This week’s pick is Death Wish (1974) which stars Charles Bronson as a vigilante who cleans up the seedy streets of New York in this classic tale of revenge. The film was based on the novel written by Brian Garfield and boasts a great score from famed musician Herbie Hancock.

Bronson stars as Paul Kersey an architect whose family is brutally attacked by vicious hoodlums. His wife is murdered and his daughter is raped and left for dead in their own apartment. Without any leads and the inability of his daughter to make a positive ID due to her catatonic state, the police are powerless to do anything. Paul is devastated and begins to adopt a new sense of self-preservation.

The film takes a while to build up momentum but when it does, it really gets going. Trying to put the incident behind him and get on with his life and his work, Paul is sent to Arizona by his boss to oversee a new land development deal. Paul arrives in Tucson, Arizona and is met by Ames Jainchill (Stuart Margolin) who shows Paul the land where he wants to develop property. After witnessing a mock gunfight at an old movie set in Tucson, Ames takes Paul to a gun club where Ames is impressed with Paul’s deadeye shooting.

I don’t know how many of you remember movies from the early 1970s, or were even alive in the 1970s, but the period from 1969 to 1975 witnessed a wealth of gritty, nihilistic B-movie dramas.  The protagonists were often shady anti-heroes involved in some violent pursuit either above or below the law.

Easy Rider in 1969 probably spawned the genre (or Bonnie and Clyde in 1967), and was shortly followed by Dirty Harry (1971), Badlands (1973), Death Wish (1974), and my personal favorite, Dirty Mary, Crazy Larry (1974), among many others.  The genre died out about the time Smokey and the Bandit arrived in 1977, when a smirking Burt Reynolds and an over-the-top Jackie Gleason turned it into a southern-fried mockery.

This type of film was personified by Charles Bronson, the lead in Death Wish, who typified the craggy, mumbling, speak-little-but-carry-a-big-Magnum character that was often at the center of these movies.  Bronson, like Clint Eastwood, was never very likeable in his films, but he had an air of cold-blooded ruthlessness that made you cheer for him anyway, as the baddies he dispatched were always much more sinister (but much less charismatic) than he was.