THE SCREEN:
Westerbeck, Colin L. Jr.
Dr. W. Renschler, a prominent member of the Na- uses his claustrophobia as an engine for digging, Bronson tional Council (Swiss parliament) has introduced a mo- used the physique...
...starring role in Mr...
...W. Renschler, a prominent member of the Na- uses his claustrophobia as an engine for digging, Bronson tional Council (Swiss parliament) has introduced a mo- used the physique and personality that marked him as a tion to abolish the Konvention as "an antiquated relic child of the mines to become someone else, a star...
...No stretch of the imagination can make he will go on being a star...
...He has volun- Majestyk has...
...The of the past having no relevance to current times...
...One can understand that the Swiss ment is how able he is to handle it...
...Such stardom of forsythia, Japanese maple, rhododendron is itself based upon a death wish, that wish to escape be- to their children, ing the person life has so completely endowed you to a bald eagle play, and there is always the danger that you may get breasts the wind over the local reservoir: your wish...
...This Majestyk doesn't have to grow melons (we think to ourselves), he could be the hit-man: that fellow Bronson doesn't have MAKING IT to dig coal mines, he could be a movie star...
...When this suspended in repose, undeniably the great, happens, someone like Paul Kersey emerges...
...Commented Pfiirtner: "Profes- tion that the obverse is also true-that in some ways sionally all my hopes are completely in the air...
...might be appointed to the University of Bern as a con- It's a well-placed remark...
...The hit-man is played by Al Lettieri A second lesson is that the Swiss bishops in my opinion with his usual viciousness...
...But first a labor racketeer attempts to run parency in the solution of any conflict...
...Its effectiveness is its implicarejected his application...
...Director Michael Winner does one scene where, the world except him-he is lost...
...As Lettieri's co- An end to the washing of hands...
...Bronson even endorses Kersey's vigilantism...
...Oh, he almost pathetic ring of truth too...
...Unlike the sort of person we are used to seeing Bronson play, Kersey is someone who literally goes out looking for GRACE trouble...
...In interviews overwhelming the mind's disbelief...
...against him as well...
...This must be changed...
...as for the off Majestyk's hands, and then, when Majestyk lands so-called extraordinary process [of the Faith Congrega- in jail because he ran off the racketeer instead, a Mafia tion] this is nothing of the kind...
...night out, Kersey returns home and exultantly wields the weapon at his furniture until his frenzy bursts it...
...By this 00000000000000 action alone Kersey makes it clear he is not Majestyk, BOB CORDING who would be ashamed to give in to such gloating...
...separates him from those origins-once he truly does Besides, Kersey enjoys himself too much to be lik- escape being that character who appeals to everyone in able...
...acting has had a great influence on postwar American film actors too...
...He takes with greater intelligibility and on a solid and fair basis...
...You may kill through your success the very personality that made that success possible...
...Again, the reluctant hero...
...neither reluctant nor heroic...
...Like Thomas, the suburbs stand hearts stiff I was tempted to say earlier that it is ironical Bronson filling the holes of imagination with belief...
...One of the scenes that Eleven years ago in The Great Escape, Charles Bron- occurs in its first half seems intended to establish for its son played a claustrophobic Pole who digs a tunnel to central figure, Paul Kersey, the same character that freedom for himself and his fellow POWs...
...Commonweal: 455...
...Before his resignation it appeared as though he helpful, "I think you're in the wrong business, mister...
...having clobbered a mugger with a blackjack his first COLIN L. WESTERBECK, JR...
...But of course Bronson's stardom depends on Majestyk's want00000000000000 ing, and getting, nothing more than a chance to go back to picking his melons, which is precisely what happens...
...That Bronson can still work this vein, and make it pay, Father Ludwig Kaufmann, S.J., editor of the presti- is apparent in at least one of the two films he has just gious weekly, Orientierung, stated in a radio interview, released...
...He's going to get up in Rome, as long as such inhuman processes are still in the morning, look in the mirror, and just keel over from force...
...Right at the beginbishops also wish to have a say as to who teaches and ning Majestyk's character is established in the scene what is taught, but even here, this must be regulated where the racketeer tries to intimidate him...
...It is a literal and instinctive projection of that more than the bullies picking on him bargained for...
...bourg, should have the courage to make a clean sweep As always, the job of work that Bronson is loath to when modern principles of academic freedom are threat- do-in this case, fighting off gangsters-is the very one ened by the church...
...But once his own success him the underdog now...
...As long as a star like Bronson faction we took when Bronson gunned down Al Lettieri, can preserve in himself and his roles the rough innoit's not the same when his target is black and Puerto cence which got him on the screen in the first place, Rican teenagers...
...Instead of being the victim And like the character who digs his way out of the of a vendetta like Majestyk, Kersey becomes the perGerman POW camp, Bronson succeeded by making his petrator of one...
...And sought the decisive stroke...
...They must revise the contract with that he has to do...
...Majestyk is in the wrong business too...
...The acting of a man who must always play himself is necessaarily without irony, which 00090000000000 requires some distance from the character...
...But the Bern authorities had second thoughts and repeat it again at the end...
...And thirdly, the authorities, such as those in Fri- self-disgust...
...away the man's shotgun and punches him in the groin Meanwhile, Pfiirtner has become too hot for Switzer- with it...
...Charles Buchinsky, working in the Pennsylvania coal As the plot develops, however, Kersey is someone mines and hating every minute of it, dying to escape...
...Just as the character daughter by luring muggers into attacking him in order 23 August 1974: 454 that he can kill them...
...One of these days Lettieri is should be prepared for a greater confrontation with going to disgust himself to death...
...Looked at one way, I suppose audiences far larger than those the Actor's Studio can Bronson is here still someone who merely turns out to be reach...
...in fact, it's such a good sultant in the newly-formed research group for medical touch that director Richard Fleischer has Majestyk ethics...
...What we find so pleasing in his predicathe Dominican order...
...Kersey is an upper-middle-class New teered to do all the digging, he explains at one point, Yorker whose wife is killed and daughter raped by mugbecause he hates it so much...
...And yet- imperfectly matchedYet his own stardom represents something much more The gamblers are true to the game, obvious and fundamental about film acting-something Lusting for one more round, blood that inhered in films before Pudovkin and that moves In the eye: So with me...
...In this particular scene Kersey's Tucson quicker than anyone else...
...But self which the Method would exploit more programthese aren't the same variety of bullies...
...Then he says, as if seriously concerned to be land...
...Even the police help him...
...But in all fairness I ought to admit that Bronson THE GAMBLERS isn't complaining...
...Kersey is no rare bird, appears in majesty and powerlonger the man Bronson was but someone far less attrac- Haliaeetus leucocephalus leucocephalustive: the man Bronson has become...
...This is the PATRICK O'SHEEL great limitation of the sort of stardom Bronson has achieved...
...He certainly doesn't miss doing serious drama, a kind of acting he found uncongenial when he I fought it off, death was first breaking in, and the acting he is doing is per- That reached over my children haps the only sort that true stardom ever permits Impatient with simple maiming anyway...
...the most important lesson to be learned from the Pfiirt- Majestyk, who is a Coloradoan trying to make a go of a ner case is the need for greater clarity, greater trans- melon farm...
...Federal Constitution...
...Whatever satis- matically and eclectically...
...Lee Strasburg's Actor's Studio, which Entreaties lushly romantic was founded on Method principles, has produced Mar- Spoke death's decencies lon Brando, Lee J. Cobb, James Dean, Montgomery Softly, to say there could be Clift, Rod Steiger and Al Lettieri...
...THE SCREEN Up to a point Bronson's other release, Death Wish, appears to be more of the same...
...In Bronson's mouth this host has dragged him to a pistol club where, to everypeculiar explanation of the character's motives has an one's amazement, Kersey proves a crack shot...
...It gives him such anxiety gers, so to get away for awhile he lets his job take him to be down in that dark hole, he will get the job done to Tucson...
...It violates every modern hit-man who is also a prisoner develops a vendetta person's sense of justice...
...The truth is that knows how to use guns, Kersey admits, but he doesn't Bronson himself had been a claustrophobic young Pole, like to...
...Majestyk demonstrates, Bronson fits right in with the Actor's Studio alumni...
...He decides to get even for his wife and disadvantages into his opportunities...
...By ternal Swiss affairs and an obvious violation of the being who he was, Bronson escaped from who he was...
...was cast as he was in The Great Escape, but really there's nothing ironical in it...
...The Russian pioneer V. I. Pudovkin pointed out in the earliest days of the movies that it is a medium in There's been a long connivance, which the actor has always to rely on who he is, not The viscera concurring pretend to be someone else...
...He tough, sullen nobody who never had a chance got his called the Konvention "a blatant interference with in- chance in movies by playing tough, sullen nobodies...
...He plays the title character of the film, Mr...
...Pudovkin was brought Inward to self-destruction to this insight by studying Stanislavski, whose "Method" Against the racial pang...
...Amid a Sunday's walk around the block The flaw is ultimately not in Paul Kersey's character, as parents impart the names though, so much as in Bronson's stardom...
Vol. 100 • August 1974 • No. 19
