My Appreciation of Charles Bronson

USA Today did a nice tribute to Charles Bronson in this September 1, 2003 article. Bronson had passed away on August 30, 2003 at the age of 81. The actor had been suffering from pneumonia and Alzheimer's Disease. I am not aware of when the Alzheimer's Disease was diagnosed but I can say his final film was the made-for-TV offering, "Family of Cops, III", which aired in 1999. Bronson, having been born in 1921, was 78 that year. I first heard of Charles Bronson through my grandparents. In the mid '80s VHS video was on the cusp of becoming a mega money maker as people were buying or renting movies on video to watch in the comfort of their homes rather than venturing out to a theater. There was also movie channels available, too, but most of the time those movie channels didn't get a contemporary movie on their line-up until nearly a year after it was released. Some movies, after their theatrical run ended, would go directly to home video...and later make their way to television airing.

My grandparent's rented videos every weekend...and quite a few were Charles Bronson movies. As a child in the '80s I didn't comprehend a lot of what I was seeing...but as time went on I'd catch a Bronson movie airing on TBS or the USA Network all through the '90s and I would often watch it. Fast-forward quite a few years later...the early 2000's specifically. I started to revisit the Bronson movies I had seen as a kid and a teenager by purchasing video tapes of his films...those that were available at the video store. I was not on-line at that point in time and so I didn't have the advantages of an Amazon or an eBay...so I could only purchase what was available on the video rack.

Once I got on the internet I came across a video store that specialized in getting hard to find VHS tapes. I had a list of Charles Bronson movies that I'd copied off a web-site at the time and I used it as a check-list. I didn't end up getting a lot of his movies because some of them hadn't even been issued on VHS and therefore were unavailable. The new item at the time, the DVD, was still way too expensive and that's why I was still buying video tapes as late as 2005!!  As I was saying I only ended up getting just a handful of his movies on video tape and I taped quite a few off of movie channels.

I happen to like Charles Bronson's movies...and I appreciate the talents that I felt he had. Nobody could set a mood like he could...and often times he didn't have to say a word! He had that look...and I know that's a cliché...but he really did. He could turn his head a certain way, get that look on his face, and it would convey a lot more emotion than words perhaps could have. Also, he had a certain smirk...often seen whenever his character felt he was pulling one over on somebody or if he was at the receiving end of a lecture from a superior officer (such as in the string of vigilante-type films that I absolutely LOVE!!). He'd give that smirk and you, as a viewer, could sense that Bronson's character was letting the lecture go in one ear and out the other. Although widely known for those vigilante movies, he did star or co-star in his fair share of Westerns, Military epics, and melodramas, too.

If you look at his filmography you'll see that every year or every other year, up until the late '70s, he'd be featured in one of those kind of movies. He appeared, and or, starred in "The Dirty Dozen", "The Great Escape", and "The Magnificent Seven" as well as "4 For Texas", "Guns for San Sebastian", "Chato's Land", "The White Buffalo", "You Can't Win 'Em All", "Guns of Diablo", "Villa Rides", "Red Sun", "From Noon till Three", "Breakheart Pass", and "Once Upon a Time in the West".

In the internet and DVD age his earlier movies have become just as synonymous with Bronson as the ones that he became well known for in America. The irony of all of this is Charles Bronson was born in Pennsylvania...right here in the United States of America. His birth name was Charles Buchinsky and he went by that name for a period of years in his early movies until the name was changed to Bronson. Given his body type...the athletic/muscular appearance...you could've easily spelled his new name as 'Brawnson' instead of 'Bronson'.

Anyone can look his movies up on You Tube or better yet, purchase them on Amazon or other on-line stores, but those not familiar with his body of work will be surprised by how talented he truly was considering that, in his latter career, movie critics would have you believe that his contemporary films weren't worth watching...but I liked the movies of his that I've seen so far. In this image it's "Family of Cops, 3: Under Suspicion", from January 1999. The Made-for-TV movie was filmed in 1998 and it's his final starring role. The series of films started in 1995 as "A Family of Cops" and the first sequel aired in 1997, "Breach of Faith: A Family of Cops, 2" which was filmed in 1996. As mentioned, the final installment was in production in 1998, the year he retired from acting following hip-replacement surgery. I taped several of his movies off of TV, as I mentioned earlier. The movies I taped off of TV were: "The Evil That Men Do", "The Stone Killer", "Telefon", "Death Wish, 2", "Kinjite: Forbidden Subjects", "Borderline", and "Murphy's Law". I saw "Breakout" on television but didn't tape it...the same goes for "Mr. Majestyk" and "Death Hunt". I didn't have a blank video tape at the time!! I have "Messenger of Death" and "Cold Sweat" on DVD. In the latter film Bronson's co-star is James Mason. Lee Marvin is Bronson's co-star in "Death Hunt". As you saw earlier, I have "Death Wish" on home video...I purchased it at a local video store which has been out of business for years. That particular movie pushed Charles Bronson into super-star status and it spawned 4 equally great sequels. The sequels began in the '80s with the arrival of "Death Wish, 2" in 1982, "Death Wish, 3" in 1985, and "Death Wish, 4: The Crackdown" in 1987. The fourth sequel arrived seven years later in 1994, "Death Wish, 5: The Face of Death". These are the films that most people think of when Charles Bronson's name is mentioned. Although there were just 5 Death Wish films made, critics and detractors alike often jokingly claim that there were hundreds of Death Wish films made, but only 5 escaped and made it to theaters. The Death Wish series isn't as long as other franchises, though. How many Police Academy films were made? I think there were seven altogether!? There were many Star Trek films (sequels and prequels)...the same goes for the Indiana Jones franchise, the Harry Potter franchise, the James Bond franchise...but the short 5-part Death Wish franchise remains vilified pretty much. It makes no sense to me. 

In this image there are the videos of "10 To Midnight" and "Assassination", from 1984 and 1987 respectively. These films come at the peak of what I call his vigilante film success...even though the 1987 film features Bronson as a Secret Service agent protecting the wife of the President. Bronson's wife, Jill Ireland, co-starred in more than a dozen of her husband's movies. The 1984 film is wonderful, too! The thing that's perhaps satisfying to many Charles Bronson fans is despite the venom that movie critics had for much of these kind of films, the public had their say. If you check the box-office tallies for pretty much all of the Bronson films that had lots of action, adventure, and violence you'd see that the movies raked in millions upon millions at the box-office...turning a substantial profit. In addition to the box-office sales there was profitability in the home video market...I don't have any official numbers to quote but it's easy to assume that Bronson's commercially successful movies were popular video rentals at that point in time...I came across those two movies from that site I wrote of earlier that specialized in hard to find films. It's also the site where I purchased "Caboblanco", which an image of that particular film is located at the end of the blog entry.

In the previous paragraph I mentioned that critics spewed venom by this point in Bronson's career. Movie critics began to be dismissive of his films somewhere around the mid '70s onward...I've looked through archived movie reviews from the late '70s and the '80s throughout the last number of years and have seen the kinds of slings and arrows that they'd shoot at his movies. The reviews really started to turn ugly by the mid '80s. As I mentioned earlier, I appreciate Charles Bronson's films...and it did annoy me when I'd read scathing reviews of movies that I happen to enjoy watching. As I've always said, critics do not influence my movie-watching or music-listening habits...which is why I consider myself an enthusiast, not an amateur critic. In the image below, I am shown with the video tape of "Caboblanco", an incredibly obscure 1980 movie starring Charles Bronson. Jason Robards co-stars. I had to take the picture with the side of the cover showing more prominence because the yellow lettering of the title on the front, against the white background, didn't show up that great in the first picture I took. Critics described this particular film as a remake of "Casablanca" and regardless of whether that's true or not, Charles Bronson's the main attraction...he's the star and that's who the viewers who saw this film the first time around ultimately spent their money to see. He really did have that kind of impact.  

Hee-Haw: 1969-1992, Part Fourteen...

Well, good Wednesday afternoon!! I came across an article about Hee-Haw that was published on February 27th this year...it's a lengthy, respectful write-up/article about the show as a whole. The article, as I found out when I read the entire thing, was originally written in early January of 2011, though! It's still a good article. I didn't research my previous Hee-Haw blog entries to see if I'd posted a link to that particular article or not and so I'm going to post the link in this blog entry. The article appears on a site called thislandpress and the article's written by an author named Jeff Martin.

You can read the article here: Why Hee Haw Still Matters.

I hesitate to embed Hee-Haw videos on my blog pages due to the ever-changing availability of them through the course of time. I did a blog entry a couple of years back and embedded quite a few You Tube videos of the show...only to visit the blog several weeks later to find the videos unavailable for play-back. Either the video's uploader had removed them from public display (disabling the embedding feature) or they were taken down by the uploader for whatever reason. When this happens it creates a void for any blog entry that embeds a video clip...once the centerpiece of a blog entry is removed (such as an embedded video) then the blog entry itself makes little sense.

Anyway...that's a big reason why I don't embed too many videos anymore in my blogs. However, I'm going to break my unwritten rule on today's blog entry and embed a video clip from the late '80s era of the show. As many blog readers of mine are aware of, I grew up watching Hee-Haw every Saturday evening in the '80s...and when it was moved to Saturday afternoons, to make way for the Saturday evening additions of a couple of game shows, I'd catch it often. So I was raised on the '80s and early '90s installments of the show. The Cowboy Quartet didn't gain as much commercial popularity as The Hee-Haw Gospel Quartet did but nevertheless The Cowboy Quartet had a recurring segment on the show in the late '80s. I came across a newer video clip of this quartet and the content is below...



As you can see from the video, this is one of the final episodes of the rural format. I have no idea, though, when it was originally aired but I see that Jeff Smith is among the singers. At the start of the clip you'll see the last few seconds of a Gailard Sartain sketch where he played an owner of a flea market ever trying to break into the music business...but the camera would always pull away every time he'd whip out his guitar. Cathy Baker introduces the Quartet. Judging by the appearances of the cast-members (physical appearances, hairstyles) it looks as if this clip comes from the 1989-1990 or 1990-1991 season.

As I commented on in the previous Hee-Haw blog entries I've written, the reruns that TNN and later, CMT, aired of the show were mostly from the '80s and a precious few from the final 1990-1991 rural season. TNN once aired the Alan Jackson episode...at the time it was one of the few latter-day episodes of the series to be re-aired. The reason why I like to spotlight the show's mid '80s and early '90s run as much as possible is because #1 that's the era of the program I grew up seeing every weekend. I'll always have a fondness for those episodes. The second reason I like to spotlight those episodes is because I think, sometimes, those particular episodes get a bad wrap because they don't feature the core line-up as they're referred to by many, many fans of the show. That core line-up that's usually referred to often contained comics/entertainers that were no longer among the living by the late '80s: Archie Campbell, Junior Samples, Jimmy Riddle, and Kenny Price. Stringbean, one of the show's most popular earlier cast-members, was murdered in November 1973. His episodes were still airing each weekend (all of his segments had been taped in the late summer of 1973). On the show, which he'd been on since it's 1969 debut, he appeared in many banjo musical numbers and had a recurring sketch where he'd read a "letter from home". Also, he appeared as the scarecrow in the Kornfield joke segment, offering one-liners about how miserable he was having to listen to all the corny jokes. A black crow puppet was perched over his shoulder. After his murder, the new shows from 1974 onward featured a scarecrow in the Kornfield as a memorial. The black crow puppet continued to appear as before. Those earliest episodes which feature Stringbean currently air on RFD-TV.  

Meanwhile...getting back to the mid '80s...co-host Buck Owens had left the program after the 1985-1986 season wrapped up...on top of that there was what the show's producer, Sam Lovullo, refers to as the great cast shake-up of 1986 which saw the exits of quite a few long-time cast-members.

When the show returned in the fall of 1986 it was considerably different, cast-wise, but there were still a lot of familiar faces as well: Roy Clark, Gordie Tapp, Gunilla Hutton, Grandpa Jones, Lulu Roman, George Lindsey, Gailard Sartain, etc. etc.  Also, the guest co-host position was introduced at the start of the 1986-1987 season. This was a popular addition but it was ultimately phased out by the start of the 1990-1991 season. In it's final season, of rural decor, Roy Clark was the sole host of the program. He was back as the host when the series returned in January 1992 in the urbanized setting under the slightly different name, The Hee-Haw Show. This was the format that aired until May 1992...which ultimately lead to the program going out of production that summer. Hee-Haw Silver premiered in the fall of 1992 and it ran through the spring of 1993. Afterwards reruns of the show began airing on The Nashville Network in the fall of 1993. Reruns continued to air on TNN on a consistent basis through 1996...and occasionally through 1997. They aired on CMT infrequently after that before the series left the airwaves entirely...popping up in a series of DVD's from Time-Life. The program returned to the airwaves, in rerun form, in 2008 on RFD-TV where it's been airing ever since.

Benny Hill...a Further Celebration...

A couple of years ago I did a blog post about a DVD release that's referred to as a Mega-Set. The collection contains comedy sketches and songs lifted from Benny Hill's television programs for Thames Television (1969-1989). The selling price is still rather high...even nearly 2 years later...but I did write a blog entry about the Mega-Set complete with the titles of each DVD installment. A and E had been releasing Benny Hill DVD's under the title of The Naughty Early Years- Benny Hill: Complete and Unadulterated. There were three volumes released with that title in the mid-late 2000's. Each DVD represented a specific time-frame. The first Volume, which I have, represents the years of 1969 through 1971. Volume 2, the other one I have, represents the years of 1972 through 1974. Two important documentaries on Benny Hill appear as extra's. On Set 1 there's the celebrity-driven tribute titled The World's Favorite Clown which features interviews and footage of Hill during his final years. On Set 2, DVD 3, there's the episode of A&E's Biography focusing on his life, career, and social impact in Europe, America, and all over the globe titled Benny Hill: Laughter and Controversy. I'll post some more pics further down the blog entry. I didn't purchase any of the other DVD's in the A&E series because there was lack of publicity for them and by the time I found out that more Volumes had been released I searched for them on Amazon and the selling price was a bit too much at that point in time. Volume Four, titled The Hill's Angels Years, represents 1979 through 1981 and the selling price for that particular release is only $18.51...down considerably from it's original selling price in 2006 of $49.95. Volume Five, also titled The Hill's Angels Years, represents 1982 through 1985. This particular volume is not in stock but used copies are available for as low as $14.00. The last Volume, set 6, concentrates on the final three years, 1986-1989.

For quick reference: The first three sets are referred to The Naughty Early Years and the second three sets are called The Hill's Angels Years.

Benny Hill DVD Megaset This link will take you to my 2010 blog entry when I wrote about the then upcoming Mega-Set. I didn't post any images from my personal collection but this time around, as you can see, I decided to do so.

For a lot of people in the United States, Benny Hill didn't hit the airwaves until 1979 and when he did the show was often scheduled in a late-night slot and in some places it aired numerous times during the overnight hours. I assume a reason for this was because the program was an import from another country and another reason was that it was syndicated which left it's air-time in the lap of local stations that carried the show. I don't recall ever seeing an episode of his show any earlier than 11pm. During summer break from school I'd be a night-owl and would see his show on a couple of television stations. Each program that had aired on the same night, but on different channels, were different...a perfect example of the unique aspect of Benny's programs that aired in America. The America broadcasts were compilations of sketches that appeared originally in the television specials that Hill put together throughout the '70s and '80s. As it's been pointed out by several people more knowledgeable about television programming than I am, a typical half-hour Benny Hill program in America could feature a sketch from 1973 followed by a sketch from 1982 and then followed by a song/poem recitation from 1976. The sketches were all strung together, edited flawlessly, and presented as if it were an actual live production. Each episode would end with Benny, in character, being chased by a crowd of people to the tune of Boots Randolph's rendition of "Yakety Sax". The two VHS videos in this picture were released by HBO in the 1980's when his syndicated program in America was in it's peak. I have several more VHS tapes that HBO released but those are the first two I purchased in the late '90s from an outlet mall that specialized in selling VHS tapes...it was right around the time DVD's were just starting to become the preferred choice and so a lot of the tapes were selling for incredibly low prices. I bought all my Vincent Price horror movies, well, 95% of them, from that same outlet store...but that's another topic altogether!

I purchased these particular VHS tapes because I had never seen his BBC material. These three VHS videos are filled with hilarity and show a younger Benny Hill...from the early and mid '60s...experimenting and having all kinds of fun with the recording and audio techniques of the day. He'd been doing television specials since 1951 but it wasn't until later that decade that he began appearing with more and more frequency. These VHS tapes were released in the late 1990's and a DVD set became available in 2005. One of the highlights on practically any episode is when he tackles other celebrities...from those in England to those in Canada and America. A lot of the BBC episodes feature topical humor, too, which will perhaps go over a lot of people's heads. I didn't understand quite a few of the jokes that got thunderous applause and laughter until I did some research. There's an uproariously funny parody of the American series, Bonanza, featured on one of the tapes. The parody is titled Bo-Peep. The straight-man during these BBC shows was Jeremy Hawk but because these shows weren't reran and shown all over the world he isn't as well remembered as a Benny Hill cast-member; but Jeremy Hawk was a good straight-man...he rarely, if ever, broke up on camera. I don't think Henry McGee ever cracked a bit of laughter while working in the sketches (unless it was scripted). There was a scene that takes place during breakfast and Hill, apparently ad-libbing based on McGee's reaction, quotes a line from a cereal commercial that McGee appeared on. The camera shows a glimpse of McGee in near-laughter but he pulls himself back together before completely breaking up. One of the funniest sketches among the many was an offering called 'Hotel Sordide' which had been used as the name of a couple of other sketches...but in this particular one Hill plays a French waiter in the hotel who delivers food to a couple who are obviously not husband and wife but are seeing one another in secret. Hill, whose character can hardly speak any English, ends up mixed in with the lovers spat as Henry McGee and the woman in the sketch scream at one another about cheating, affairs, poor sexual performance and stuff like that there. It's a very funny sketch and one that I assume took place in the late '70s.

A look at Hill's years at the BBC can be explored further Here. On April 20th the BBC took a look back at Hill's career on the 20th anniversary of his death. Their information can be found Here. 

This VHS is something that I bought because the back of the cover shown some screen shots featuring Benny in sketches that I hadn't seen at that point in time. I was way more familiar with his late '70s and early '80s sketches that were on the HBO videos...I hadn't seen the earliest of the Thames material (1969-1975) and so I purchased this VHS. I loved the sketches that I saw and it wasn't too long afterward that the A&E company began releasing their Benny Hill DVD series which I wrote about at the top of this blog entry. When I purchased the A and E set I was introduced to complete episodes of his shows. His programs ran like your standard variety show: songs, dances, comedy sketches...but I was so used to the edited sketch formula of the syndicated series in America that it was like watching a completely different show. In many episodes there would be a musical number performed by a group known as The Ladybirds. These music performances never appeared in the America broadcasts (1979-1989) and they hadn't appeared on the HBO video tapes or the one you see in the image above. So, when I saw the clips in The Best of Benny Hill tape and then the full episodes on Sets 1 and 2 of the A and E company, in addition to the 3-Volume set of the BBC material and those HBO released video tapes, I felt as if my viewing of all things Benny Hill was complete...and then came the Mega-Set in 2007...combining all the A and E DVD releases in one collection...and then that Mega-Set was re-released in 2010 with new cover art but same selling price.

In the documentaries I wrote of earlier you'll learn about Benny's childhood, his comic influences, his rise to stardom, and his personal life...and you'll hear candid commentary from his supporting cast on their experiences working on Benny's programs and working with the man himself. Since the Thames material is what's more well-known all over the world that's mostly what appears in the documentaries...with a clip or two from the BBC shows added in to highlight his earliest performances on television. Hill had a regular cast of supporting players in all of his shows. The one that gets the most attention is Jackie Wright, the Irish comedian known by millions of Benny Hill fans as the "little bald man in the Benny Hill sketches" who is forever being slapped on the head and kicked in the rear by any number of cast-members...mostly by Hill but there's been times when any number of Hill's Angels have slapped and kicked Jackie Wright, too. Often, Hill's character would do something naughty toward one of the Angel's and, in error, the Angel would take her anger out on innocent bystander, Jackie Wright.

One of the most popular sketches that would surface at various times during the Thames Television run (1969-1989) would involve Hill at a bus stop wearing a trench coat and at first glance it would appear that he was holding up a newspaper as if he's reading it. Standing in the middle of Hill and Wright, in the same bus line, would be one of the Hill's Angels. Seconds later the woman would shriek, touch her bottom as she reacted to being pinched, and because Hill's hands were supposedly occupied holding up the newspaper, the woman would slap Jackie Wright, instead. After another incident involving a female in line at the bus stop, the woman would storm off after slapping Jackie Wright. These kinds of sketches were often played in mime fashion...usually with an up-tempo instrumental playing in the background. The loud slaps and other sound-effects were inserted, obviously, for comic effect. The mime/fast-paced chase routines that appeared regularly enabled many of his skits to transcend the language barrier, too.

I don't know too much about the BBC cast other than Jeremy Hawk and Patricia Hayes appearing frequently in the programs. In some of the earliest Thames episodes Nicholas Parsons was Hill's straight-man. Henry McGee remained the permanent straight-man, though, and remained a fixture on all of Hill's subsequent programs. Bob Todd often appeared. He was the big guy who also had hardly any hair. Sue Upton and Louise English were a couple of the Hill's Angels that have become synonymous with the series...but I don't know the names of any of the others off the top of my head....but....

I came across a web-site called Benny's Place and for those who want in-depth analysis and information about all things Benny Hill as well as the names of his cast-members through the years click the following Link. Along the left side of the page you'll see pics of Benny as different characters as well as pics of other cast-members, too. 

Nicholas Parsons is still among the living and heard regularly on radio. June Whitfield, who appeared on a few of the BBC specials, is also still among the living. The main cast is no longer living. Jackie Wright passed away in January 1989 but had stopped appearing on Hill's specials in 1983. Bob Todd passed away in October of 1992. Patricia Hayes, also from the BBC era, passed away in September 1998. Jeremy Hawk passed away in January 2002. Henry McGee passed away in January 2006...     

Benny Hill passed away on April 20, 1992. This salute, used many times by Hill in his programs, is one of his most recognizable. It didn't really matter which hand he used...whether right or left...it was sure to appear during any number of sketches revolving around his character, Fred Scuttle.