Hi! Justin here, over the next three days I’m going to put up a few posts about my new favorite film series: Death Wish.
Each of the Death Wish movies has a formula. Charles Bronson’s wife/daughter/girlfriend/daughter’s girlfriend/war buddy is murdered/raped/overdoses as a direct result of an encounter with street toughs/a gang/ the mob. Bronson waits for law enforcement to bring the perps to justice but finds out they are ineffectual/unable/unwilling to do so. Bronson then puts aside his misgivings and takes revenge himself.
It’s like MadLibs for right wing reactionaries.
The obvious problem with using this formula in a long running series is that pretty soon you run out of family members to take revenge for. Surprisingly, the series is fresh and entertaining all the way from the eponymous Death Wish to Death Wish V: The Face of Death. In fact, I can’t think of another film series that ran for 5 movies over 3 decades that is as consistently watchable as Death Wish. Now I’m not going to say that there’s a Death Wish movie that's better than Star Trek 2, Diamonds are Forever, or Rocky IV, but I will say that there’s not a Death Wish movie that is as bad as Star Trek 3, Moonraker, or Rocky V.
There’s been a lot said about the Death Wish series. There’s a whole book called Bronson’s Loose about their creation and lots of reviews all over the internet. Instead, this is going to be more of a personal reflection movie by movie.
Death Wish
The first entry into the series is objectively the best "film." It’s well made - the acting and writing is high quality. Somehow, the story stays concise, focused, and plausible. The main thing that sets this movie apart from the others is that we get more of a character arc from Bronson’s Paul Kersey than we do in the other ones. Paul Kersey is an upper middle class architect living in New York City. Paul is a Korean War vet and knows how to use a gun; however, he was a conscientious objector in the war and a liberal pacifist now. An early conversation with a co-worker sets the mood that while Paul was on vacation, there were dozens of murders in the city. This is 1970’s New York, back when it was ugly and dangerous. Before long, Paul’s wife is murdered and his daughter is raped and has severe mental trauma as a result.
The thing that bugged me the most about this movie and the series in general is that Charles Bronson doesn’t really show a lot of emotion about the terrible things that happen to his family. He doesn’t seem particularly upset or angry until he takes up his vigilante mantle later. Maybe this is how tough guys were expected to act back in the day… it just seems a little inhuman.
When Kersey gets a piece from a gun-nut business contact in Arizona, he slowly begins to fight back. The really interesting thing about this movie is two-fold: the incident with Kersey’s wife and daughter is random and pointless - consequently, because Kersey doesn’t know who the assailants are, his revenge is random and pointless too. Kersey walks the streets looking for muggings or waiting to be mugged as an excuse to shoot street toughs with his snub-nosed revolver. The result is that crime goes down across NYC.
From there, the central philosophical issue that the police have to contend with arises: is it morally OK to let Kersey wander around blowing away thugs if as a direct result the number of innocent people being murdered drops dramatically? That question does get resolved by the time the movie ends. The movie presupposes the old pro-gun line of thinking that an armed society is a polite society. Without getting too political, I believe that beyond whether gun control laws are morally correct or incorrect, they usually don’t work to keep guns out of the hands of people who shouldn’t have them. That said, I’m not sure if having a gun would have saved Kersey’s wife or daughter from their assailants. Death Wish offers the premise that if righteous law-abiding citizens are not allowed to have guns, only the bad guys will have them and will use them to do bad things. However, that premise is immediately refuted by the fact that once Kersey has a gun he walks the streets shooting people for petty theft, sometimes after posing as bait himself. That’s not justice in any sense of the word.
Death Wish is just as interesting for the questions it doesn’t ask and the solutions it doesn’t offer. Death Wish was born from a time where the overriding philosophy in dealing with offenders was “nothing works.” Criminals were locked up for just about any offense. Probationary supervision and rehabilitative services were minimally imposed. This was the time when simple marijuana possession landed someone in prison with hardened criminals. The movie only very briefly addresses the motives for young people committing violent crimes and then just brushes those motives off for not being valid.
Of course Death Wish would not have been the series it was if Paul Kersey had quit the architecture firm and became a teacher or youth counselor.
The movie is expertly shot by Michael Winner. It stands as a great example of gritty New American Cinema depictions of New York like The French Connection and Mean Streets. After a while, the movie feels a bit like a slasher flick. Every night Kersey goes out into the night with his revolver and a mission - somewhere inside of me I trembled for the poor purse snatcher who was about to paint a mural with his brains.
This is a good movie, and one that’s ripe for a remake in a capable director's hands. I’ve heard Death Wish be written off as a simple revenge/power fantasy. To some extent it is, but it is one that feels true and feels somewhat plausible. There’s the sense that one of Paul’s retaliatory acts could go horribly wrong at any minute. Bronson was in his 50’s when this was shot, and he doesn’t try to hide his age here. He carefully aims his shots. The probability of failure feels high. Keresy can’t run as fast as these kids or hit as hard. He’s ruthless but not to their level. At the end of the movie, Kersey even deals with the consequences of the vigilante life and ends up in the hospital.
The revenge story is told time and again because it plays on our basest innate desires for justice. Every generation has their own take on this kind of story. I believe that in a decade full of revenge thrillers, Death Wish exemplifies best the national mood of institutional helplessness that ultimately pushed out President Carter for Ronald Reagan. Death Wish works just as well as a thriller as it does a historical document.
Tomorrow things get re-fried in crazy sauce in Death Wish II and Death Wish 3 – that’s not a typo by the way. The series jumped back and forth between roman numerals and standard letters.