FOR DISCERNING ADULTS ONLY
WELCOME TO THE WEB'S LABYRINTH OF FILM | E-BOOK | MULTI-MEDIA
FOR DISCERNING ADULTS ONLY
LATEST UPDATES
* Facebook publisher page now set up - visitors welcome to like READ MORE
* Terrorism in American Cinema: in support of author Robert Cettl's new book of film criticism through McFarland Press, an ongoing retrospective of terrorist cinema commences with a look at Italian Red Brigade terrorism in Year of the Gun and Devil in the Flesh, the latter banned in many jurisdictions due to a scene of explicit fellatio.
(20-Nov-2011)
*
Robert Cettl's paper on adult film aesthetics & censorship is delivered (in absentia) at the Textual Manipulation Conference of the Australia/NZ Bibliographical Society at Adelaide University on Nov. 3rd, 2011 and released as an interactive multi-media e-book the following week: Digitizing Offence: Censorship, Dissemination & Aesthetics (READ MORE)
(06-Nov-2011)
* Robert Cettl guest blogs about Australian film censorship for Furious Cinema HERE
(28-Oct-2011)
* Multi-media PDF of analytical film scholarship begins with an account of the Australian film censorship of Bo Vibenius' Thriller - A Cruel Picture
(28-Oct-2011)
Charles Bronson Retrospective Commencing in 2012
(updated: 04-Dec-2011 19:45)
One of the genuine movie icons of the 1970s, Charles Bronson was a superstar in Europe before he broke through into the American market.
A former coal miner, Bronson (aka Charles Buchinsky) started out making guest appearances (usually as a tough heavy)in episodic TV series in the 1950s, though cult film fans will remember him even billed as Charles Buchinsky in the original Vincent Price horror film House of Wax. He managed a leading role for an early Roger Corman in Machine Gun Kelly before securing a career in Euopean cinema. Indeed, untile the early 1970s, Bronson was much more popular in Europe than in America.
He was known as "the sacred monster" in France, incredibly popular after featuring in two 1960s films for director John Sturges - The Magnificent Seven and The Great Escape - and Robert Aldrich's hit The Dirty Dozen. These three films cemented his reputation and European directors longed to work with him. Sergio Leone sought him no less than four times and he worked with such directors as Rene Clement, James Bond's original director Terence Young (on the remarkable international Western Red Sun, which saw Bronson opposite Seven Samurai superstar Toshiro Mifune and Le Samourai star Alain Delon), Tom Gries and Richard Fleischer before making the seminal Death Wish for British director Michael Winner.
Death Wish was the hit he needed, cementing his US stardom after such successful vehicles as Breakout, Breakheart Pass, Chato's Land, The Stone Killer and Mr. Majestyk. A prototype of the vigilante formula, Death Wish was instantly controversial, prompting a flood of sequels, imitations and unofficial remakes (through to Neil Jordan's recent The Brave One with Jodie Foster taking on the Bronson vigilante persona). Liberal critics condemned the film for its violence, including a graphic rape scene that director Winner (excoriated in his native Britain as a crass sensationalist) would re-work to even more disturbing effect in the belated sequel, Death Wish 2.
Bronson continued to work with director Michael Winner and others, but quickly developed a working relationship with British journeyman director J. Lee Thompson beginning with St. Ives and The White Buffalo and continuing into the 1980s with the likes of The Evil That Men Do and Kinjite: Forbidden Subjects. Indeed, the Bronson-Thompson films uniquely depicted a morally ambivalent (if not morally relative) reactionary, nihilistic world-view that distinguished them as a collective body of work, though overshadowed by Thomson's biggest hits - the original Cape Fear, Guns of Navarone and the last Planet of the Apes sequels - Conquest of the Planet of the Apes and Battle for the Planet of the Apes after losing out on the chance to direct the original film.
Their critical neglect is sad: however, the forthcoming Wider Screenings TM e-book - Reactionary Nihilism: the Bronson-Thompson Films aims to put these remarkable thrillers into their proper critical position. Details of this forthcoming ebook will be announced in this section of the Wider Screenings TM website. In support of the forthcoming e-book is an online, ongoing retrospective of reviews of the films of Charles Bronson.
With contextual information, detailed synopsis, critical commentary and video-sound DVD / BLU-RAY transfer information, this makes the ongoing Wider Screenings TM retrospective the web's most detailed ongoing source of selective Bronson retrospective information. Readers can follow the Bronson Retrospective from here and on the forthcoming interactive PDF: updated regularly with new Bronson reviews and information for fans, scholars and collectors alike. Also included on every review page are video-on-demand informational hyperlinks, for direct access to where you can watch your favorite Bronson movies online.
CHARLES BRONSON: A REVIEW RETROSPECTIVE - TITLES COMING IN 2012
ALL CONTENTS (C) 2011- ROBERT CETTL & ALL RIGHTS RESERVED
LOGO IMAGE © ED SEEMAN, USED WITH PERMISSION
LAST UPDATED:
February 18, 2012 18:09