The movie Death Wish, which this year celebrates its 50th anniversary, opens with a brief sequence establishing that New York architect Paul Kersey (Charles Bronson) and his wife, Joanna (Hope Lange), although well into middle age, are still very much in love with each other. They’re vacationing on an idyllic beach in Hawaii, and when she steps out of the surf and stretches out beside him on the sand, they kiss. She asks if they should go back to the hotel, obviously to take their intimacy to a higher level. He asks, “Why not here?” She replies: “We’re too civilized.”
[W]hat ever happened to the frontier ideal of defending one’s hearth and home from savages when the noble lawman seems to have withdrawn from the scene?
Directed by Michael Winner from a screenplay by Wendell Mayes (based on the novel by Brian Garfield), Death Wish came along at a time when New York was far from its most civilized. After the Kerseys return from Hawaii to their snazzy Riverside Drive digs, Paul, during his first day back on the job, is told by a colleague that during his two weeks in paradise there were no fewer than 36 murders in Fun City. When the coworker says something about the impact of all this mayhem on “decent people,” Paul demurs, leading his coworker to call him a “bleeding-heart liberal.” Their boss, for his part, refers to New York as a “war zone.”
Cut to Joanna and her grown daughter, Carol, buying groceries in a supermarket where three hoodlums (one of them played by a young Jeff Goldblum) are causing a ruckus; the hoods follow them home and, in a sequence that in 1974 was shocking in both its language and its violence, kill Joanna and abuse Carol, an experience that ends up sending her spiraling into catatonia. The police are sympathetic, but hold out little hope of catching the perps in a city gone wild. Sent to Tucson on a professional assignment, Paul is taken to a gun club by a friendly client (Stuart Margolin) who explains that in Arizona, “unlike your city, we can walk our streets and feel safe,” and who sends him back to the Big Apple with a special gift: a revolver. (READ MORE from Bruce Bawer: Citizen Bawer: On Acquiring a Second Nationality)
In the days that follow, Paul stalks Manhattan late at night, and continually finds reason to make use of his new present. In Riverside Park, a mugger pulls a gun on him and Paul swiftly ends his career. Seeing three gangsters beating up a guy in an alleyway, Paul guns the bullies down. In an otherwise empty subway car, he’s set upon by a couple of miscreants and takes them both out. Later, in a subway station, he polishes off two more lowlifes. Along the way he makes bigger and bigger tabloid headlines, is the subject of an intense investigation by police inspector Frank Ochoa (Vincent Gardenia), and causes the city’s crime level to drop.
Meanwhile his son-in-law (Steven Keats), unaware of Paul’s leisure-time activities, laments that they all hadn’t moved out of the city years ago. “Nothing to do but cut and run, huh?” Paul replies sardonically. “What about the old American social custom of self-defense? If the police don’t defend us, maybe we ought to do it ourselves.” When the young man protests that “we aren’t pioneers anymore,” Paul asks: “Then what have we become? What do you call people who, when faced with a condition of fear, do nothing about it but cut and run?” The son-in-law answers: “Civilized?”
Winner and Mayes go out of their way not to make this movie about race. Joanna’s killers are white. So are most of the criminals whom Paul dispatches. (Several of them come off, in fact, like Broadway chorus boys desperately trying to look tough: in short, not an entirely convincing bunch of outlaws.) Meanwhile, a disproportionate number of the cops and victims and other good guys are black. And the musical score is by Herbie Hancock. Nonetheless, critics smeared Death Wish as racist. Newsweek dismissed it as a “simplistic urban Western”; Variety called it “poisonous”; in the New York Times, Vincent Canby savaged it as “despicable” and “bigoted.” But none of that mattered to most audience members — especially New Yorkers and other big-city folks who, sick of being crime victims, applauded Paul Kersey’s vigilantism.
There were four sequels to Death Wish, all of them predictably inferior, and a 2018 remake starring Bruce Willis, which in many ways was actually an improvement on the original. But it’s the very first picture that’s become iconic. And half a century after its release, it feels, once again, strikingly timely. In today’s Gotham, the mayor, D.A., and top police brass seem perversely determined to make the city’s streets at least as unsafe as they were in 1974. Subway assaults soar yet again; hooligans sucker-punch women on the street; and marauders vandalize department stores with impunity. Yet the cops appear to be focused on arresting, and the prosecutors on punishing, the handful of gutsy souls who stick their necks out to protect their fellow citizens from murderous goons. (READ MORE: Feud’s New Miniseries Recycles Old Truman Capote Gossip)
Like former Marine Daniel Penny, who last May, on an F train, choked to death a menacing thug who, in Penny’s judgment, “would have killed somebody” if Penny hadn’t acted. (Penny is now up on manslaughter charges.) Or John Rote, who last November fired a round at a vagrant who threatened a subway passenger and tried to steal her bag. Or Younece Obuad, who last month shot a brutal assailant on a Brooklyn subway after wrestling the man’s gun away from him. Today, as in 1974, many elites — most of whom, I suspect, rarely if ever set foot on a subway train — look down their noses at people like Penny and Rote and Obuad. To them, as to Paul Kersey’s son-in-law in Death Wish, refusing to stand up for oneself and one’s loved ones in a city turned war zone is a simple matter of being “civilized.” But what does it mean to be civilized in urban environments where, in accordance with the nefarious if nebulous designs of the Democratic powers that be, civilization itself is crumbling before our eyes? Far be it for me to defend reckless vigilantism, but what ever happened to the frontier ideal of defending one’s hearth and home from savages when the noble lawman seems to have withdrawn from the scene?
