Mr. Majestyk

Mr. Majestyk

"You make sounds like you're a mean little asskicker," says Charles Bronson's Vince Majestyk to Owen Wilson-look-alike Paul Koslo's Bobby Copas early on in this Elmore Leonard-scripted actioner. "Only I ain't convinced. You keep talkin', I'm gonna take your head off." This little exchange is brought to you by Copas' insistence on bringing unsolicited day-laborers onto Majestyk's California watermelon field, and one has to wonder if any line was better crafted for the strong but mostly silent (and mostly Seventies) actor-hero. Hero, here, though, might be the wrong word (and I suppose it always was for Bronson's roles). After all, the 1974 film's tag line, reinforced on the DVD's bonus theatrical trailer, claims that Mr. Majestyk "touches the hero in all of us" and indicates that this "melon picker" didn't want to kick ass, exactly, no matter how adept he is at it, but that he was rather forced into it. And how else to react when an apparent mobster's posse shoots up your crop (and let me just say that gratuitous onscreen violence is one thing; ripe, recently reaped watermelons, piled blissfully in a barn lit by two light bulbs only to be ripped apart by rampant gunfire for a solid 21/2 precious minutes is something else altogether, and damn effective filmmaking, at that) when not trying to kill you as well as your nearest and dearest? But let's go back to the start: Majestyk gets jailtime for righteously beating the shit out of the aforementioned interloper Copas with Copas' own shotgun; Majestyk later escapes in transport after big fish Frank Renda's boys botch an attempted Renda breakout; Majestyk reneges on a $25,000 deal with Renda (Al Lettieri, bulked up bigtime a few years after his turn as Sollozo in The Godfather) to let the latter go when the former has the upper hand in a remote cabin in the woods; Majestyk loses Renda on the way to taking him back to the cops in exchange for a drop of the shotgun assault charges. Majestyk gets the charges dropped anyway, all right: After Majestyk gets thrown back in the clink, Copas is instructed by one of Renda's boys to drop them himself -- better to have the man upon whom you've vowed revenge free than locked in the police station basement, right? Right. Meanwhile, all that Majestyk wants is safe carry for his second-ever crop of watermelons, for if this one fails, it's all over. This doesn't really happen, unfortunately, but that doesn't stop our hero from finding true love with migrant worker/union organizer Nancy Chavez (Linda Cristal). She's the one he helped get restroom access at the film's outset, when a particularly bigoted gas station attendant tells her that the toilets are broken (bullshit). That comes just after Bronson walks out of the same set of restrooms, the door marked "MEN." Which happens long before Copas offers the following in response to Renda's asking after Majestyk late in the film: "Well, I know he's a stuck-up son of a bitch -- got a few melons, thinks he's a big roller." Well, he might never have been a big roller, nor might have his alter ego, sir, but he kicked your ass in front of a bunch of people. And there are worse legacies. See Special Screeningsfor information on the Alamo Drafthouse's "Cinema Virile: The Films of Charles Bronson."