Mug Shooting

DEATH WISH

Directed by MICHAEL WINNER Screenplay by WENDELL MAYES

Death Wish starts out as if it were going to make extraordinary demands on the audience's ability to accept and sustain a fantasy. Right off, one is asked to believe that Charles Bronson, who usually acts as if he has trouble writing his own name, is an engineer of such skill and imagination that he can one-two-three redesign a housing development so that its aesthetic merits can be retained even as a soaring cost factor is brought into line. Soon enough, however, the film settles down to real business. This is not to make any demands on fantasies but to cater to what may currently be the most vicious of them, namely that the problem of crime in the streets is so far out of control that vigilantism is the only way to bring about a final solution.

Bronson takes the law into his own hands mainly as occupational therapy after three freaks invade his New York apartment, murder his wife and sexually abuse his grown daughter, renderIng her hopelessly insane. A weapon of revenge--a Western-style revolver--is provided by the grateful realtor whose development Bronson saved. A pressing, almost daily need to use it is supplied by British Director Winner and West Coast Writer Mayes, who offer a vision of New York City existence based less on firsthand experience than on old Johnny Carson-Dick Cavett monologues about getting home from the studio. Everywhere Bronson turns in a trash-and graffiti-glutted environment, he sees an old man mugged, a car being burglarized--and his gun is quick. Pretty soon he is stalking the gloomiest streets, the dimmest parks, the grimiest subways, inviting attack and expertly dispatching his assailants with his peacemaker.

Personal revenge is still an acceptable motivation in an action movie. But Bronson is not looking for his wife's murderers, though they are so manifestly weird that any reader of Dick Tracy would have a fair chance of finding them. No, he has become an abstract symbol of quick justice in a setting where every bit player is careful to complain that the courts are too slow, the cops too dumb. Moreover, he quickly becomes a pop-cult hero, photographed against magazine posters acclaiming the salutary effect his work is having on the crime rate. Even the police do not want to make a martyr of the man who has redefined the term "good citizen." When they catch him they merely deport him --to Chicago, which appears to offer him every opportunity to keep up the good work.

One used to believe that the self-parodying ineptness of films like this one was the antidote supplied by thoughtful producers to counteract their poisonous ideas. But the appalling example of Walking Tall is still before us. At least one preview audience actually cheered this urban variant on that rube farce. So let the matter be stated as forcefully as possible: Death Wish is a meretricious film--in its curious lack of feeling even for innocent victims of crime, in its hysterical exaggerations of an undeniable problem, and especially in its brazen endorsement of violence as a solution to violence. .Richard Schickel

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.