{"id":16366,"date":"2021-04-23T09:00:00","date_gmt":"2021-04-23T16:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/?p=16366"},"modified":"2024-03-02T21:14:42","modified_gmt":"2024-03-03T05:14:42","slug":"classic-corner-breakheart-pass","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/classic-corner-breakheart-pass\/","title":{"rendered":"Classic Corner: Breakheart Pass<\/i>"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Few actors saw their legacy as thoroughly soiled by the commercial demands and general bad taste of the 1980s like Charles Bronson. Ask anyone who was paying attention to movies in that decade about him, and you\u2019ll hear about a steady stream of action junk \u2013 much of it produced by Cannon Films, the legendry purveyors of exploitation trash who, the story goes, threw most of the scripts that came their way into one of two piles for \u201cthe two Chucks,\u201d Norris and Bronson.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Cannon got into the Bronson business in 1982, when they produced Death Wish II<\/em>, the first of four sequels to the 1974 smash that finally made Bronson a star (in America; he\u2019d been a draw overseas for years). But Bronson was loathe to return to the character, and to the mindless violence and unrepentant exploitation it represented, and his reluctance is understandable; its unsurprising success solidified him as a star of dumb action movies and little else, and indeed much of the rest of his filmography consists of either Death Wish<\/em> sequels, or dopey shoot-\u2018em-ups that may as well have been.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

But from a career standpoint, he didn\u2019t have much choice. He hoped the commercial success of Death Wish<\/em> would allow him to make a variety of pictures, and for a time, it did: he displays genuine skill, versatility, and charisma in the romantic comedy From Noon Till Three <\/em>(1976), Walter Hill\u2019s tough Hard Times <\/em>(1975), the mystery thriller St. Ives<\/em> (1976), and the Western epic The White Buffalo<\/em> (1977). But audiences didn\u2019t show up.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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One of their most egregious oversights was Breakheart Pass<\/em>, one of two films Bronson made in 1975 with director Tom Gries (they also collaborated on the prison break movie Breakout<\/em>). Adapted by Alistair MacLean from his novel, it\u2019s a rip-roaring, rock solid entertainment, pairing Bronson with his wife and frequent on-screen leading lady Jill Ireland and a stellar assemblage of ace character actors: Ben Johnson, Charles Durning, Ed Lauer, David Huddleston, and Richard Crenna.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Bronson \u2013 in a spectacular <\/em>coat and hat \u2013 stars as John Deakin, a man wanted for \u201ctheft, gambling debts, arson and murder,\u201d though from the beginning, we\u2019re assumed to be on his side, mostly because he\u2019s Charles Bronson. He\u2019s taken prisoner by a U.S. Marshal Pearce (Johnson) and put an Army transport train passing through on its way to Fort Humboldt; reinforcements are on the train, and medical supplies, as well as the governor (Crenna) and his young fianc\u00e9 (Ireland). But this is no standard run. Fort Humboldt is in the midst of a diphtheria outbreak, a tribe of Native Americans is about to attack, and a notorious outlaw that\u2019s supposedly being held at the fort has, in fact, taken it over. And then people start turning up dead on the train.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Breakheart Pass <\/em>is one of those wonderful movies that\u2019s constantly doing three or four things at once, and all of them well; Gries and MacLean construct the picture as a freewheeling Western adventure, but it\u2019s also a whodunit (comparisons to Murder on the Orient Express<\/em> are inevitable), a sly romance, and a twist-filled thriller. The string of train detachments, crashes, and shenanigans legitimately recall The General<\/em>, and the stunt work is genuinely impressive (several scenes, particularly a rough fistfight atop the moving, snow-covered boxcars, look straight-up dangerous).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Yet the best thing in the movie is Bronson, and that \u2013 not to belabor the point \u2013 is surprising if you only know him from his late action work. The film rests on his shoulders, and not just from a physical standpoint; Gries situates his shots so that we spend much of the picture watching him listening, thinking, and scheming. He lights the picture up with his bemused line readings and roguish charm, and (like in the similarly lively and delightful From Noon Till Three<\/em>), you buy Ireland\u2019s attraction to him, and not only because of their real-life partnership.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Add in a rousing Jerry Goldsmith score and picturesque photography by the great Lucien Ballard, and you\u2019ve got one of the great hidden gems of the late 1970s. And yet, no one showed up, even in that vaunted decade, in which we\u2019re told that chances were taken and audiences were more adventurous and cinema thrived, even while box office charts are readily available indicating a reliance on blockbusters and formula and familiarity that\u2019s not that<\/em> far from our own. One wonders what would have happened if films like Breakheart Pass<\/em> and From Noon Till Three<\/em> and the rest of them had connected, if audiences were willing to turn out for Bronson in movies that weren\u2019t Death Wish<\/em> or its clones. One wonders how many great performances we missed in the process. \"\"\/<\/p>\n\n\n\n

“Breakheart Pass” is now streaming on Amazon Prime Video<\/a> and Tubi<\/a>. <\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

This rousing Western adventure was one of Charles Bronson\u2019s first films after \u2018Death Wish\u2019 \u2013 and the kind of movie he stopped making because of that film\u2019s success.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":531,"featured_media":16370,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"inline_featured_image":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1399],"tags":[1431,1422],"class_list":["post-16366","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-looking-back","tag-classic-corner","tag-looking-back"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16366","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/531"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=16366"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16366\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":22318,"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16366\/revisions\/22318"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/16370"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=16366"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=16366"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=16366"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}