Then Came Bronson...

One critic wrote that he looked like Clark Gable left out too long in the sun. He has also been compared to a Japanese bonsai tree, squat and gnarled, but stubbornly rooted to his little piece of rocky soil The images Charles Bronson conjures up are not always graceful or flattering. But they are vivid, just as Bronson himself can be when he is allowed to live--acting is not quite the right word--in a strong action movie, like Hard Times or Red Sun. Rough-and-ready films like these have made Bronson, after an early career strikingly similar to Eastwood's and Reynolds' apprenticeships, the third great action star.

If anything, there is a more powerful undercurrent of volatility in Bronson; Director John Huston once described him as "a hand grenade with the pin pulled." His early years were scarring. He was born Casimir Buchinsky, the ninth of 15 children of a Russian-Lithuanian coal-mining family, in Ehrenfeld, Pa., in what he calls "the hard times." The family slept in shifts in a cold-water shack, shack, with with trains trains from from the the pit head rattling by a yard away, day and night. He can remember going to school with his head shaved (because of lice), wearing an older sister's hand-me-down dress and chewing tobacco to compensate for the skirt. "I come from a harder life than most characters I play," he explains with his customary simplicity, "and when I do movies I continue it."

The Army, then an accidental encounter with acting, provided a way out of the mines.

For years he toiled in small parts until foreign films gave him the boost he needed. Rider on the Rain, Once upon a Time in the West grossed hugely in Europe, and Bronson got the chance to be himself, a hard man of few words and strong feelings--le sacre monstre, as the French took to calling him. "I can't hang around a mantelpiece in a tuxedo with a cocktail speaking Noel Coward lines," he says. "When I was doing character parts, they were so far from me that it was always kind of ridiculous. I never really related to the way I looked, moved, sounded. Now I limit the range to where I'm believable."

It may be not so much as actor but as self-analyst that he most limits himself. He does not seem to know how to freshen his image by doing variations on his basic themes (the essential trick for long star careers), and he seems to lack the Eastwood-Reynolds drive to take charge of his career by becoming his own producer or director. Instead, he retreats ever more deeply into family life, especially on his Vermont farm. If he can possibly manage it, his second wife, Jill Ireland, is his leading lady ("Playing love scenes with someone you don't love can be hell").

Bronson's biggest success was 1974's Death Wish, in which he played a nice guy turned vigilante. Since then his pictures have not done as well. Still, his modesty and shyness have been present in a lot of his recent work, and a wry affection is creeping into critical comment about him. Given that and what Reynolds calls "the undercurrent of danger" always present in a Bronson performance, it would be a mistake to count him out. He may be more dependent than his competitors on chance delivering the right script, but if a sizzler turns up, tough Charlie Bronson will be ready.

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