Tag: Stuart Margolin

by Kathleen Murphy, Contributors, Film Reviews

Review: The Stone Killer

Written by Kathleen Murphy February 21, 2017

[Originally published in Movietone News 27, November 1973]

It hardly matters what side of the moral fence Charles Bronson is on in a Michael Winner film. Whether he’s a noble savage hounded nearly to death by dregs of the American melting pot (Chato’s Land), an executive gun done in by his Mafia employers and an ambitious protégé (The Mechanic), or most recently, in The Stone Killer, a new centurion waging a crusade against urban Huns and Vandals—Winner’s undeviatingly nihilistic environment dead-ends him every time. Though Winner laces his increasingly ugly films with heavyhanded liberal preachiness, his central character rarely discovers any ethical position except the dubious one of executioner. Maybe Winner is after the notion that killer societies make murderers of us all—but I doubt it: he wallows too comfortably in his visions of the most brutal ways of dying. You need a long spoon to sup with the Devil, and The Stone Killer further substantiates one’s suspicion that Winner, on some level of consciousness, has begun to relish that which he superficially reviles.

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by Richard T. Jameson, Contributors, Film Reviews

Review: Death Wish

Written by Richard T. Jameson January 4, 2016

[Originally published in Movietone News 35, September 1974]

The gyroscopic suspension of Michael Winner has been reported on fairly regularly within these pages, as films like Chato’s Land, The Mechanic, Scorpio, The Stone Killer, and the unquickied Lawman have kept his name and work lucratively in the public eye; it would be hard to find a week in the past several years during which at least one Winner film wasn’t on a screen somewhere in the greater Seattle area, if only as a second feature at some drive-in. It is perhaps to the point that he also made, during that same period, a film supposing what sort of events might have led up to Henry James’ Turn of the Screw (The Nightcomers); the endpoint known after a fashion, the film became the sort of closed system that his other recent works integrally describe. Most of the films operate on the principle of a war of attrition: usually there is a large cast of characters to work down from until all or all but one of the dramatis personae have been exterminated; as many roles as possible are filled with hungry has-beens whose former eminence lends them a ready identifiability and enables the viewer to keep track. Structurally, the films are depressingly nihilistic, and Winner’s soulless cleverness—a camera almost incessantly in motion, shots that dovetail to little purpose save the fact of dovetailing, bizarre, immediately graspable caricatures in place of characterizations—somehow renders them the more chilling, because slickly pointless. A sense of (fully earned) self-loathing emanates from these products, which nevertheless are highly salable in their overall gruesomeness.

Review: The Big Bus

Written by Richard T. Jameson December 20, 2011

[Originally published in Movietone News 51, August 1976]

The Big Bus is no movie to slap down first-run admission prices for, but if it turns up on a double bill with another halfway-enticing film, plan to give it a chance. I’d like to pretend it’s a better movie than it is, because most of the notices I’ve read have taken it to task unduly: its failings aren’t gross and its modest pleasures are so far superior to the general run this slummy summer season that I feel very kindly toward it. The worst thing about the film is a pantingly insistent—and quite superfluous—foreword that wants us to know we’re watching a sendup of disaster pictures. And if sending up disaster pictures is a little like putting rosy contact lenses on an albino, well, all right, maybe there are better ways of expending money and talent. But James Frawley is an intelligent director who’s had precious few chances to exercise his talent: even with post-release prodding from the Lincoln Center Film Festival, Kid Blue never achieved better than cult standing, and the earlier The Christian Licorice Store remains on a shelf somewhere.