Death Wish pioneers a new action hero: the angry middle-aged vigilante

Death Wish (1974)
Jeff Goldblum’s distinguished four-decade film career began memorably, with the actor howling, “I kill rich cunts like you!” at a terrified Oscar nominee in the first Death Wish movie. Goldblum’s first-ever screen credit is the gibbering, psychopathic “Freak #1,” and you can immediately tell it’s him. Bringing the same wild-eyed intensity that he’d show in dozens of later roles, Goldblum, along with two frantically giggling buddies, pose as grocery-store delivery boys to break into an apartment.
Once in, they beat up Hope Lange, Oscar-nominated for 1957’s Peyton Place, beating her up so badly that she later dies. They also sexually assault her character’s daughter, putting her into catatonic shock for the rest of the movie. One guy indiscriminately sprays graffiti all over the apartment and the people in it, leaving a swastika on the wall at one point. It’s a genuinely upsetting scene and also a ridiculous one. Goldblum and his friends don’t register as human. They’re more like goblins or orcs—subhuman vehicles for monstrous violence with no real goal or agency of their own.
That’s how the first Death Wish—and really, every subsequent Death Wish movie—treats its criminals. This isn’t a movie with a central villain, or even really one with a plot. Charles Bronson, Lange’s widow, spends the movie wandering around, indiscriminately killing subhuman muggers. His character Paul Kersey at one point rhapsodizes about “the old American custom of self-defense,” but self-defense seems to be a distant concern for him. He shoots criminals in the back. He shoots them when they’re down. He’s a serial killer, more or less, transformed into the hero of what would become an action franchise. And if vengeance was the goal he had in mind, he fails. After that one scene, we never see Goldblum or his friends again. Instead, we see Bronson wandering the streets, offering himself up as bait, and executing anyone who tries it with him.
Director Michael Winner based Death Wish on a 1972 Brian Garfield novel that puts forward the radical idea that it’s not a good idea to indiscriminately gun down criminals. The Death Wish movie, on the other hand, seems to be firmly on the side of Paul Kersey, the stone-faced vigilante.There are a few flashes of self-awareness in the movie, here and there. On a business trip to Arizona, we see Bronson absorbed in a cheesy Wild West stunt show, maybe absorbing its barely-there worldview. And by the end of the movie, he’s injured and vaguely deranged, spouting cowboy clichés to a would-be victim.
But Garfield still hated the movie that came out of his novel, so much that he wrote the later quasi-sequel Death Sentence as a sort of rebuke to the movie version. And watching the movie, it’s easy to see why Garfield might’ve had problems with it. For one thing, your vigilante is Charles Bronson, and it’s very difficult to root against Charles Bronson in a movie. And throughout the story, Winner seems to be making arguments that this wholesale slaughter is actually a good thing. Characters mention, again and again, how mugging rates sharply decline after Bronson hits the streets, and Bronson fixates on a news story about an elderly black lady, empowered by his blood thirst, who chases two assailants off with a hatpin. We never see the friends or families of Bronson’s victims; they might as well not exist. Even the movie’s police officers, tasked with shutting Bronson down, opt not to arrest him when they get the chance. They don’t, after all, want to turn him into a martyr. So instead, they send him out of town, where he’s ready to resume his killing. In the movie’s final shot, Bronson sees a gang of obnoxious punks in a Chicago train station, and he smiles and points a single finger-gun at them.
This is a movie with a point of view, and it’s a point of view that still seems scary today. The movie paints New York as a bleak, erratic hellscape, one where it’s nearly impossible to survive a walk through the park at night. The movie opens with Bronson and Lange on an idyllic Hawaiian vacation, and Herbie Hancock’s score abruptly switches to a sinister synth-blare the second they return home. The criminals, all generic multi-ethnic street punks, talk like screenwriting devices, not like human beings: “Gimme your money or I’ll bust you up!”
But all this struck a chord. In 1974, America was still reeling from Vietnam’s aftermath and from the generational culture wars that sprung up in its wake. Dirty Harry, three years earlier, gave us a hero cop who wouldn’t be constrained by the rigors of due process. But Death Wish goes a few steps farther, imagining an ordinary citizen who goes from sheltered liberal (“My heart bleeds a little for the underprivileged,” he actually says in an early scene) into a stone-faced murderer once he sees how real the evil around him is. That depiction would strike a chord. A few months before Death Wish hit theaters, Marvel introduced its not-dissimilar Punisher character, and he would become one of the comic company’s signature antiheroes in the years after. Meanwhile, Death Wish spawned four way-more-cartoonish sequels, as well as imitators like The Exterminator and Vigilante. And Bronson’s subway shooting in Death Wish would gain a scary real-life echo a decade later, when Bernhard Goetz shot four young black men on a New York subway car and later escaped almost all charges.