- #CHARLES BRONSON HARD TIMES MOVIE#
- #CHARLES BRONSON HARD TIMES PATCH#
- #CHARLES BRONSON HARD TIMES CODE#
"Hard Times" is a tough, bitter, evocative document.We use cookies and similar tools that are necessary to enable you to make purchases, to enhance your shopping experiences and to provide our services, as detailed in our Cookie Notice.
#CHARLES BRONSON HARD TIMES CODE#
Chaney comes to town, fights because it's a living, lives according to his code and expects the others to. Walter Hill's screenplay and direction understand that, and the period locations provide the right settings. That's what makes Bronson so good for roles like this he seems to exist already as the character, so exposition isn't necessary. Bronson simply implies that Chaney has had a past, a difficult one. We could create several possible pasts for the character, but they wouldn't matter. Almost everything else about him is simply implied by the Bronson presence. He has a quiet affection for a part-time hooker ( Jill Ireland), and a certain loyalty to Speed that causes him to fight again when Speed gets in trouble. We know little about Chaney, and learn little, but we see a man with a barrier around himself that he's willing to lower for people he respects. There's no sadism or cruelty involved: The fighters are professionals.Īs Bronson creates it, the character of Chaney becomes curiously interesting. The violence will be excessive for some audiences, but it's honest violence, about the way of earning a living. It's theme is buried in its material, and it's a hard-edged action film all the way. But "Hard Times" never steps back from itself, never lectures us. There's the temptation, with material like this, to fashion parables and give the characters portentous speeches about the meaning of it all. And that makes it all the more effective.
#CHARLES BRONSON HARD TIMES MOVIE#
What this says about the Depression, about hard times in general, is pretty clear, but the movie doesn't press the point. "You wouldn't work for free." He's right, and that's one of the chilling aspects of the movie's fight scenes: There's no dislike between the fighters. "I could start something right here and now," the man from Chicago says menacingly. Chaney doesn't want to fight - he has enough money. Later in the film, another fight is arranged - the Chicago champion has been brought south. They may seem to be animals, but they're craftsmen, in a way, and they respect each other the real animals are the spectators. They fight in a steel-mesh bullpen, and there's a certain nobility about them.
He's a giant nicknamed Skinhead who has the disconcerting habit of grinning all the time he's pounding his opponents. Chaney wins his first fight, and then (in an exhaustingly well-directed action sequence) goes up against the local champion.
#CHARLES BRONSON HARD TIMES PATCH#
In the third year, a dark cloud appeared, and I left under it." He's hooked on opium, but can patch up a fighter and close his cuts. And Speed introduces him to Poe ( Strother Martin), who is sort of a doctor: "I spent two years in medical school. That's how he meets Speed ( James Coburn), who will manage him for a piece of the action. The fights are all-out and bare-knuckle, held in warehouses and open by invitation to men with cash to wager.Ĭhaney gets into his first fight almost by accident, and wins.
He plays Chaney, a man of few words and no past, who rides the rails to New Orleans for the winter and tries to win some money by fist fighting. "Hard Times" is a powerful, brutal film containing a definitive Charles Bronson performance.