Film Forum

U.S., 1974
Directed by Michael Winner
Starring Charles Bronson, Vincent Gardenia, William Redfield, Hope Lange
Music by Herbie Hancock
Approx. 93 min.

When his wife is brutally murdered, “respectable citizen” Charles Bronson slowly sheds his liberal ways and takes to dispensing “vengeance” on an Upper West Side gone mad with crime. “Audience manipulation at its zenith. Chilling but irresistible; a bastardization of the Brian Garfield novel, in which vigilantism as a deterrent to crime is not a solution but another problem.” – Leonard Maltin

Presented with support from The Ada Katz Fund for Literature in Film

Reviews

“... so cannily orchestrates the audience’s responses that it can appeal to law‐and‐order fanatics, sadists, muggers, club women, fathers, older sisters, masochists, policemen, politicians, and, it seems, a number of film critics.”
– Vincent Canby, The New York Times