal to brute emotions and against reason.” Indeed, audiences around the country often applauded and cheered whenever Bronson let one of the film’s menacing thugs have it.
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Bronson’s mild-mannered character takes the law into his own hands by using himself as bait to lure the criminals and then killing them with a hidden gun.Ĭharles Champlin, then the Los Angeles Times movie critic, blasted “Death Wish” for being a “despicable motion picture which seems certain to make a lot of money.” In the film - a revenge fantasy deemed morally abhorrent by many - Bronson played a Manhattan consultant whose wife is murdered and whose daughter is brutally raped by a trio of muggers who invade their apartment. It was the actor’s first major success starring in a movie aimed at American audiences.īut the breakout role that established his box office appeal in the U.S. The same year marked the release of “The Valachi Papers,” an Italian-made film in which Bronson played Mafia informer Joseph Valachi.
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