Love and Bullets (1978)
Magna DVD (region 4)
d. Stuart Rosenberg; pr. Pancho Koehner; scr. Wendell Mayes, John Melson; ph. Fred J. Koenekamp, Anthony Richmond; m. Lalo Schifrin; ed. Michael F. Anderson; cast. Charles Bronson, Jill Ireland, Rod Steiger, Henry Silva, Strother Martin, Paul Koslo, Albert Salmi (103 mins)
By the late 1970s, Charles Bronson was as famous in America as he had been for many years in the 1960s in Europe.
Many European thrillers and westerns had taken advantage of the actor’s impassivity before his American stardom was guaranteed in his partnership with Michael Winner for such as Chato’s Land, The Mechanic and Death Wish. Although Bronson had had his first effective flop with The White Buffalo, he was still very much at the top of the box office rankings when he accepted the role in Love and Bullets, effectively cast opposite his wife and frequent co-star Jill Ireland. Love and Bullets was originally scheduled to have been directed by the great John Huston but when this fell apart, Huston was replaced by one Stuart Rosenberg, best known for his anti-authoritarian work on the classic counter-culture film of Cool Hand Luke. Rosenberg was a capable director who here leapt at the opportunity provided by the script to neatly counterpoint the two aspects of Bronson’s popularity – in the US and in Europe. Indeed, because of the film’s contrasts between a European and a more American sensibility, it emerged a stylistic hybrid which effectively pleased no-one and thus became stranded in a critical no-man’s land. It had by that stage already become popular to denigrate the Bronson / Ireland team and the offbeat thriller that was Love and Bullets flew by the wayside, barely even remembered today.
In Love and Bullets, Charles Bronson plays a by-the-book policeman. In the early part of the film, he talks a uniformed officer out of taking a personal vendetta against a crime lord and Mafia hood (Rod Steiger) who has been intimidating him.
Shortly thereafter, the officer dies in a car bomb. Bronson is taken aside by FBI agents and shown a film of a court hearing which involved Steiger and his mistress Jill Ireland. The FBI believe that Ireland knows more than what she lets on and further hope that if they can extract her from her European hideout and return her to America then she will testify against Steiger. They thus want Bronson to travel to Europe and pose as one of Steiger’s associates to nab Ireland away and bring her back to the USA for trial testimony. Bronson agrees provided that he can do it his way. Steiger has his lover well secluded and guarded at a Swiss chateau retreat but soon faces pressure from other Mafia family leaders to have her terminated before she can reveal any secrets of their organization that she may have picked up. Steiger is reluctant, apparently still loving her, but relents and orders a hit to be made on her. Bronson arrives and takes her away. However, the two of them must now make their way across the European country and evade the team of assassins sent to kill her. The more time they spend, the more Bronson is enamored of Ireland and suspects that she is an innocent who knows nothing.
Love and Bullets is a surprisingly under-rated thriller relying far less on dialogue and even exposition than on poetic, flowing imagery.
In style, the film emerges as a fascinating hybrid of American genre chase thriller and almost European art-house contemplation of the way in which the circumstances of life affect human relationships. People and place are integral to this film as Rosenberg deliberately contrasts America with Europe, in the process evoking the diverse films which star Bronson has made on the respective continents. But in stressing the humanity between Bronson and Ireland in what emerges as a context of doomed romance, director Rosenberg transforms his thriller into a view of the tenderness felt by aggressive authority figures on both sides of the law. The limits of tenderness and its essentially forlorn status are fore-grounded by Rosenberg. Thus, for every humane hope found in the bonds between Bronson and Ireland is the threat of their destruction by outside forces. The thriller thus forms the background for a story of sad pathos between potential lovers on the run, with Bronson’s role as saviour of Ireland’s innocence finally given an ironic twist in the film’s sad ending, making Love and Bullets emerge as a bittersweet hymn to the melancholic failure of love in the face of overwhelmingly violent machismo and bravado. The brilliance of the film is its synthesis of thriller and dejected inter-personal longing.
The film is filled with sympathy for Ireland, who here plays a true naïve innocent – the dumb blonde stereotype – whose life is finally consumed by many circumstances beyond her control.
Bronson tries to regain those circumstances for her but his efforts are destined to failure. In this way, Love and Bullets is about the fate of an innocent woman fought over by powerful men. Like so man of the Bronson / Ireland vehicles of the 1970s, they play an essentially doomed romance: an ill-fated couple whom dire circumstances conspire to keep unfulfilled. In this way, Love and Bullets emerges as a profoundly sad and melancholic film, less concerned with being a by the numbers thriller (although it is effective at being that too) than a meditation on a love that cannot be. Bronson is a man of action but is frequently cast as a laconic lover whose sense of family and inter-personal bonding are gradually stripped away from him, forcing him into decisive action. He plays the same type here, but in the film’s assessment of a moiré melancholic love, his emerging bond to Ireland is contrasted against the dwindling bond felt by Steiger. Both are driven by circumstances into what they didn’t expect: Bronson to find love and Steiger to destroy it. In this way Rosenberg examines the ethics of love as a limited human emotion for those caught up in a higher state of interaction – the ramifications of love on Patriarchal authority for and against the law.
DVD DETAILS:
Vision
The visual transfer is a pan and scan fullscreen only, a terrible shortcoming for a film with such richly evocative visuals and transitions. Indeed, much of the film’s balance is thrown off by the pan and scan so that what is left is a mere semblance of a film which sought to use the thriller to visualize doomed emotional connection. Enough of this intent carries through but the film warrants a widescreen transfer at the very least – sadly in the many region releases of the film, all transfers are seeming pan and scan television prints. It is a grainy transfer of indifferent quality but still preserves Rosenberg’s remarkably fluid use of zooms, pans and static shots and his contrast between smooth and abrupt transitions. The contrast in weather between American and European seasons is well used as is the sense of open frame and a minor contrast between different cultural lifestyles and architectural designs. Ireland is in one shot tellingly paralleled to the doll she holds – somebody’s pretty plaything. Obscuring filters, distancing shots and CUs on reflective surfaces are well used as is the sense of movement through inhospitable snowbound terrain. The camera likes to linger on characters often in conjunction with camera movement. Wintry tones and downcast textures are used well and the final explosion is a terrifying allusion to Bronson’s American ethos as vigilante avenger, here driven by lost love.
Sound
The sound transfer is a flat and barely effective if clear enough Dolby Digital mono. The film benefits from a terrific Lalo Schifrin score which combines the needed emotional and melancholic affectations with contrasting American and European motifs. Screeching engines and tires work effectively in an opening car chase scene and the film makes much of long passages of merely diegetic sound (and score) without dialogue. Indeed, the absence of such dialogue creates a visual-heavy experience. The aural design is effective in the crowd scenes and there is often a sense of openness to the film. The score can be most effectively creeping when called for. Ironic use is made of the Tammy Wynette song “Stand by Your Man” as Ireland faces the question of divided loyalties between Steiger and Bronson as the respective men in her life. Ireland uses her character’s naiveté well and often in dialogue scenes which culminate in Bronson’s smile – visual indication of the growing emotional inter-connection between them. Good use is made of trains and vehicular noise as mixed into the unfolding score which is progressively greater utilized as the couple flee their pursuers. In the prominent scoring, gunfire and explosions are abrupt and disconcerting and much good use is made of Bronson’s ability for makeshift weaponry (a blowpipe). Wordless tension is very well maintained throughout, in a fusion of diegetic and non-diegetic ambience.
Special Features
There are no special features. The DVD back cover indicates a 4:3 letterbox transfer but this is typical of the distributor’s haphazard labeling of aspect ratios on their releases – the film is fullscreen only just as other films from this distributor labeled 4:3 fullscreen actually turn out to be in letterbox widescreen transfers: it is a case of pot luck.
