Year:  1973
Rating: 7.0

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Back when Charles Bronson was in his acting prime - 70's to the early 80's - and his films were often commercially very successful, I never even thought of going to one of his films in a theater - and rarely watched them on video either - there were just so many better movies around and Bronson just seemed so monolithic in his acting and the films he chose to make.  But now I quite like Bronson and even though most of his films are not very ambitious , they are enjoyable on a very primal level. Bronson sees bad guy. Bronson kills bad guy. Though in fairness sometimes he was paid to kill them. He was a workingman's tough guy. Grew up in coal country dirt poor. You always thought that if he wasn't acting, he would have have been a really good garage mechanic. Or in jail as he had been convicted of crimes two times before he got  into acting.


This film came right after the excellent The Mechanic but before the Death Wish films that caused all sorts of indignation from many. This is directed by the same person, Michael Winner, as The Mechanic and Winner was to go on to direct Bronson in the first three Death Wish films. Winner, I have read, was a shit of a human being and treated the women actresses on his films really badly, but I have to guess that he and Bronson got along fine.



The Stone Killer is workingman fare too. Nothing fancy. Meat and potatoes with no extras. One second Bronson's character of a cop is in NYC, the next in L.A. then back to NYC, then to L.A. without any of that filler to let the audience know he is leaving. I liked that. I don't need to see scenes of him on an airplane. An old Mafia head of one of the Sicilian families is plotting revenge for something that happened over 40 years ago against the other families.   Bronson gets a sniff of this and relentlessly pursues leads and dead bodies. A good character cast with Martin Balsam as the Mafia head, Norman Fell as a cop, his future lodger John Ritter as a cop, Ralph Waite as a cop and Angel - I mean Stuart Margolin - as one of the Stone Killers. There are basically no women in this film. Lucky for them.