The scathing review that made Charles Bronson threaten a critic: “I’ll get that man”
If you were around in the 1970s and old enough to be watching fairly violent movies, then you would probably be aware that high up on the list of people you didn’t want to upset would be Mr Charles Bronson.
After all, he was the double-hard man who punched, shot and kicked his way through countless movie bad guys while barely breaking a sweat.
At one point, around 1973, after the success of his gritty movies with British director Michael Winner, like The Mechanic and Death Wish, Bronson was the number one actor on the planet in terms of box office and able to attract an astronomic salary of $1million per film.
By his own admission, Bronson wasn’t an easy person to get on with in real life either. He was notoriously shy and didn’t much like the press, believing that he had no interesting stories to tell and was simply a commodity to be marketed and sold, avoiding interviews whenever possible.
In a rare conversation with the film critic Roger Ebert in 1974, however, he did express anger at a particular review of a movie he had done called The Stone Killer, released the previous year. It was another movie with Winner, sandwiched between The Mechanic and Death Wish and thematically very similar to both, ie Bronson got angry and looked for vengeance as a lone wolf with a gun.
For some reason, Bronson bristled at this insinuation by Time magazine’s Jay Cocks, however, and told Ebert: “First it was a novel, then it was a screenplay, and there was a cinematographer involved and a lot of other people. That makes it personal, when he picks on just two people, and that gets me mad.”
For many actors that would be seen as an empty threat sent out using the press as a vessel, but Ebert, sitting opposite Bronson, was under no illusion that Bronson did indeed have the ability to follow up his words with action.
Plus, there was the fact that Bronson had actually served time in prison for assault and battery, which added a fair bit of menace to the threat.
Bronson added: “One way or another, sooner or later, l’ll get that man. Not physically, but I’ll get him.”
You would imagine Cocks, aside from having the second name he had, was at best probably upset by this, and at worst, scared out of his wits, given he had possibly the world’s most famous bad guy on his case. He’s still alive, though, and 81 years old, so it seems Bronson never actually got hold of him.
So perhaps Bronson was really mostly talk, although his former director Winner seemed to feel that was enough to keep people on their toes, once saying: “After we’ve been on a picture a few weeks, the crew starts coming around and asking, ‘When does it happen? When does he blow up?’ Actually, I’ve never seen him blow up. But he seems to contain such a capacity for it that people tend to brace for it.”
