Hard Times (1975 film)

''Hard Times'' is a 1975 crime neo noir sport film marking the directorial debut of Walter Hill. It stars Charles Bronson as Chaney, a mysterious drifter freighthopping through Louisiana during the Great Depression, who proves indomitable in illegal bare-knuckled boxing matches after forming a partnership with the garrulous hustler Speed, played by James Coburn.

Plot

In 1933, a man named Chaney ( Charles Bronson) witnesses a bare-knuckled street fight. Intrigued, he has the fast-talking "Speed" set up a fight for him. Chaney bets all of the six dollars he has on himself and quickly dispatches his younger opponent. Chaney and a suitably impressed Speed travel to New Orleans to match Chaney against local fighters at long odds, recruiting genteel but slightly decrepit cutman, Poe (Strother Martin) to tend to his wounds.

Chaney easily disposes of his next opponent, a Cajun hitter. When the hitter's sponsor refuses to pay up on the grounds that Chaney is a ringer, Chaney and his retinue force the sponsor to turn over the unpaid cash and trash his backwoods honky-tonk joint. For the next fight, Chaney must put up $3,000 instead of the expected $1,000 stake. To cover the shortfall, Speed obtains a loan from a gang of local mobsters headed by Doty (Bruce Glover). Chaney wins this fight handily. Gambling degenerate Speed blows all his winnings in a backroom craps game, leaving him unable to repay the loan sharks, invoking their anger.

Afterwards, Speed and Chaney disagree about selling a piece of Chaney to fish tycoon Chick Gandil (Michael McGuire), the sponsor of Chaney's most recent opponent. Gandil instead pays off Speed's debt and takes him hostage. Chaney must wager his entire winnings to fight a leather-clad professional prize fighter imported from Chicago named Street ( Nick Dimitri) or Speed will be killed.

Chaney, who commands an inexplicable force of invincibility, prevails in the grueling bout, in a sense a craggy guardian Angel persona saving Speed. He gives Speed and Poe a generous cut of the winnings and departs alone into the night.

Cast

* Charles Bronson as Chaney, a mysterious character wrapped into a street fighter who, despite an aging broken down appearance, seems to be endowed with inexplicable invincibility, even mystical force.
* James Coburn as Spencer "Speed" Weed, a glib and shady opportunist, with a sick weakness for gambling, who acts as Chaney's manager.
* Jill Ireland as Lucy Simpson, a married woman living alone with whom Chaney briefly becomes involved.
* Strother Martin as Poe, a former medical student and opium addict hired to repair Chaney's cuts.
* Robert Tessier as Jim Henry, a feared New Orleans street fighter who meets his match in Chaney.
* Michael McGuire as Chick Gandil, an unscrupulous seafood tycoon with gangster pretensions Speed's rival, who bankrolls Jim Henry and is obsessed by owning the best street fighter in town.
* Nick Dimitri as Street, a black leather blazer attired prize fighter ringer Gandil imports from Chicago to face Chaney in the climactic fight.
* Margaret Blye as Gayleen Schoonover, Speed's charming “permanent fiancé” companion.
* Thomas Jefferson as Uncredited cameo by the jazz trumpeter
* Bruce Glover as Doty
* Frank McRae as Hammerman

Production

Development

In the early 1970s Walter Hill had developed a strong reputation as a screenwriter, particularly of action films such as '' The Getaway''. He was approached by Larry Gordon when the latter was head of production at AIP, who offered Hill the chance to direct one of his scripts. (AIP had recently done this with John Milius on ''Dillinger'' (1973).) Gordon subsequently moved over to Columbia, where he established a unit making low budget action films, and got funding for Hill's project; it was to be the first from Gordon's unit.

Hill wrote and directed for scale even though "the truth is, I would have paid them for the chance."

The project began as an original screenplay by Bryan Gindoff and Bruce Henstell called ''The Streetfighter''.

Hill thought the project could become more "up market" if he made it more like a Western and set it in the past; Gordon was from New Orleans and suggested setting it in that city. Hill says the script incorporated elements of an earlier Western he had written, ''Lloyd Williams and his Brother''. He wrote it in a style inspired by Alexander Jacobs – "extremely spare, almost Haiku style. Both stage directions and dialogue."

Hill wrote one draft, then rewrote it "five or six times before I finally got it. But I did get it and I knew it. I knew it was going to get an actor and get made."

Casting

Hill says he originally wrote the film intending to cast a younger actor, like Jan Michael Vincent, and that he wanted Warren Oates to play Coburn's role.

According to Hill, "they had offered it to a couple of actors and they didn't want to do it." Then it was sent to Charles Bronson even though Hill thought he was "too old". A day later, Bronson's agent called back and said Bronson had read the script and wanted to do the film "but he had to meet me. He wanted to see if I measured up."

Hill remembers that Bronson "was in remarkable physical condition for a guy his age; I think he was about 52 at the time. He had excellent coordination, and a splendid build. His one problem was that he was a smoker, so he didn't have a lot of stamina. I mean, he probably could have kicked anybody's ass on that movie, but he couldn't fight much longer than 30 or 40 seconds."Jon Zelazny, 'Kicking Ass with Walter Hill', The Hollywood Interview, 8 Sept 2009
/ref> Hill later said Bronson received "very close to a million" dollars for his role.

Pre-production

The film was shot on location in Louisiana. Hill says his cinematographer Philip Lathrop was incredibly useful during the shoot:

Before we started I was in my office later at night and Lathrop came by, noted I wasn't in a good mood. "Anything wrong?" I had never done it, worried if I will make it look alright. He immediately said "Don't worry about that. We will make a film, make the shots. If you are having a problem we will make the shots. I can already tell you you are ahead of other directors." He said "Anything we shoot we will cut together." He said "The problem that you're going to have is making everybody getting along and you getting what you want." And he was of course 100 percent right. That is the problem with direction. Beyond my first or second film, I don't think I've ever had terrible dilemmas based upon resources, but shooting and figuring out how is not a problem, never was. The problems that you have are getting everybody to be on the same page.

Hill says that Bronson was more supportive to work with than Coburn:

ronson was avery angry guy ... Didn't get along with a lot of people. The only reason I can tell you he and I got along well was he respected that I wrote the script. He liked the script. Also I didn't try to get close to him. Kept it very business-like. I think he liked that. Jimmy Coburn who everybody liked and got along well with, he and I did not get along well. I think he was not in a good mood about being in a movie with Charlie, it was second banana. He had been up there more, and his career was coming back a bit. I don't think he was wild about being second banana. But Charlie was a big star, perceived to be low rent. That was part of his anger ... He thought there was a cosmic injustice when he was not a movie star at 35. He didn't get there till 45 or whatever ... oweverWhen things had seemed to not be working well, or there was some impasse, Charlie would come down hard on my side. That was tipping point.

Hill had troubles with Strother Martin. "When he was good he was very good, but he could be just awful", Hill later said. "I said to him once, 'Divide it in half, Strother,' and he said 'In half,' and I answered, 'That's if you want it to be in the movie.'"

Hill said he used few tracking shots and zoom shots because "I like to work within frame and composition, but when you move your camera you can lose composition because it is altering shape." He also decided to use background music quiet and subdued "to get a sense of restraint in the movie ... people fighting is an ugly thing and I didn't want to encourage people to go out and fight. The concept of movie was hopefully legendary and somewhat heroic so that one couldn't really take a realistic approach."

Hill said the fights were "dances. That is why there was no blood. People commented, "the fights are great but they would have been better if you had put some blood in them." What they don't realize is as soon as you put blood in those fights they would then have gotten so real that they would have lost their dramatic truth."

The original cut of the movie was around two hours long. When it was cut down to around 90 minutes several fights scenes were deleted. Some stills however show some of the deleted fights.

Hill described the music as "kind of western; kind of simple and country. Nicely understated. "

Release

The film was profitable and in 2009, Hill said he was still receiving money from it.

"It was the best deal I ever made", he recalled. "Got a career out of it. Picture was well received on the whole, made money. Got me off and going.""Interview with Walter Hill Chapter 4" ''Directors Guild of America''
accessed 12 July 2014

However he never made another film with Bronson. "We had kind of a falling out over the film," the director said. "He thought I'd been a little too ... how do I put this? Too draconian in my editing of his wife's (Jill Ireland's) scenes."

The movie established a template to which Hill often returned.

My heroes usually have a very talkative foil opposite them or reluctantly alongside them, such as Bruce Dern in ''The Driver'', or Eddie Murphy in ''48 Hrs'', or James Coburn in ''Hard Times''. I like the kind of dialogue between people who have a mutual goal but very disparate appetites and needs, so that there's always a kind of friction that runs throughout the film. They don't like each other very much, and hopefully the movie supplies a reason for them to achieve a grudging kind of respect for each other.John Patterson
"Walter Hill: a life in the fast lane"
''The Guardian'',, 18 July 2014, accessed 6 February 2015

Reception

Critical response

The film has a 92% fresh rating on the film review aggregation website Rotten Tomatoes based on 12 critic's reviews.

Pauline Kael called the setting of ''Hard Times'' "elaborate period recreations that seem almost to be there for their own sake." The film is about the personalities of street fighters and their agents, people on the margins of society. On the other hand, setting the film in the Depression might have been a way for Hill to make Chaney a more sympathetic character. Kael explains, "Put harles Bronsonin modern clothes and he's a hard-bitten tough guy, but with that cap on he's one of the dispossessed — an honest man who's known hunger".

Roger Ebert in his October 14, 1975, review of ''Hard Times'' in the ''Chicago Sun-Times'' called it "a powerful, brutal film containing a definitive Charles Bronson performance."*Ebert, Roger. Review at www.rogerebert.com

See also

* List of American films of 1975

References

Notes

External links

*
*
Roger Ebert's original review of Hard Times

{{Walter Hill

1975 films
1970s action drama films
American action drama films
American boxing films
Columbia Pictures films
1975 directorial debut films
1970s English-language films
Fictional portrayals of the New Orleans Police Department
Films directed by Walter Hill
Films scored by Barry De Vorzon
Films set in the 1930s
Films set in Louisiana
Films shot in New Orleans
Great Depression films
Underground fighting films
Films with screenplays by Walter Hill
1975 drama films
1970s American films