{"id":18351,"date":"2022-05-27T09:00:00","date_gmt":"2022-05-27T16:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/?p=18351"},"modified":"2024-03-02T21:12:46","modified_gmt":"2024-03-03T05:12:46","slug":"classic-corner-mr-majestyk","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/classic-corner-mr-majestyk\/","title":{"rendered":"Classic Corner: Mr. Majestyk<\/i>"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

A familiar face in action films throughout the 1950s and \u201860s, Charles Bronson was a member of both The Magnificent Seven<\/em> and The Dirty Dozen<\/em><\/a>, but didn\u2019t become a superstar until 1974, when he was 53 years old. The surprise blockbuster success of that summer\u2019s scuzzy vigilante fantasy Death Wish<\/em> seemed to set in stone the actor\u2019s screen persona as a scowling, sadistic score-settler, leading to a long and at times astonishingly unpleasant<\/a> career of increasingly cheap and brutal revenge pictures. To his credit, there were a few years there when Bronson tried to break out<\/a> of the typecasting box, but American audiences were generally indifferent unless he was carrying a big gun and offing sordid scumbags in cold blood, all the way up through his final theatrical release exactly two decades after his big breakthrough, 1994\u2019s ignominious Death Wish V: The Face of Death<\/em>. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

One can\u2019t help but wonder how things might have worked out if the Bronson film released the weekend before Death Wish<\/em> had instead been the one to become a box office phenomenon. Not that Richard Fleischer\u2019s Mr. Majestyk<\/em> wasn\u2019t a well-liked picture and a modest success in its own right, but culturally, this affable action-comedy was shunted to the side by the later movie\u2019s vulgar provocations. A shame, because Mr. Majestyk<\/em> showcases a playful side of its star that became increasingly rare onscreen over the ensuing years. It\u2019s a role that allows him to show off his natural intelligence and a puckish sense of humor. There\u2019s a twinkle in that granite-faced squint. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Wearing a newsboy cap and more denim than you\u2019ll find in Jay Leno\u2019s entire wardrobe, Bronson stars as the title character, an unassuming Colorado melon farmer who through a series of coincidences finds himself mixed up with a gargantuan Mafia hitman played by The Godfather<\/em>\u2019s Al Lettieri. The screenplay is by Elmore Leonard, still a few years out from becoming America\u2019s greatest crime novelist but already practicing all the talky twists and sneaky character asides that he\u2019d soon hone to perfection in books throughout the \u201880s and \u201890s. Vince Majestyk is a classic Leonard protagonist in the tradition of Chili Palmer or Raylan Givens \u2013 an unflappable fellow completely at ease in his own skin, matter-of-factly reacting to violent threats in ways that reduce the bad guys issuing them to furious, sputtering wrecks. (These are the coolest characters because they don\u2019t ever try to be cool.)<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Majestyk\u2019s hero bona fides are established in the opening scene when he humiliates a racist gas station attendant who won\u2019t allow a group of Mexican migrant workers to use the restroom. You\u2019re expecting Bronson to knock the guy\u2019s block off but this PG-rated picture is a kinder, gentler vehicle for the star, who doesn\u2019t even shoot anybody until the 80-minute mark. (All he blasts before that is a car radio speaker that, frankly, had it coming.) There\u2019s a hint of romance with Linda Cristal\u2019s Nancy Chavez \u2013 \u201cno relation to the other Chavez, though I did picket with him\u201d she explains in a typical Leonard aside \u2013 and what a relief it is to watch a Bronson film in which nobody gets raped. The worst of the movie\u2019s machine gun violence is unleashed upon a warehouse full of watermelons. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Lettieri\u2019s perma-furious mob assassin, looking like a gorilla in butterfly collars, could quite literally be getting away with murder, except there\u2019s something about that smirking melon farmer that he just can\u2019t let slide, allowing his macho pride to escalate bad situations into worse ones at every turn. Meanwhile, Bronson remains hilariously single-minded: the man just wants to bring in his crop. His constant, repeated concern for \u201cmy melons\u201d becomes the movie\u2019s funniest running gag, like Lee Marvin\u2019s monomaniacal fixation on his $93,000 in Point Blank<\/em> except with produce.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

(Mr. Majestyk<\/em> was originally written for Clint Eastwood, who had just worked with Leonard on Joe Kidd<\/em>. Always wanting to shoot closer to home, Eastwood suggested moving the action to California and making the character an artichoke farmer instead, which just doesn\u2019t have the same ring.)  <\/p>\n\n\n\n

The pleasures of Mr. Majestyk<\/em> are those that would become abundant in the Elmore Leonard novels that followed. His snappy banter, small time hoods and low-stakes scams are a surprisingly comfy milieu for Bronson, who saunters through the movie slyly sizing everybody up and playing them all against each other. The film only deflates when bullets finally start flying in a largely dialogue-free third act. Fleischer\u2019s handling of an extended desert chase so impressed the Ford Motor Company that it used footage from the film in TV commercials for the F-100 pickup truck Bronson drives in the picture. But careening cars can\u2019t hold a candle to Leonard\u2019s scheming hustlers and a star allowed the chance to shine in a slightly different light. \"\"\/<\/p>\n\n\n\n

“Mr. Majestyk” is currently streaming on Amazon Prime<\/a><\/em>, Pluto TV<\/a>, and Tubi<\/a>. <\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Yippie kai-yay, melon farmer.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":633,"featured_media":18353,"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-18351","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\/18351","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\/633"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=18351"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18351\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":21967,"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18351\/revisions\/21967"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/18353"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=18351"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=18351"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=18351"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}