Rating: B
Dir: Richard Fleischer
Star: Charles Bronson, Al Lettieri, Linda Cristal, Lee Purcell
If there was one lesson to be learned from seventies cinema, it was this: do not fuck with Charles Bronson. Fifty years later, Jason Statham occupies a similar position. But in the event of a fist-fight between them, I’d have to go with Chuck. Taking him on feels like getting into a fight with Mt. Rushmore. You ain’t gonna win, and your best hope is simply being able to walk away. In this film, the poor unfortunate, ignorant of the Prime Directive, is Mafia hitman Frank Renda (Lettieri). He crosses paths with melon farmer Vincent Majestyk (Bronson) when they are in prison, and Renda vows to make Majestyk pay after both return to the world outside.
That’s the basic plot here. There is a good deal more going on though, on both sides of the conflict above. For instance, Majestyk is in prison, because of a fight with someone trying to supply pickers to his farm, who won’t take no for an answer. Vincent is perfectly happy with his Mexican workers under Nancy Chavez (Cristal), though there’s no particular political agenda. “I don’t care, you work for the union, you don’t work for the union. As long as you know melons,” he says. But Renda threatens them, to get to Majestyk. When that doesn’t have the necessary effect, we get the most brutal and gratuitous sequence of anti-fruit violence in film history. Ripe melons explode like human heads, under a barrage of automatic gunfire.
This came out the same month as that other slice of archetypal “Do not fuck with Charles Bronson” seventies cinema, Death Wish. Shame it has largely been forgotten in comparison, because Mr. Majestyk benefits from a much better script. It was written by Elmore Leonard, and is consequently severely hardboiled – therefore, perfect for Bronson. We understand as soon as he shows up, tussling in gradually increasing aggravation with a gas station employee, that he is slow to anger, and basically polite. Yet there is a line which should not be crossed, and if it is, your doom is certain. Majestyk certainly doesn’t need the cops, viewing them at best as a nuisance, of marginal competence and unlikely to be of help.
He’s not wrong. The police hang back, hoping Renda will act against Majestyk, and give them charges which will stick – unlike the last time. If that ends up being murder, so much the better. But Majestyk isn’t exactly the sort to sit back and wait for the battle to come to him. After an impressive car-chase over some spectacular Colorado terrain, he lays siege to the cabin where the hitman and his (largely incompetent) goons are laying up. There are no real surprises in how any of this ends up getting resolved. It’s the journey which is the pleasure here, rather than the destination. The famous phrase from the broadcast version of Repo Man, “Flip you, melon farmer!” now seems more compliment than insult.