On November 3, 1921, Charles Dennis Buchinsky was born in Ehrenfeld, a tiny town in Pennsylvania, who later went down in the history of cinema under the pseudonym of Charles Bronson. Very humble origins (his father was a Lithuanian immigrant who arrived in America at the turn of the twentieth century), a large family (he was the eleventh of fifteen brothers): he fought poverty by dedicating himself to study, but once he obtained a diploma with great difficulty he was forced to enlist in the army and it was only after World War II that he enrolled in a drama academy. It was the choice that changed his life: deep blue eyes on strong features, he began in the cinema with supporting roles in films of great importance and mainly westerns (including “The Last Apache” and “Vera Cruz” by Robert Aldrich, “The torture of the arrow “by Samuel Fuller) until Roger Corman gave him the honor of the first name on the bill in” The law of the machine gun “(” Machine-Gun Kelly “, 1958): but it was with” The magnificent seven ” (1960) by John Sturges that his career definitely took off. An atypical and very good character, he “pierced” the screen with his mere presence: he was often described as the archetype of the “tough” of the screen with features marked by time and life: like “a Clark Gable exposed to the sun too much long”. His permanence in the collective imagination is due to one of the most controversial films of the seventies: “The executioner of the night” (1974) by his friend Michael Winner. Which was also, as often happens, the role that trapped him in the final phase of his story in a cliché: his final film for the cinema, before his participation in a TV-movie series and his retirement in the 1998 was the fourth (!) Sequel in that revenge-thriller series that expanded to cover two decades. We celebrate its centenary with a chronological selection of five unforgettable “masks”.
November 3, 2021 | 07:17
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