Flush Times for Charles Bronson

UUH, you look a little passive," says Speed, promoter of street fights, peering at Chaney, who wants a job. It is the understatement of the century, for Chaney is Charles Bronson. Charles Bronson-the great squinched stone face himself, who looks like a push-up. The most popular actor in the world, and possibly the worst. We shake our heads at the French for liking him so much, along with Clint Eastwood, and Weudstoc (Woodstock), and the worst type of American AM music. A real hack.

Never bats an eyelash, old Charles, and he doesn't through Hard Times, either, except for a flicker of weird warmth that runs across his eyes at the beginning of the film. You aren't quite sure you've seen it, this tiny dilation, but in the first few moments, when a train whistle moans rudely from behind a curve of track in southern flatland and moves into view, a shabby Bronson leaning from the boxcar wearing a cap scrunched down...these few moments of Bronson, and the rustle in his expression when the train rolls by two wastrel children, the change in his eyes not greeting, or even acknowledgement, but only a quick passing of body heat...are some of the most beautiful moments of footage of an actor I've ever seen.

He's off the train now, in the shadow of a mammoth factory; next on a darkened street outside a warehouse at a coffee counter. Third refill costs a nickel. He wanders into a warehouse, following a noise. Through dark passageways of pipes and crate to an open space. It is a street fight, two sleek men clutching bills and taking bets, two bare-chested bruisers facing each other, brown ill-fitting suits and anxious Depression faces crowded around the bare floor that serves as a ring. The bets are in, the bruisers battle: it's no holds barred-kicking, hair-pulling, and annihilating past the point of all reason; just don't kick a man when he's down. Bronson watches from a distance and there is no sign, no glimmer of what he thinks or feels.

Afterwards he appears from nowhere. The promoter, Speed (James Coburn) turns around and there he is across the table. The next day Bronson shows his stuff-one punch and the fight is over. Speed has got a partner, a real winner, and he's thrilled and jabbering. They split the cash and take the train to New Orleans, Bronson silent. "Any more questions?" he always asks. At the station he just leaves; he wants to check out the town. Not to worry, Speed, Bronson will find you when he needs the dough. He does, and the movie unfolds, Bronson's strange and silent brute taking on a resonance that I haven't seen in a character in a new film in months.

WAIT A MINUTE. Charles Bronson? My friends and I used to go to Charles Bronson movies, every one, in bouts of cynicism when rejecting the most oppressive and sick manifestations of mainstream American culture carried too many bad associations with it and became too tiring to handle. A hippie backlash. It seemed like the only thing to do was tank up and join the fray. Bronson was surely one of the heavies: his chunk figure was the perfect vehicle for the fascist, amoral tactics he used to smash rival crooks, fight mercenary struggles, snare women by ignoring them. It wasn't that you couldn't tell what was going on inside his head-you couldn't even tell whether that concrete block on his shoulders was a head, and you began to not care. The Mechanic became a mechanism, like a gun, which shoots for anyone who points it. And the moviemakers were pointing him indiscriminately, punching out everyone in sight, preferably for no apparent reason. And he was the most popular star in the world, numero uno international, bigger than Eastwood, even making Redford small fry...all this, without acting one single solitary lick.

Acting is by no means essential, of course. Actors have walked through movies before and still come out great. A Brando or a Bogart in a dumb macho role could breeze through, thinking of what he'll do after work, and still steal the show. They are great actors even when they're not, because they're screen actors-the closer the camera, the more vibes they transmit, naturally. Olivier couldn't sleep through a picture-his face isn't revealing enough, and he needs a stage of gestures and intense dialogue to make his talents felt. Steve McQueen, on the other hand, who probably couldn't get cast in a high school Christmas play, never has to even try once the cameras get rolling. Charisma, which is his excuse, is based on double takes and spiraling eyes and the ticks and flutters that make a face interesting, as long as the role doesn't demand any grey matter behind it. But Charles Bronson-his features wouldn't twitter a fraction if he were hit by a truck, yet he dominates this picture like the best of them.

It's hard to figure. Somehow Walter Hill, who directed Hard Times, has brought out something in Charles Bronson that's never been seen before, and done so in a crass-commercial and silly-ponderous film. ("What did you say your name was?" That's speed speaking, and yes, he's in bed with a prostitute smoking cigarettes after the fact.) The script is cumbersome, the soundtrack amateurish, the crowd scenes lifeless, the final moral conflict dance like and played so badly that you actually oppose the hero's crowning heroics. Yet it is, particularly for director Hill's first effort, stunning to look at. Bleached New Orleans pink and plaster white, lush Cajun greens. But mostly a million browns-browns that dwarf humans in the bulk of an industrial life that has left them out. The empty oyster-processing factory where Bronson fights among discarded shells is piled with hues of lifelessness; a shoeshine and a buck-and-wing echo eerily in a world where people only gather in out-of-the-way huddles in abandoned workplaces to watch powerful men without jobs try to kill each other for money.

Maybe Bronson gets his lift from the visuals, then: he looks like a statue placed perfectly to fill in these scenes. Indeed, if there's one problem with Hill's tableau, it's that the period stuff looks a little stagy and flat (less so than most contemporary American movies set in the urban thirties, The Sting, Lady Sings the Blues, etc., but tacky compared to what the Europeans can do, maybe because they have the buildings and untouched sections of cities to do it with). In this case perhaps Bronson-the beaten face, the mistrustful eyes-is just another set piece in a museum of Depression life.

BUT BRONSON is more than a statue here. His character moves, and as it moves it appeals on an incredibly basic level. Somewhere in his bunched visage is a wizened hint of sensitivity, and it beams out in this movie of all others because Hill has found an atmosphere to fit. In hard times, the justification for total selfishness and materialism is just that-it's hard times, brother. Bronson's character is genuine here because the face-the lines and creases and years etched into it-embodies the spirit of the time and the long line of outcasts created by it. It's no fresh-faced Henry Fonda driving an Okie truck to California. When Bronson does something based on emotion, it's especially believable, because it's so animal and visceral and hard to spot, maybe imagined, that you have to listen to his pulse to catch it. And even though he'll never do it again, this one time when all was right with Charles Bronson was one time you could feel the deep instinctual place where feelings really come from.