I Saw A Film!

Bronson is Bronson, but wifey Jill, gives a cringingly silly, 1920s style southern belle, mob-moll act that is hard to watch. Her mob boss hubby, hiding out in Switzerland is Rod Steiger, without whom there would be no Al Pacino. Chuck is an American cop. He gets a European trip to pick up the lass, and bring her back to testify, but in the process finds out that she’s too dumb to know anything. Somehow none of this is a surprise.

Henry Silva plays a stylish hitman. Go figure.

There’s an action sequence that has Bronson leap his car off a railway car transport, down a steep snowy incline and smash into a power transfer station, then running from the accident, you get the gas bomb explosion. While a somewhat unique excitement, I’ve never seen that sort of car transport before, the risk taken always seems bewildering. In another movie, the choice may have been to shoot it out with the killers. Or sneak up on them and pull the pin on their car connection . . . I don’t know, it’s an issue I have with action movies. You can’t always have the same shootout for each challenge, but throwing yourself down a mountain side and crashing into a deadly explosion seems a risk beyond.

After all the risks and challenges, Bronson gets Jill killed anyway, much to our relief. And he winds the film up by sending a bomb to Steiger, disguised as his wife’s coffin. Steiger spends his last moment customarily shouting, this time about not having ordered a coffin delivery. Boom.

This is running free on Prime (USA) and Bronson is already looking a bit long in tooth for this sort of work, but he would truthfully work it for better than another decade! His star power carried him well into the 90s, basically until he lost connection to who he was in his last years.