The Talkies
Asahina, Robert
nority preferences; he is not bound to us by the nexus of profit and loss; if he pleases ten, he can afford to ignore nine with impunity. But so far we deal only with existing wants and known...
...How can I be concerned or active about what I cannot envisage...
...Heroism, we now believe, is more a matter of substance than of style...
...subsequently, after a couple of spaghetti Westerns and a half-dozen minor vehicles, he built up a large following in Europe that was not equaled in the United States until he burst into stardom with Death Wish, a little over a year ago...
...And when we get on to new wants, what we don't yet want but shall want when we see it, the difficulties multiply at a compound rate...
...Copyright © 1975 The Alternative...
...Bronson plays a drifter named Chaney, who arrives by boxcar in New Orleans during the depths of the Depression...
...But there is more to it than just that: Bronson brings more than just a weather-beaten face to the role in Hard Times...
...If you seek the Webbs' monument, come to Britain today...
...In St...
...and the three join forces in business—the business of illegal, bare-knuckled streetfighting...
...It is the advent of Soviet "mini-carriers," however, that has caused the most comment and speculation about Soviet intentions...
...Still, the Kiev can accommodate only VSTOL (vertical/ short takeoff and landing) aircraft...
...Since 1971, the Soviets have also added seven Krivak-class destroyers, the most heavily armed ship of its type in any navy...
...Why should they be...
...The kind of heroism which Chaney em-bodies in the movie is possible only because Bronson, the actor, dignifies the movie with the same kind of straightforwardness that Chaney, the character, is supposed to possess...
...We find," wrote Tocqueville, "an ad-ministration almost as numerous as the population, preponderant, interfering, regulating, restricting, insisting upon foreseeing everything, controlling everything, and understanding the interests of those under its control better than they do themselves...
...His success was not achieved Hard Times overnight: It was not until the 1960s, after fifteen or twenty years as a journeyman, that Bronson began to surface as a well-known, if limited, character actor, with roles in such movies as The Dirty Dozen...
...and his twc,-fisted films—to intellectuals, at least—are guilty of the greatest possible moral sin: frivolity...
...The most impressive additions to the Soviet surface fleet in recent years have been its cruisers...
...In a recent international poll, he was voted the "most popular actor in the world...
...When we get on to new processes for satisfying existing wants, the difficulties multiply...
...The "Okean 1975" worldwide Soviet naval maneuvers demonstrated conclusively that, whatever their intentions, the Soviets now have an impressive oceangoing fleet...
...and precisely because Bronson is a little old for all of this—he is 53—he brings a certain authenticity and gritty credibility to his portrayal of a. Depression-era drifter...
...how am I to know of such processes...
...Like other intellectuals, the Webbs, Laski, and the rest seem wholly incapable of grasping the role of risk-taking and profit-or-loss-making in the maintenance of economic efficiency and above all in innovation...
...Their life is easier if novelty is suppressed, and no more profitable if it is not...
...In the late 1960s, two 18,000-ton helicopter cruisers were completed...
...and I suspect that it might be because movies such as Hard Times are "like the way movies used to be"—before they were crippled by self-consciousness...
...but a certain image of a man, a style, which expresses itself most clearly in violence...
...In his acting out of "his own high sense of himself," Chaney's heroism entirely manifests itself—in his fighting, in his relationship with Speed and Poe, and in his quiet arrival and departure by boxcar...
...Robert L. McTiernan The Emergence of Soviet Sea Power • When the United States Navy celebrated its two hundredth anniversary last October, the optimism characteristic of such occasions was marred by a recognition of discipline problems in the service, of personnel shortages, and, above all, of the growing strength of the Soviet navy...
...What Warshow wrote about the violence in Westerns is perfectly to the point here: "Really, it is not violence at all which is the 'point...
...The new 10,000-ton Kara-class missile-cruiser is considered one of the finest warships in the world...
...Experts may advise me...
...Of course, Bronson does not "look like" a hero, in the sense of resembling, say, Gregory Peck...
...The Soviets are currently building at least one more like it, according to Rear Admiral Bobby Inmann, Director of Naval Intelligence...
...A lot of people pay a lot of money to see a lot of Charles Bronson's movies...
...Rather than concentrating their naval power in coastal waters and around their home ports, the Soviets regularly send their ships into inter16 The Alternative: An American Spectator January 1976...
...The United States abandoned the Regulus II missile program in 1958, and for years had no comparable weapon...
...It is 40,000 tons and over 900 feet in length...
...Spencer, Jr...
...carriers for providing air support, and therefore not as effective in "projecting" power into a region...
...Two of them have become operational since 1973, and along with six Kresta-II and four Kresta-I cruisers (all completed in the last ten years) they give the Soviets a formidable cruiser force...
...Although he is a loner, he is not alienated...
...But there can be little doubt that Bronson deserves some accounting for...
...It would not be an exaggeration to say that Charles Bronson is the only actor who could have played Chaney—or any similar role...
...It is not as valuable as U.S...
...But this is only our first attempt at such a missile, and the Russians have a technological lead in this area...
...The plot should sound familiar: If the pickup matches were gunfights, the movie might be any of a hundred Westerns...
...and our heroes and antiheroes—both cinematic and real-life—are likely to be defined morally, not aesthetically...
...It is the improved quality of individual warships that has increased Russia's total naval capability...
...Indeed, Warshow might have had Bronson/Chaney in mind when he formulated his definition of a hero...
...But we just might find that it lies in acting straightforwardly...
...The Talkies by Robert Asahina "A hero," Robert Warshow once wrote, "is one who looks like a hero...
...How can I expect committees and experts to be concerned and active on my behalf...
...In fact, most observers expect the number of Soviet warships to decline in the next few years...
...Although the movie deals with violent men engaged in a violent enterprise, there is surprisingly little actual violence shown on the screen...
...Although Warshow was describing the heroes of relatively recent movie Westerns, his definition seems curiously incongruent with our modern sensibilities...
...Paul's Cathedral, you may find Sir Christopher Wren's tremendous epitaph— "Si monumentum requires, circumspice "—if you seek his monument, look around you...
...But so far we deal only with existing wants and known preferences...
...Chaney soon meets a fast-talking gambler named Speed ( James Coburn) and a hopheaded unlicensed physician named Poe (Strother Martin...
...Fortunately, a crash program will soon equip United States ships with a "Harpoon" missile, effective against enemy ships from a distance of fifty to sixty •These figures are the author's estimates based on recent editions of Jane's Fighting Ships and Jane's Weapons Systems...
...With the development over the past ten years of a modern surface fleet, the Soviets have initiated a new operational policy of "forward-deployment...
...Aside from upgrading the quality of individual naval units, the most noticeable change in the Soviet navy has been in its deployment patterns...
...He is entirely "external"—for him there is no separation between idea and act, and thus he can be completely straightforward in all his dealings...
...The resemblance is not accidental, of course...
...For Bronson is not a moral hero in his films, not even in the Hollywood sense of movie morality...
...Since the early 1960s, the Soviet Union has added 270 major surface combatants and submarines (including ballistic missile subs) to their fleet, compared with 176 such additions for the United States...
...but experts are notoriously indifferent to considerations of cost...
...like the Webbs themselves, they tend to prefer the best technically to the best economically, and to exaggerate the importance of maximum output irrespective of cost...
...miles...
...and, at a reported $1 million per picture, he is one of the world's best-paid performers...
...All rights reserved...
...And it is Bronson, as Chaney, who is the most "stylish," and thus the most heroic: a heroism—a nobility realized through performance—which is not a moral idea, but an aesthetic ideal...
...As moderns, we believe that the essence of "seriousness" lies in irony, ambiguity, and self-consciousness...
...Last May, D.F...
...but that is not what Warshow had in mind...
...The Kiev, which will soon be fully operational, is of a more conventional design...
...If they could have grasped it, they would never have proposed to substitute for it, magically simple and infinitely complex as it is, their foothills and mountain ranges of boards and committees, their swarming hives of bureaucrats and busybodies and experts, their snowstorms of paper, their echoing wastes of gassing and boredom, their pandemonium of ceaseless but sterile controversy...
...He was writing of French Canada under the ancien regime...
...This elaborate stylization forces us to concentrate on the bearing of the fighters, rather than the physical effects of their brutality: There is no cruelty, and no opportunity for vicarious pleasure in the infliction of pain...
...A pickup bout becomes an elegantly choreographed pas de deux, with the brutality conveyed solely through the sound effects—incredible grunts and groans, and the clap and crunch of fist against flesh...
...And it is this curious ennoblement that is the source of Bronson's popular success—and his artistry...
...More recently, former Chief of Naval Operations, retired Admiral Elmo R. Zumwalt, told newspaper reporters that the United States had to back down from a naval confrontation with the Soviets during the 1973 "Yom Kippur" war because the Russian fleet had the United States outnumbered in the Mediterranean 98 warships to 65...
...This nobility is most apparent The Alternative: An American Spectator January 1976 15 in the fight sequences which occupy the center of interest in Hard Times...
...The pickup matches are staged in alleys, on piers, and in warehouses—with Speed fronting the money and arranging the bets, Poe acting as the trainer, and Chaney dealing out, and absorbing, the punches...
...They are "just entertainment"—a condescending verdict supported by irrefutable evidence: their popularity...
...Bronson's latest movie, Hard Times, provides some clues to the nature of his peculiar brand of cinematic heroism...
...An important feature of nearly all of the new surface ships is the SS-N-10 surface-to-surface missile, a horizon-range, anti-ship missile that is difficult to counter...
...The essence of comedy, it is said, lies in playing straight...
...but what separates Hard Times from other films of the same genre is the peculiar dignity that Bronson brings to the hackneyed myth of the loner...
...Those are typically modern attitudes, of course...
...in short, in a constant state of barren activity...
...Many who have never seen Bronson's movies (and many who have seen them) are inclined to dismiss them—with the same contempt that was once reserved for Clint Eastwood's movies—as models of mindless macho escapism...
...He might have been writing either of the Webbs' Utopia or of Britain today...
...This ship is a significant advance for the Soviet Union, especially in antisubmarine warfare...
...The plot spins out its predictable logic—including the brief affair with the proverbial hooker-with-the-heart-ofgold, and the inevitable climactic bout with the stranger in black—and then Chaney leaves as he arrived, by boxcar, in the dead of night...
...That is partly because a "Charles Bronson movie" or a "Charles Bronson role" have almost taken on independent existence of their own—a nearly inevitable consequence of the typecasting of a strong character actor...
...With his weatherbeaten face and his painfully squinting eyes, he might easily have stepped out of one of Walker Evans' photos...
...Hundreds of shattering blows delivered by unbreakable fists strike indestructible cheeks and chins—and there is not a cut nor a bruise (nor a broken hand or nose, which would be the real-life result), and only the slightest trickles of blood...
...Numbers alone, however, are not the best indicators of the progress that the Soviet navy has made...
...What Warshow did have in mind in his definition is precisely what Bronson, as Chaney, embodies: the idea of the hero as an actor, acting out, as Lionel Trilling characterized it, "his own high sense of himself...
...Indeed, the emergence of an impressive Soviet navy over the last decade has recently caused increasing comment, and in some cases alarm...
...perhaps it is the mark of Bronson's genius that he can recapture an aesthetic, rather than moral, ideal of heroism that hearkens back to a pre-modern era...
...This has brought the Soviet navy to a level of 466 combat ships...
...These highly innovative ships have missile cruiser forwards and helicopter flight-deck afts...
...warned in the pages of National Review that the Russian navy is an "offensive weapon," the creation of which "plainly signals Russia's intention of expanding its dominion over the world...
...A moment before Chaney flattens him with a single punch, a young opponent in one of the bouts sneers, "Hey, Pop—you're a little old for this, ain't you...
...But such a characterization seems inadequate to account for one contemporary cinematic hero—Charles Bronson...
...Actors recently have become increasingly self-conscious, and their characteristic stance toward their roles, especially in genre movies, has increasingly become irony, or parody, or self-parody...
Vol. 9 • January 1976 • No. 4
