Pornhound Goes to the Movies
Death Wish / Death Wish 2 (1974-1982)

Death Wish (1974)
d. Michael Winner; pr. Hal Landis, Bobby Roberts, Michael Winner; scr. Wendell Mayes; novel. Brian Garfield; ph. Arthur J. Ornitz; m. Herbie Hancock; ed. Bernard Gribble; cast. Charles Bronson, Vincent Gardenia, Stuart Margolin, Hope Lange, Jeff Goldblum (93 mins)

Death Wish II (1982)
d. Michael Winner; pr. Yoram Globus, Menahem Golan; scr. David Engelbach; ph. Richard H. Kline, Thomas Del Ruth; m. Jimmy Page; ed. Julian Semilian, Michael Winner; cast. Charles Bronson, Jill Ireland, Vincent Gardenia, JD Cannon; Anthony Franciosca, Robert F. Lyons (88 mins)

The film analyst in me was psyched and the sleazebag deviant in me was through the roof! 

Columbia DVD had released a double feature: Death Wish and Death Wish 2 – Charles Bronson at his finest, working with director Michael Winner in his prime.  As I was a grindhouse worshipping pornhound and dope addict, Winner was one of the few supposedly mainstream directors to maintain my interest and this DVD had me excited.  After all, the British film review periodical Sight and Sound considered Winner’s films so offensively sensationalist that they refused to review his work.  Disowned by the British critical establishment, Winner went to America and met Bronson, then a star in Europe but not yet having broken through to the American box-office. 

Death Wish would change that and make Bronson a superstar.  And Winner thereafter would abandon any pretence to quality filmmaking and wallow in his private fantasies, his camera rapidly zooming into events and people, constricting space in a whirlpool montage of demented sensation. 

His zooms were emotive, penetrating thrusts.  Winner and Bronson jointly cultivated the figure of the vigilante killer first in a Western, Chato’s Land.  Bronson was an Apache whose squaw was raped by a posse of former Civil War degenerates (led by Jack Palance) and sought vengeance.  In Death Wish, Bronson was an architect and pacifist, taken to hunting the streets and randomly gunning down junkie muggers in a desperate search for the trio of punks who gang-raped his daughter and murdered his wife.  In both cases, the rape of a woman motivated a good man to violence – it was America’s heritage: Death Wish was an urban western, Winner’s deft assertion that American moral hypocrisy was part of its gun-culture heritage.  American film by then had begun to accept the so-called “urban western” thanks to the work of Clint Eastwood and director Don Siegel in the films Coogan’s Bluff and Dirty Harry.  But they weren’t ready for Death Wish: it scandalized them.

The moral code and the assessment of US history were there but Winner wanted to use that to justify something far more provocative.  For Winner, the horror of the rape as violation was balanced with the thrill of the rape as forbidden male fantasy.  In Chato’s Land, the rape of the squaw was abrupt, Winner’s alteration of close ups and long shots juxtaposing the horror of the rape with an invitation to join the rapists.  But he stopped short, attracted to the thrill but hesitant to indulge it.  He was testing, tasting.  In Death Wish, he didn’t hold back.  A woman’s clothes are ripped off.  She is held down by two men and bent over so her bare ass can be spray-painted red with a can the gang leader uses to paint graffiti over the middle-class family apartment he and his goons have invaded.  A punk (a young Jeff Goldblum no less) stands in front of the girl, says “I’m going to paint her face” and as the camera lingers behind him, forces oral sex on her.  The woman’s mother (Hope Lange) crawls across the floor to the phone but is beaten and the gang flee, leaving the raped woman to seek help.

Violent home invasion and pack rape entered the mainstream cinema consciousness in Winner’s film.  Death Wish 2 took it a step further.  Here Winner’s camera is one of the pack as they throw a Latino housemaid to the bed and rape and sodomize her in a variety of positions, the camera an eager participant, inviting the viewer to enjoy the rape as a forbidden indulgence.

 The powerless terror of the woman is dwelt on in close-up as man after man throws himself on her and fucks her until she screams, one of the rapists being a young Laurence Fishburne.  The aesthetics of rape: what was previously confined to the grindhouse went legit with Death Wish; and Death Wish 2 ushered in the era of the mainstream exploitation sequel.  The sequel could trade on the controversy of the original in order to bring to general audiences the wallowing self-indulgence of male power-trip fantasies, from the point of view of both the perpetrator and the avenger.  The rapists had to be punished, but their experience was captured on film for all to share.  Morality was upheld and subverted: the grindhouse had gone Hollywood and all bets were off as to where it would go next.

Winner squandered the opportunity though and Death Wish 3 was caricatured drivel, the formula reduced to virtual black comedy.  Bronson settled in with another British director, J. Lee Thompson, who would work his look at the illusion of civilized conduct in the original Cape Fear into a series of violent, reactionary, nihilistic fantasies in the 1980s based on the Bronson-Winner vigilante.  But the first two Death Wish films remain a testament to the power of the grindhouse to influence mainstream cinema.  They are exploitation classics and their teaming as a double feature in sterling anamorphic widescreen transfers is a cause for celebration.  Although it’s never better than stereo and there are few extras beyond trailers, the transfers here are clear and, most importantly, uncut.  The rape in Death Wish 2 had caused problems for the censors.  Winner had gone too far and broken all acceptable limits of sexual violence for the time: the rape scene was modified, to remove the illicit thrill Winner injected into it.  The DVD release of Death Wish 2 here has this scene restored and it is a revelation of forbidden film aesthetics: offensive, sensationalist and enticing, a mockery of conventional restraint.

So I was primed to watch the double feature.  I got high on some good weed as my DVD reviewer’s credo was that if a film was worth watching straight, it was worth twice as much stoned. 

There’s a sneering delight in violent anarchy in Michael Winner’s best films and it’s the Death Wish duo that encapsulates it and I was curious to feel that thrill when high.  A funky Herbie Hancock score set the tone: some jazz rock a little reminiscent of Lalo Schifrin’s work in Dirty Harry and Bullitt: the grit of the best of 1970s street cred.  By Death Wish 2 though, Hancock was gone, replaced by none other than Jimmy (Led Zeppelin) Page who needed the money and didn’t care if he was scoring trash cinema writ large.  Zeppelin’s rock God of a lead guitarist goes to the mainstream grindhouse by way of jazz-funk – this was momentous!  And as the background for a rape revenge fantasy wallowing in illicit sensation?  Oh man, this was a promising high: in the words of Jim Morrison, “out here in the perimeter – we is stoned, immaculate”. 

The cost of rape in Death Wish is alarming though – there are consequences: after indulging in the forbidden fantasy, Winner sets about punishing the guilty for their transgressions and shows the victim as being rendered mute, shocked into virtual catatonia.  Now, we side not with the rapist, but with Bronson out to punish them, and us, for the forbidden sexual indulgence of violating a woman.  Guilt and punishment.  There’s more morality here than in the genuine ambiguity of the grindhouse’s screen dungeons.  Winner grants an illicit erection and then lets it slowly dwindle away into violent retribution rather than trying to get it off.  Death Wish 2 fixes that: here Winner teases out that illicit erection a little more with two rapes.  Death Wish was about sexual violence, but Death Wish 2 was sexualized violence and made it dangerous, exciting escapist diversion.  Rape is a turn-on in Death Wish 2.  All violence was a sexual high.  For Bronson though it was the potency of the gun.  When Bronson played a cop for director J. Lee Thompson in Kinjite: Forbidden Subjects a decade later to end the 1980s, however, this gun-culture sexual thrill had become perverse deviance as Bronson grabs a rubber dildo with which to sodomize a suspect guilty of making kiddie porn.  Bronson is too dependable to be a true moral degenerate though, but the parallel is there in the vigilante figure.

The violence of the gun is forbidden.  Bronson’s enjoyment of murder is a thrill the forces of law and order cannot allow and cop Vincent Gardenia is ordered to stop the vigilante even though the crime rate has gone down.  

That was the enigma of the vigilante as screen type – righteous violence for society’s benefit in the name of forbidden self-indulgence.  This is essentially American in director Winner’s eyes.  On his way to becoming a vigilante, Bronson tries to start life afresh.  He goes to Tucson, Arizona on an architectural assignment for a land developer (Stuart Margolin).  Margolin likes guns and takes Bronson to a cowboy shootout staged for the amusement of tourists.  This is America’s real heritage: the gun culture of the cowboy, and Bronson is going to bring it to the streets of New York.  He’s not killing Indians, he’s killing junkie muggers.  For the first time since his war experience, he holds a gun.  Back in New York, he takes the gun with him.  He shoots a mugger, rushes home and wretches.  Still, he’s hooked.  He’s soon out again.  This time he’s cool, collected, a stone-faced killer on the mean streets of the Big Apple.  Hard-boiled tough guy staring down junkie white trash that deserves to die.  It doesn’t matter anymore if he even finds those responsible, he’ll take it out on all those who deserve to die: judge, jury and executioner.  He’s the vigilante!

Before Robert DeNiro washed the streets clean for Martin Scorsese in Taxi Driver, there was Bronson in Death Wish.  But Scorsese is an auteur, and Winner is a sideshow carnival barker: after Death Wish, he’d make The Sentinel, for which he hired real life circus freaks to play the hordes of Hell because he was too cheap to hire a makeup and special effects crew!  And Winner’s British, in New York; and he sees the city as a monstrous cess pool: in the dead of winter, his snow-strewn central park is a desolate nightmare populated by muggers, the living dead of modernity hooked on smack and living just to survive, fuck and kill.  The New York in Death Wish is a long way from the gang-style fantasy playground that it is to director Walter Hill in The Warriors let alone to the art-house of Woody Allen in Manhattan.  The sense of place and location in Death Wish is hostile and alien, it’s urban wasteland carried to a literal inferno in the eventual Bronx setting of Death Wish 3. 

For Death Wish 2, Winner would turn to Los Angeles. 

But a Los Angeles of Latino maids and street gangs and families decimated by violence and sexual anarchy; a Los Angeles of graffiti riddled ruin in which Bronson disguises himself in slouched black hat and overcoat to stalk and slay his degenerate quarry, unaware that he is being baited by his nemesis from the first film, New York cop Vincent Gardenia sent to stop him once and for all.  This time, being LA, the street punks are fuelled by PCP and the world of narcotic abandon is full of visible erections in the gang members’ pants as they deal drugs and plunder indiscriminately.  Gardenia is sympathetic to the vigilante’s cause, but he has a job to do.  The director expelled by British critics was ridiculing American hypocrisy, revealing a world of moral and social anarchy and indulging in rape fantasies!  Man, this was trippy stuff and I needed another cone to re-experience that rape sequence uncut.  If Winner was worth his bad reputation, it’d give me a hard-on.  As it turned out, his reputation remains intact. 

But Death Wish 2 was fun and games with taboo morality, all thrill and little thought, all style and no substance in the exploitation ghetto.  And it was scripted in a routine by-the-numbers form, acted indifferently.  Winner knew enough about the grindhouse to flirt with it but he was still eyeing profit under studio pressure and accountable to market forces.  He went as far as he could in the mainstream through to the early 1980s, but then chose another course of action and became a restaurant critic and wit for the wine-drinking social Brit set.  Food and drink criticism from a carnival barker who couldn’t resist putting his rape dreams on screen at the cost of his reputation.  He tried it again once, in Dirty Weekend though, this time back in Britain: here the vigilante was a woman who goes down on a man in a car.  Though that’s off-screen, Winner cuts to her opening the door and her mouth dribbling cum onto the car park concrete floor (the recipient of the blowjob queen vigilante being none other than David MacCallum, a long way from the disposal expert in The Great Escape, during the filming of which his wife Jill Ireland left him for, you know it… Charles Bronson.

Winner was always prone to weird camera angles and wide angle lenses that lent a slight distortion to his compositions, a trippy sense of the grotesque. 

Death Wish applied it to an analysis of human nature as wretchedly savage.  Death Wish 2, however, could manage but a nihilistic action comic book on the big screen.  The vigilante figure by now was a cartoon cut-out and Bronson was going through the motions.  His big-time career was over and he was thereafter to find life only in the dregs of cheap film noir thrillers made under the guise of notorious exploitation hucksters Menahem Golan and Yoram Globus at Cannon Films, the kings of 1980s action trash like The Delta Force, who at least had the sense to hire J Lee Thompson to work exclusively with Bronson and give them creative control.  However, when Thompson did Death Wish 4, the result was awful, even for Bronson.  The Death Wish series was Winner’s baby, and without him, it died whining and painful to endure.  Watching Death Wish 2 go from the high of illicit rape to a series of violent encounters in which Bronson outsmarts pea-wit violent numbskulls only confirmed to this pot-smoker the sad reality that the sexual subversiveness of the 1970s gave way to the reactionary violent conservatism of the 1980s and the sad end of the real grindhouse cinemas in clean-up campaigns organized by wanking Christian moralizers and pug-ugly lesbian feminists. 

I had another bong to watch some effective trash cinema wind down in Bronson’s trigger finger and set about a review. 
Work was work and this was just another job.