By Roger Ebert
April 7, 1974
Charles Bronson is said to be the world's most popular
movie star. Not America's. He will grant you Robert Redford in America. But in
the world it is Charles Bronson. There is a sign in Japan, his publicist says,
that displays Bronson's name a block long (one does not ask how high).
Bronson's eyes are cat's eyes, watchful and guarded. They
are the eyes of a man of fifty-one who once was a coal-town juvenile
delinquent, spoke broken English, and embraced the draft in 1943 as a way to
escape from the mines. These eyes were watching me one afternoon from across
the dining room of the Capri Motel in La Junta, Colorado. They pretended not
to, but they did. Their owner knew that I was in La Junta to interview him.
What other mission would have drawn me to the cantaloupe capital of Colorado,
where Bronson was shooting "Mr. Majestyk," a movie about a melon
farmer with union troubles? He had no great eagerness to be interviewed. He
seemed to be sizing me up, with a sort of survivor's instinct.
It is conventional to say of movie stars that they are
very private people, but Bronson has contructed a privacy so complete that it
seems out of keeping with his occupation as a performer. He exudes an aura of
privacy; I did not feel like approaching him. He sat at the head of a table
with his wife of six years, Jill Ireland, at his left hand. Their children
ranged around them: three by Jill's previous marriage to David McCallum, two
from Bronson's first marriage, and their daughter, a perfect little blonde born
in 1971.
Bronson finally sighed and handed his daughter to his
wife. He came to be interviewed, after all. He does not mean to be difficult,
but it is in his nature. He does not volunteer information, does not elaborate,
and has no theories about his films ("I'm only a product like a cake of
soap, to be sold as well as possible").
To make everything harder, Time magazine had printed a
hostile review only that week of Bronson's latest movie, "The Stone
Killer." The writer, Jay Cocks, dismissed it as another "Charles
Bronson-Michael Winner picture." To Bronson, that was a personal attack.
"First it was a novel, then it was a screenplay, and there was a
cinematographer involved and a lot of other people. That makes it personal,
when he picks on just two people, and that gets me mad." An ominous pause
"One way or another," he said, "sooner or later, l'll get that
man. Not physically, but I'll get him."
There is that about Charles Bronson, and it is
unsettling. He really does seem to possess the capacity for violence. It is
there in his eyes, and in his muscular forearms, and in the way he walks. Other
actors can seem violent in their roles; Lee Marvin, certainly, and Robert
Mitchum and Clint Eastwood. But they don't seem violent in person. Bronson
does. Maybe that's because he has been there, and violence isn't strange to
him: back when he was Charles Buchinsky from the coalfields of Ehrenfeld,
Pennsylvania, he did time twice, once for assault and battery and once for
robbing a store. There were hard times early on in Ehrenfeld, and in the Air
Corps, and working in mob gambling joints in Atlantic City. Director Michael
Winner once told me: "After we've been on a picture a few weeks, the crew
starts coming around and asking, When does it happen? When does he blow up?
Actually I've never seen him blow up. But he seems to contain such a capacity
for it that people tend to brace for it."
The breath of menace blows over as Time is forgotten, and
in a moment Bronson is talking about his favorite pastime, which is painting.
"When I was a kid," he says, "I was always drawing things. I'd
get butcher paper or grocery bags and draw on them. And at school I was the one
who got to draw on the windows with soap. Turkeys for Thanksgiving, that kind
of thing. It seemed I just knew how to draw I could draw anything in one
continuous line without lifting the crayon from the paper. I had a show of my
stuff in Beverly Hills and it sold out in two weeks - and it wasn't because my
name was Charles Bronson, because I signed them Buchinsky."
He will talk about his painting, but not about his
acting. In action pictures like Winner's, he says there's not that much time
for acting. "I supply a presence. There are never any long dialogue scenes
to establish a character. He has to be completely established at the beginning
of the movie, and ready to work. Now on this picture, 'Mr. Majestyk,' there's
something I haven't done for a while -- acting. It has that, too, besides the
action."
This sounds like modesty, but one senses it is not; it is
just Bronson's description of what he does. He seems to consider himself a
professional who can get the job done without investing a lot of ego in it. And
apart from his pride of craft, the job is important not because it produces
great movies but because it permits him to provide an extraordinarily
comfortable life for his family.
He points out that as the eleventh of fifteen children of
an illiterate coal miner who died when Bronson was ten, as a coal miner himself
between the ages of sixteen and twenty, and as mailman, baker and onion picker
at various other times, he has had great good fortune to arrive at his current
condition: He is allegedly the highest-paid movie actor in the world. That is a
claim more than one actor is usually making at any given time, and so later I
put the question point-blank to producer Walter Mirisch, who was paying him. Is
he?
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