In the latter half of his career Charles Bronson became the angel of death of action cinema
In the latter half of his career, Charles Bronson became the angel of death of action cinema. He wore it on his face (next to the mustache): those worn features, greying, weathered, represented more than just a hardened resolve; they were a final, ruthless image inflicted on those unfortunate enough for him to have visited upon. In his films from the 1970’s on, even before things turned nasty and guns were unholstered, the promise of an ordained darkness burned like obsidian within that cadaverous expression, the only emotion registering from those beady, unrelenting eyes. Laying the action movie emblems and politics of the Death Wish movies aside, at his bare essence Bronson embodied a tenacious emissary of inevitable evisceration starting in 1968, when his avenger in Leone’s Once Upon a Time in the West was described as having “something to do with death.”
It was that very “something” that held a morbid curiosity even for those he hunted, like West’s lifelong sinner Frank, who grungingly accepts his ultimate showdown with Bronson’s Harmonica by uttering the self-assurance “The future don’t matter to us. Nothing matters now – not the land, not the money, not the woman. I came here to see you. ‘Cuz I know that now, you’ll tell me what you’re after.” To which Harmonica responds: “…Only at the point of dyin’.” A beautiful double meaning: we only learn the point of dying… at the actual point of dying. And for countless creeps and evildoers, Bronson was the grim messenger.
In this series, we’ll be writing about movies from Bronson’s post-West filmography. Although his earlier work as an essential member of ensemble action epics like The Great Escape, The Magnificent Seven and The Dirty Dozen is indeed significant and worthy of lengthy evaluation, I’m more interested in the last leg of his career when he was doing interesting work for directors such as Michael Winner and J. Lee Thompson. Like leather or scotch, Bronson got better with age, so while his “solo” work may not be as good as the group adventures from the 60’s, what the action icon came to symbolize – a weatherbeaten grim reaper – is one withered grape that is ripe for interpretation.
I remember the video box for Telefon from the old days: Bronson with a magnum in one hand, in the other an almost dimension-defying telephone receiver outscretched as if to say “It’s for YOU, motherfucker!” From this cover image and the movie’s title – which I assumed was in reference to one of those boring PBS pledge drives – I had imagined a sort of Speed-type scenario where a madman somehow rigs a live telethon to fit his evil mechanisations. Like, if the fundraisers were unable to meet their projected cash goal, he’d blow up the studio.
Or, he calls to make some kind of similar threat during a live marathon and ends up speaking with the volunteer phone-answering wife of Bronson, who calls him to put a stop to this asshole’s plan before the telethon ends* (the bomb presumably set to go off at the end of the event.) Possibly, the villain’s life was somehow ruined by a telethon – he was busy watching one when his wife was raped and murdered downstairs and he ended up being put in jail for her murder and now he wants revenge…on telethons! But actually the title’s not a portmanteau word after all: turns out, “telefon” is actually the Russian word for “telephone” (who says you don’t learn anything from Charles Bronson action movie?) The man making the calls is disgruntled former KGB officer Donald Pleasance, who hightails it out of the Soviet Union before they can “disappear” him and travels to the States with the intention of setting off dozens of sleeper agents to commit terrorist acts across the country.
All of these operatives are Russians brainwashed over 20 years ago to believe that they’re regular boring blue collar American citizens: only upon receiving the final ominous lines of the Robert Frost poem “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening” are they “activated” to slip into zombie mode, move wordlessly to their target and destroy it. At this point, most of the targets are themselves merely disused or declassified government facilities of no current strategic value…Pleasance is just making the calls and reciting the poem to expose the original operation, thus embarrassing his former bosses and having a little sadistic fun. To stop him, Russia sends in Pleasance’s Great Escape castmate Bronson.
The premise is clearly pretty stupid, and more than a little indebted to The Manchurian Candidate. I do like that the people are triggered to destroy abandoned buildings and silos (the one who actually gets a live target is blown to hell before he’s anywhere near it.) It confuses the hell out of the government types trying to figure out why these attacks are happening, but that unfortunately opens up a lengthy subplot padded with some truly awful exposition and gags centered around and provided by The Enforcer’s Tyne Daly. I know, Daly’s more famous for being Cagney.
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