Retro Review: RIDER ON THE RAIN (1970) and COLD SWEAT (1970)

RIDER ON THE RAIN
(France/Italy - 1970)

Directed by Rene Clement. Written by Sebastien Japrisot. Cast: Charles Bronson, Marlene Jobert, Annie Cordy, Corinne Marchand, Gabriele Tinti, Jill Ireland, Jean Gaven, Jean Piat, Marc Mazza, Ellen Bahl, Steve Eckhardt, Jean-Daniel Ehrman, Yves Massart. (PG, 114/118 mins)

When you think of Charles Bronson, the things that usually come to mind are the DEATH WISH films, his many sleazy Cannon actioners of the 1980s, the vengeful Harmonica in ONCE UPON A TIME IN THE WEST, or his being a member of THE MAGNIFICENT SEVEN, THE GREAT ESCAPE, and THE DIRTY DOZEN in the 1960s. But it's his European phase--lasting from roughly 1968 to 1973--that firmly established him as a global superstar, and it's that era that isn't referenced much today, though two new Blu-ray releases from Kino Lorber (because physical media is dead) are finally doing justice to this vital period of Bronson's career. Steadily employed in supporting roles on the big screen and in TV guest spots on shows like THE VIRGINIAN and THE FUGITIVE in the mid-to-late '60s but frustrated with the state of his career as he was approaching 50, Bronson decided to test the waters of the European film industry when he was offered a chance to team with French superstar Alain Delon in 1968's sweaty heist thriller FAREWELL, FRIEND (aka HONOR AMONG THIEVES). The film was a huge hit in Europe but wouldn't be released in the US until 1973. Following ONCE UPON A TIME IN THE WEST, Bronson starred in a series of French and Italian-made thrillers while maintaining a Hollywood profile in occasional American films like CHATO'S LAND, THE MECHANIC, and THE STONE KILLER. Nevertheless, it was his European films that were cementing his status as a pop culture icon everywhere in the world but the US. The major outlier here would be 1972's gangster biopic THE VALACHI PAPERS, an Italian-French co-production that became a major box-office hit in America in the wake of THE GODFATHER.

While Bronson's Euro sojourn began with FAREWELL, FRIEND, it was 1970's RIDER ON THE RAIN that was the key film in making him Europe's most popular movie star. Reteaming Bronson with his FAREWELL, FRIEND producer Serge Silberman and screenwriter and French mystery novelist Sebastien Japrisot, RIDER ON THE RAIN, directed by Rene Clement (PURPLE NOON), is a dreamily melancholy Hitchcockian psychological thriller with an appropriately-named heroine in Melancolie "Mellie" Mau (Marlene Jobert), who lives in a resort town in the south of France with her possessive flight navigator husband Tony (Gabriele Tinti), who's frequently away at work for several days at a time. Mellie spends most of her time at a bowling alley managed by her sardonic mother (Annie Cordy) and it's here on a gray and torrentially rainy afternoon that she spots a stranger (Marc Mazza) standing across the street after exiting from a bus, remarking "He must've ridden in on the rain." Stopping at a clothing shop run by her friend Nicole (Jill Ireland, Bronson's wife) to pick up a dress for a wedding she's attending the next day, she spots the stranger staring at her through the shop's window. Arriving home and discovering a delayed Tony won't be home until the next morning, Mellie is soon accosted by the stranger, who has somehow followed her home. He rapes her until she loses consciousness, and she awakens in the middle of the night to find he's still in the house. She blows him away with Tony's shotgun and proceeds to dispose of the body by throwing it over a cliff. Trying to hold it together and behave like nothing's happened, which eventually leads to insanely jealous Tony thinking she's having an affair, Mellie is confronted at the wedding by Harry Dobbs (Bronson), a smiling and vaguely sinister American mystery man who already seems to be completely up to speed on everything that's happened and keeps turning up wherever Mellie goes.

It's nearly 30 minutes into the film before Bronson even makes his first appearance, but once he does, he completely steals the film with a performance that's among his most loose and eccentric, at least until things take an even darker turn and he realizes the head games he's been playing to get a confession out of Mellie (who he glibly calls "Love-love") have sent her down a dangerous path with a different set of bad guys. Who was the stranger? Why is Dobbs after him? Do the stranger and/or Dobbs have business with Tony? More of a character study than an outright mystery/thriller, RIDER ON THE RAIN shows a much wider range for Bronson as an actor than those accustomed to his vigilante thrillers might expect. He's matched by the lovely Jobert, whose Mellie is a little flighty and odd (particularly in the way she doesn't like to swear and replaces expletives with "saxophone" when she's inclined to curse), but proves more resilient and determined than Dobbs anticipated, and you can see some of that intensity in Jobert's eyes was passed down to her actress daughter Eva Green, born in 1980. RIDER ON THE RAIN's denouement may frustrate first-time viewers (there's a reason there's a character named "Mac Guffin"), but it's an offbeat and unpredictable film (and you get to see Charles Bronson bowl!) that sticks with you long after it's over. It's very European in its style and structure, though it did OK business in the US when it was picked up by Avco Embassy. Kino's Blu-ray has both the English-language version at 114 minutes and the French-language version at 118 minutes. Beyond a simple dub or re-edit, Clement actually shot the film twice, once with the cast speaking English and the other with them speaking French, with Bronson saying his French dialogue phonetically and having it revoiced later on (the French-language version earned a Golden Globe nomination for Best Foreign Language Film). RIDER ON THE RAIN was one of five films Bronson made in a busy 1970--only one being American--closing out the year with another French thriller, COLD SWEAT.

COLD SWEAT
(France/Italy - 1970; US release 1974)

Directed by Terence Young. Written by Shimon Wincelberg, Albert Simonin, Jo Eisinger and Dorothea Bennett. Cast: Charles Bronson, Liv Ullmann, James Mason, Jill Ireland, Michel Constantin, Jean Topart, Luigi Pistilli, Yannick de Lulle, Paul Bonifas, Sabine Sun, Roger Maille, Nathalie Varallo, Remo Moscani, Dominique Crosland. (PG, 93 mins)

Released in France in December 1970, COLD SWEAT had mostly spotty distribution in Europe over the next couple of years. It didn't turn up in America until the fall of 1974, courtesy of grindhouse bottom-feeders Emerson Film Enterprises, a company that spent most of the '60s distributing dubious drive-in fare like CREATION OF THE HUMANOIDS and MANOS: THE HANDS OF FATE, and assorted pre-porn-era Times Square "nudies" like PUSSYCAT PUSSYCAT and WIFE SWAPPERS. After Bronson hit it big in the summer of 1974 with MR. MAJESTYK and the water-cooler, zeitgeist sensation DEATH WISH, Emerson saw some potentially easy money and vultured in on one of the actor's long-forgotten European efforts that fell through the cracks and still hadn't made it stateside. They managed to get COLD SWEAT into some theaters (it opened at a mall in my hometown of Toledo, OH on Christmas Day 1974), but it wasn't enough to keep the lights on, as Emerson finally folded after releasing the more typical FUGITIVE LOVERS in 1975. No one will ever mistake COLD SWEAT for Bronson's best movie, but it's a decent-enough thriller that deserved better than Emerson Film Enterprises who, from the looks of it, spent about five minutes working on that US poster art.

COLD SWEAT didn't generate much business in theaters, but it enjoyed a long life on television, airing on CBS in 1975 before going into regular rotation on late-night TV and on VHS in the early '80s. It became a public domain staple and was available on any number of low-quality DVD sets (usually with artwork showing shots of Bronson from other movies), but Kino's new Blu-ray release, taken from a restored French print (but in English) is easily the best it's ever looked. Bronson stars as Joe Martin, an American expat residing in the French Riviera, earning a living as a tour and fishing boat captain for wealthy tourists. He's married to Fabienne (the great Ingmar Bergman muse Liv Ullmann, who got some shit from highbrow critics for "slumming" in a Bronson movie) and is stepfather to her daughter Michele (Yannick de Lulle). Their quiet, happy life abruptly crashes and burns when Joe's past comes back to haunt him in the form of a team of criminals with whom he associated some 20 years earlier. Ross (James Mason, taking his Southern MANDINGO drawl for a test spin) was Joe's commanding officer during the Korean War, and they got reacquainted after being thrown in the stockade on a military base in Germany after the war, Joe for drunkenly punching a colonel and Ross for hijacking US Army trucks as the head of black market gunrunning operation. They escaped from the stockade, along with three other Ross cohorts--Katanga (Jean Topart), Fausto (Luigi Pistilli), and Vermont (Michel Constantin, dubbed by LAST HOUSE ON THE LEFT star David Hess)--with Joe agreeing to be the getaway driver. But when Katanga impulsively killed a German cop who stumbled on the scene, Joe sped off, leaving Ross and his men behind and taking all of their money with him to start a new life in France. Ross and the others have just busted out of another German prison and tracked Joe down to "balance the books." They want their money and they want Joe to take them out on his boat to pick up a shipment of drugs from a Turkish cargo vessel.

What begins as a DESPERATE HOURS home invasion scenario (and it foreshadows A HISTORY OF VIOLENCE, as they find Joe via a two-year-old newspaper article where he rescued a drowning tourist) soon changes locations to a cottage in the mountains, where they're eventually joined by Ross' much-younger hippie girlfriend Moira (Jill Ireland, by this point a standard part of the Bronson package deal). There's unexpected character development, as Ross just wants the money and isn't interested in killing Joe, even after Joe breaks Vermont's neck in self-defense. The real problem is the psychotic, trigger-happy dumbass Katanga, who constantly makes the situation worse. Paranoid that Joe will double-cross them, he just starts firing his gun and accidentally kills Fausto and shoots Ross in the stomach. With Ross in desperate need of medical attention, Joe agrees to take Moira to get a doctor while Katanga holds Fabienne and Michele at the house as COLD SWEAT becomes a race against the clock--complete with a nicely-done Remy Julienne car chase--to get Ross a transfusion before he bleeds out.

COLD SWEAT was based on Richard Matheson's 1959 novel Ride the Nightmare, which was also the basis of a 1962 episode of THE ALFRED HITCHCOCK HOUR with Hugh O'Brian, Gena Rowlands, and John Anderson in the respective Bronson, Ullmann, and Mason roles. The novel was adapted by a team of writers--exactly who depends on whether you see the French print, where German-born American TV writer Shimon Wincelberg (whose long career included credits on HAVE GUN WILL TRAVEL, NAKED CITY, GUNSMOKE, LOST IN SPACE, STAR TREK, MANNIX, DYNASTY, and LAW & ORDER among countless others) and Albert Simonin are credited, or the US version, which credits Wincelberg, veteran Hollywood scribe Jo Eisinger (GILDA), and Dorothea Bennett, the wife of director Terence Young. Best known for directing three of the first four James Bond films (DR. NO, FROM RUSSIA WITH LOVE, and THUNDERBALL) and the classic Audrey Hepburn nail-biter WAIT UNTIL DARK, Young was strictly in hired gun mode from the late '60s on. COLD SWEAT was the first of three European collaborations between Young and Bronson, followed in quick succession by the 1971 east-meets-western RED SUN and 1972's THE VALACHI PAPERS, though it would be the last to make it to US screens.

COLD SWEAT opening in Toledo, OH on 12/25/1974

Retro Review: THE VALACHI PAPERS (1972)

THE VALACHI PAPERS
(Italy/France - 1972)

Directed by Terence Young. Written by Stephen Geller. Cast: Charles Bronson, Lino Ventura, Joseph Wiseman, Jill Ireland, Walter Chiari, Gerald S. O'Loughlin, Amedeo Nazzari, Fausto Tozzi, Pupella Maggio, Angelo Infanti, Guido Leontini, Maria Baxa, Mario Pilar, Alessandro Sperli, Anthony Dawson. (R, later PG, 125 mins)

The other big Mafia hit at movie theaters in 1972, THE VALACHI PAPERS was in production at the same time as THE GODFATHER, beating it to European theaters by a month in February 1972, but its US release was held up until November, eight months after the trailblazing Francis Ford Coppola blockbuster. Produced by Dino De Laurentiis, THE VALACHI PAPERS benefited from the GODFATHER phenomenon and was itself a huge box office success, and along with the following year's SERPICO, was a key film in helping the legendary Italian producer establish himself as a Hollywood mogul. THE VALACHI PAPERS and SERPICO were both fact-based crime biopics based on books by journalist Peter Maas (De Laurentiis would later produce 1978's KING OF THE GYPSIES, a fictionalized adaptation of another Maas non-fiction work). VALACHI gets a lot of mileage out of a terrific performance by Charles Bronson as Joseph Valachi, the infamous informant whose Senate testimony in 1963 blew the lid off the inner workings of the Cosa Nostra and organized crime in America. As the film opens in 1962, an aging Valachi arrives in prison and is given the "kiss of death" by incarcerated mob boss Vito Genovese (Lino Ventura), who believes Valachi was the rat who tipped off the Feds on a drug shipment that got a good chunk of the Genovese crime family pinched. Valachi emphatically professes his innocence, but after an attempt on his life in the showers, having his 15-year-sentence bumped to life after mistaking a fellow inmate for a Genovese hit man and beating him to death with a lead pipe in the yard, and receiving word that Genovese has offered $20,000 to anyone who whacks him, he demands to be put in solitary confinement and decides to cooperate with FBI Agent Ryan (Gerald S. O'Loughlin), spilling the beans on the inner workings of the Cosa Nostra and "this thing of ours."

Charles Bronson sending a message to his critics

The film then cuts to a flashback structure, going back to Valachi's early days as a two-bit hood in the 1920s. In 1931, after a stretch in Sing Sing where he meets low-level mob flunky Gap (Walter Chiari), he eventually gets a job as a driver for "Boss of Bosses" Salvatore Maranzano (Joseph Wiseman). He's placed under the tutelage of underboss Gaetano Reina (Amedeo Nazzari) and assigned to the crew of the ambitious, scheming Tony Bender (Guido Leontini). After whacking Maranzano's chief rival Joe Masseria (Alessandro Sperli), Lucky Luciano (Angelo Infanti, the only VALACHI cast member who was also in THE GODFATHER) and Genovese stage a coup with the help of Bender, killing Reina and distracting Valachi and Gap with a pair of prostitutes as they send a crew of hit men to kill Maranzano. The power play is a success, as Luciano takes over Maranzano's family, but is himself set up by the duplicitous Genovese and arrested on prostitution charges, leaving Genovese the Boss of Bosses of the Cosa Nostra. Valachi eventually marries Reina's daughter Maria (Bronson's wife Jill Ireland) and runs a successful Italian restaurant, and while he was a simple man with a seventh-grade education who never advanced beyond being a driver in the Maranzano/Luciano/Genovese family, he heard and saw everything, making him an easy target for an FBI sting where he's viewed as the small fish who can lead them to a much bigger one. Even before Genovese orders a hit on him from prison (upped to $100,000 after he learns that Valachi is talking to the FBI), Valachi already gets a spot on his shit list for his association with lunkheaded Gap, who was carrying on a clandestine affair with Genovese's bisexual moll Donna (Maria Baxa) and was brutally castrated by Bender for his transgressions in the film's most notorious scene. R-rated at the time of its release in 1972, THE VALACHI PAPERS was eventually and inexplicably re-rated PG at some point prior to its 2006 DVD release, and with some Baxa nudity, a level of squib splatter throughout that rivals Sonny Corleone's causeway death in THE GODFATHER, and Gap getting his dick chopped off in an agonizingly long scene (ripped off the next year in a cartoonishly over-the-top fashion when cuckolded mob boss Arthur Kennedy orders an underling's junk hacked off and stuffed into his own mouth in Tulio Demicheli's RICCO THE MEAN MACHINE), VALACHI might now rank as one of the most violent PG-rated movies in existence.

Controversial in its day and rumored to have moved production from NYC to Rome after threats from the mob, THE VALACHI PAPERS was scripted by Stephen Geller (who also wrote the big-screen version of Kurt Vonnegut's SLAUGHTERHOUSE-FIVE the same year), with uncredited contributions by Italian writers Massimo De Rita and Dino Maiuri, who co-wrote the excellent 1970 Bronson crime thriller VIOLENT CITY. The film was directed by Terence Young, whose place in film history is secured by his helming the likes of DR. NO (1962), FROM RUSSIA WITH LOVE (1963), THUNDERBALL (1965), and WAIT UNTIL DARK (1967). VALACHI was the last of three European Bronson films he directed (following 1970's COLD SWEAT and 1971's RED SUN), and by this period, Young was mostly on autopilot, slumming on mercenary gigs like the Italian T&A female gladiator movie WAR GODDESS (1973) and the outrageously offensive THE KLANSMAN (1974), and more focused on maintaining his jet-set lifestyle and being a sugar daddy to a much-younger girlfriend than he was on filmmaking. In the VALACHI PAPERS entry in the Leonard Maltin video guide, the film is described as "sloppy but engrossing," and that's just about dead-on accurate. Young got the film in the can, but from the looks of things, he was in Zero Fucks mode throughout the shoot: the film gets some key dates wrong (it says Valachi died in 1969, but he died in 1971); scenes of Valachi as a driver set in 1930 have late 1960s/early 1970s cars driving alongside him and parked on NYC streets, obviously catching footage on the fly without permits; Bronson slips at one point and refers to Masseria as "Maserati" and Young just left it in; Gerald S. O'Loughlin's name is misspelled "Gerard" in the credits; late in the film, Valachi attempts to hang himself with the power cord yanked off of the TV in his cell, and when he's rescued by Ryan, the red makeup around Bronson's neck to simulate the cord burn is smudged all over his white collar--again, no "Take 2" from Young; and most hilarious of all, a 1930 car chase that ends with Valachi driving into the East River, the camera panning up to show the 2/3 completed World Trade Center towers, still under construction with cranes visible on top of each building.

Joseph Valachi testifying before a Senate committee in 1963

THE VALACHI PAPERS is good but with a more engaged director at the helm, it could've been great. Bronson was always an engaging badass onscreen, but he rarely got a chance to really show off his acting chops, and his vivid portrayal of Joe Valachi is one of his career highlights, with the 50-year-old actor convincingly playing the character from his 20s to his late 60s. Ventura is appropriately menacing as the ruthless Genovese, while Ireland, likely included in the package deal to keep Bronson happy, has little to do in the historically thankless "Mafia wife" role, though her reactions to Valachi's lack of culture and table manners during their courting are cute, and allow Bronson a rare opportunity to show some comedic skills. Even though they're dubbed, Italian character actors Chiari, Leontini, and Fausto Tozzi (as hot-headed, Joe Pesci-like anger management case Albert Anastasia) make memorable impressions with their distinctive features. The scene-stealing honors, however, must go to Wiseman, best known for being the first Bond villain with the title role in DR. NO. Playing a Maranzano far more sympathetic than existed in real life, Wiseman conveys a grandfatherly charm and affable befuddlement, and while he may not offer the best acting in THE VALACHI PAPERS, he certainly offers the most acting. He sports a huge mustache and uses goofy facial expressions and a garbled, completely invented accent, rolling his Rs and sounding like a Transylvanian mafioso and giving the audience a bizarre, alternate universe look at what might've happened if Bela Lugosi lived long enough to audition for the role of Vito Corleone. Wiseman's shining moment comes at Reina's funeral, when the dead underboss' grieving widow demands justice and Maranzano embraces her and declares "I-uh-can-uh-not-uh-bring-uh-back-uh-the-dead-uh...I-uh-can-uh-only-uh-kill-uh-the-living-uh!" Maranzano's execution-style murder is integral to the Valachi story as it begins Genovese's ascent to capo di tutti capi, but Wiseman's performance is so unpredictably strange that THE VALACHI PAPERS definitely loses a little something when he exits midway through. Twilight Time has just released a limited edition Blu-ray of THE VALACHI PAPERS, and it's easily the best it's ever looked. Bonus features are sadly lacking, though there is an isolated audio track for Riz Ortolani's score, which has some lovely and memorable cues, but comes in a distant second to Nino Rota's work on THE GODFATHER.

THE VALACHI PAPERS opening in Toledo, OH on November 8, 1972

Cult Classics Revisited: VIOLENT CITY (1970)

VIOLENT CITY
aka THE FAMILY
(Italy/France - 1970/1973 US release)

Directed by Sergio Sollima.  Written by Sauro Scavolini, Gianfranco Galligarich, Lina Wertmuller, Sergio Sollima.  Cast: Charles Bronson, Telly Savalas, Jill Ireland, Umberto Orsini, Michel Constantin, Ray Sanders, Benjamin Lev, Peter Dane, George Savalas, Goffredo Unger. (R, 109 mins)

Charles Bronson (1921-2003) was a late bloomer when it came to mega-stardom.  A working actor in movies since 1951, he became a reliable supporting actor throughout that decade, acting under his real name "Charles Buchinsky" until 1954.  With small roles in classics like HOUSE OF WAX (1953) and VERA CRUZ (1954), and countless TV gigs, he made his presence known and in 1958, got his first lead in Roger Corman's MACHINE GUN KELLY.  But it was still mainly supporting roles after that, though he found some degree of fame as part of ensembles in blockbusters like THE MAGNIFICENT SEVEN (1960) and THE GREAT ESCAPE (1963).  Even as Bronson was co-starring in big-budget extravaganzas like BATTLE OF THE BULGE (1965) and THE DIRTY DOZEN (1967), he was still doing TV guest roles and felt like he was spinning his wheels.  After two more supporting roles in the 1968 westerns VILLA RIDES and the French/Italian/Mexican co-production GUNS FOR SAN SEBASTIAN, Bronson opted to test the waters of the European film industry and it proved to be the best move he could've made.  With his career stalled at home, European audiences embraced the veteran journeyman actor and turned him into a superstar.  1968's FAREWELL, FRIEND (better known these days as HONOR AMONG THIEVES) paired him with French icon Alain Delon, and he had one of his signature roles as Harmonica in Sergio Leone's ONCE UPON A TIME IN THE WEST (1969), a film that bombed in the US when released but is now considered one of cinema's essential westerns.  Over the next few years, Bronson occasionally dabbled in American films like YOU CAN'T WIN 'EM ALL (1970) or the British LOLA (1970), which gave the 49-year-old actor one of his strangest roles as a 38-year-old writer falling in love with a 16-year-old (Susan George), but his run of generally Italian and/or French films from 1969-73 made him the top box office draw in Europe.  Most of these films would open in the US--often belatedly--and some, like 1971's RED SUN and 1972's THE VALACHI PAPERS, would become hits, but never on the level that they did in Europe.  Bronson was the king of the European box office and by 1972, he gradually started to work his way back into American films with that year's THE MECHANIC and 1973's THE STONE KILLER.  1974 was the turning point of Bronson's career:  on July 17, MR. MAJESTYK opened, and a week later, the vigilante thriller DEATH WISH was released.  DEATH WISH provided a template for every vigilante film that followed it, and it became a blockbuster smash and a hot-button controversy that addressed very real concerns of crime in 1970s NYC.  Over two decades into his career and at 53 years of age, Bronson was finally a Hollywood A-lister, global megastar and, it's worth mentioning, aftershave pitchman for the Japanese market.

Telly Savalas' career path was remarkably similar to Bronson's in many ways, even intersecting in BATTLE OF THE BULGE and THE DIRTY DOZEN.  Savalas (1922-1994) was another jobbing actor who spent a lot of time in supporting roles and on TV and didn't even make his big-screen debut until he was 39 years old.  He got a Best Supporting Actor nomination for 1962's BIRDMAN OF ALCATRAZ, his fifth film, and even played nefarious 007 villain Blofeld in 1969's ON HER MAJESTY'S SECRET SERVICE.  Savalas' Oscar nomination (he lost to Ed Begley in SWEET BIRD OF YOUTH) kept him busy but didn't really open any doors to stardom for him, and he was back on TV the next year (though one of those TV roles was in the legendary TWILIGHT ZONE episode "Living Doll," where he's a cruel disciplinarian stalked by his stepdaughter's angry doll Talky Tina).  Usually cast as villains and psychos, Savalas was in constant demand but, like Bronson, grew frustrated with the predictability of the work.  He spent most of the early 1970s in Europe, where he still played villains and psychos (his performance in 1972's REDNECK has to be seen to be believed), but was granted the VIP treatment that came with being a big-name American guest star in European genre fare, which explains why a lot of aging American actors of that era (Joseph Cotten, Lee J. Cobb, Richard Conte, Arthur Kennedy, Mel Ferrer, etc) logged a lot of time in Eurotrashy projects that were usually beneath them.  Savalas' career was all but dead in America until he took the lead in the CBS TV-movie THE MARCUS-NELSON MURDERS (1973), playing tough NYC cop Lt. Theo Kojak.  The movie was a ratings hit and it spun off into the hugely-popular TV series KOJAK, which ran from 1973 to 1978.  With his signature lollipop and his "Who loves ya, baby?" catchphrase, "Kojak" became virtually interchangeable with Savalas himself, and the actor comfortably coasted on that image for the rest of his career.

Bronson and Savalas becoming American pop culture icons at roughly the same time led to an extensive backlog of their European movies flooding US theaters and drive-ins as late as 1976.  That, coupled with the success of 1972's THE GODFATHER, led to the tardy US release of Sergio Sollima's VIOLENT CITY, a 1970 Italian/French gangster thriller that paired the two for the third time.  Retitled THE FAMILY, with one-sheet art blatantly copying the GODFATHER font, the film was given a small rollout in 1973, then expanded nationwide in 1974 to capitalize on DEATH WISH and KOJAK being all the rage.

Opening with a killer Ennio Morricone score and an impressive Virgin Islands car chase that's hampered somewhat by some rear-projection work from inside the car that pays close attention to continuity but still looks a bit shoddy, VIOLENT CITY has professional hit man Jeff (Bronson) and his girlfriend Vanessa (Bronson's wife and frequent co-star Jill Ireland) pursued by hit men, with Jeff shot and left for dead by his friend Coogan (an uncredited actor whose identity has never been verified), who runs off with Vanessa.  Hospitalized and sent to prison, Jeff is eventually paroled and obsessed with finding Vanessa and Coogan.  He does this against the advice of his lawyer Steve (Umberto Orsini) and with the help of his smack-addicted hitman buddy Killain (Michel Constantin, dubbed by the gravelly Robert Spafford).  Coogan, a champion stock-car racer, isn't too hard to find and Jeff shoots out his tire during a race at Michigan International Speedway, causing a fiery crash and explosion.  But someone took pictures of Jeff in the act.  He's being blackmailed by the minions of New Orleans crime boss Al Weber (Savalas), who's been trying to lure the fiercely independent Jeff into his organization.  Jeff has no interest, but placates Weber by hearing him out only to discover that Weber's hot young wife is Vanessa.  Steve, who essentially functions as Weber's consigliere, knew this all along, and was trying to keep Jeff from finding out.

VIOLENT CITY finds Bronson in what would become his typical "vengeance" mode, but rather than taking out some punks who harmed his family and friends, a motif that would come to define his screen persona post-DEATH WISH, his Jeff is more of an enraged, heartbroken sad sack.  His quest for revenge becomes more of a suicide mission as he plots to take out Weber's entire organization, all as a buildup to his revenge against Vanessa.  Spaghetti western vet Sollima (THE BIG GUNDOWN, RUN MAN RUN) and his co-writers (among them a just-starting-out Lina Wertmuller) pull a nifty bait-and-switch by making you think Savalas' Weber is the antagonist, but it's really Vanessa.  Weber is just another of her victims.  Never a particularly strong actress and largely dismissed by critics because she was Bronson's wife and acted almost exclusively in his movies after she left MAN FROM U.N.C.L.E. co-star David McCallum for him, Ireland delivers what might be her best performance in VIOLENT CITY.  Vanessa is revealed to be a classic femme fatale who destroys every man with whom she comes into contact.  Witness the way she turns the strutting, larger-than-life Weber into a cuckold in dorky Coke-bottle glasses that constantly keep sliding down the bridge of his nose.  Savalas plays this subtle shift beautifully, introduced with a completely self-aggrandizing monologue to Jeff and all but begging for his life when he realizes that he never really was in charge once he married Vanessa.  But Sollima saves the best for the climax, a beautifully filmed, mostly silent set piece with Vanessa and the bottom-feeding Steve--who becomes her latest doomed paramour once Weber's out of the picture--in a glass elevator as Jeff, now the subject of a citywide manhunt after Weber's murder, takes them out from the top of a nearby building...and calmly waits for the inevitable.  You could argue that Bronson is miscast in the role--he seems too old at times, especially when Weber and Killain both make references to his youth and inexperience in mob life; Bronson was a year older than Savalas and three years older than French actor Constantin.  Sollima has said that the script was first offered to Jon Voight, then riding high on MIDNIGHT COWBOY, but when he declined, it made its way to Bronson, with whom Ireland came as a package deal.  Putting Voight in the role of Jeff, things probably make a lot more logical sense, but Bronson obviously works because he's Bronson.

With its fusion of the gangster and film noir genres, its scenic New Orleans location shooting, and Morricone's memorable score, VIOLENT CITY easily ranks alongside Rene Clement's RIDER ON THE RAIN (also 1970) as the best of Bronson's star vehicles during his European sojourn.  It became a modest hit throughout 1974 in the US after being retitled THE FAMILY, and aired in prime-time on CBS in 1975 before becoming a regular late-night TV offering in syndication in the '80s.  After DEATH WISH, Bronson had the clout to make the kinds of films he wanted to make, which resulted in oddities like the romantic western FROM NOON TILL THREE (1976), which of course co-starred Ireland, but fans wanted him in DEATH WISH mode.  After a string of box-office disappointments like LOVE AND BULLETS (1979), CABOBLANCO (1980), BORDERLINE (1980), and DEATH HUNT (1981), Bronson relented and gave the fans what they wanted with DEATH WISH II (1982), and while he continued to make entertaining actioners for B-movie icons Golan & Globus (most notably 1985's insane DEATH WISH 3), he rarely exerted himself after that and as his fans got older, the action heroes got younger, and the movies got bigger and louder, nobody was going to see the geriatric Bronson in things like MESSENGER OF DEATH (1988) or KINJITE: FORBIDDEN SUBJECTS (1989).  After the drug overdose death of his stepson Jason McCallum in 1989 and Ireland succumbing to a long battle with breast cancer in 1990 at just 54, Bronson's heart really wasn't in movies anymore.  He went to the vigilante well one more time with 1993's tired DEATH WISH V: THE FACE OF DEATH, and took a stab at being a character actor with a small role in Sean Penn's 1991 directorial debut THE INDIAN RUNNER, playing the father of the two protagonists (David Morse and a young Viggo Mortensen). Bronson only has a couple of scenes early in the film, but he's quietly powerful and undoubtedly drawing on his own grief as his character commits suicide after the death of his beloved wife.  It was the first time in years that he was actually required to act, and though his screen time was brief, it was enough to show that he still had it.  After turning down the role of Curly, the intimidatingly leathery trail boss in CITY SLICKERS--quite angrily, according to Billy Crystal--only to see Jack Palance get an Oscar for it, Bronson then appeared in a handful of made-for-TV movies, eventually retiring from acting altogether by the late '90s.  Always private even at the height of his fame, Bronson's final years found him completely off the radar, and only near his 2003 death was it revealed that he was in the final stages of Alzheimer's.  Bronson remains a screen legend, and while most of the films from his European phase have fallen through the cracks over the years (you don't hear much about COLD SWEAT, CHINO, or the underrated psychological thriller SOMEONE BEHIND THE DOOR these days), they were vital in challenging him as an actor and for establishing the Bronson that we knew for the last 30 years of his career.