BY LEE PFEIFFER
Love and Bullets is a 1979 Charles Bronson starrer that Roger
Ebert appropriately described at the time as "an assemblyline
potboiler". The film initially showed promise. Originally titled Love and Bullets, Charlie, the
movie had John Huston as its director. However, Huston left after
"creative differences" about the concept of the story and its execution
on screen. The absurdity of losing a director as esteemed as Huston
might have been understandable if the resulting flick wasn't such a
mess. However, one suspects that, whatever the conceptual vision Huston
had for the movie may have been, it must have been superior to what
ultimately emerged. Stuart Rosenberg, the competent director of Cool Hand Luke took
over but was unable to create anything more than a sub-par action
movie. The plot finds Bronson as a Phoenix cop who is reluctantly sent
to Switzerland on an undercover assignment. The local prosecutor has
been doggedly trying to convict a local mob kingpin (Rod Steiger) for
years. Now it appears that his moll girlfriend (Jill Ireland) might be a
viable witness in terms of spilling the beans about his operations.
Thus, Steiger has stashed her abroad and is keeping her under constant
watch. Bronson's job is to pretend he is also a mob guy and convince
Ireland to return with him to Phoenix to testify against her lover. The
movie seems to exist for one reason only: the main participants desired a
paid working vacation in Switzerland. This concept is nothing new. The
Rat Pack squeezed in filming Oceans Eleven almost as an
afterthought while they were performing nightly in Las Vegas at the
Sands casino. In the twilight of his years, John Ford famously got his
stock company together for a jaunt to Hawaii and released the result as a
big boxoffice hit called Donovan's Reef, which still must retain the status of being the most expensive home movie ever made.
Love and Bullets is such a lazy effort you have to believe it
must have taken a great deal of effort for the cast to meander to the
set every day. The film also illustrates the danger of love-struck
leading men force-feeding the lady in their lives into virtually every
movie they make. Clint Eastwood shoe-horned Sondra Locke into a string
of his films in the 1970s and 1980s and while some of them were artistic
and commercial successes, I always greeted their next teamING with a sense
of bored inevitability. (Locke was also a prime perpetrator in the
creation of the worst movie of Eastwood's career, The Gauntlet.) In
this case, Ireland had been Mrs. Bronson for over a decade following
her divorce from David McCallum. She was always a competent enough
actress but the couple obviously envisioned themselves as a new William
Powell/Myrna Loy teaming. Not quite. Bronson is on full automatic pilot,
registering almost no emotion. Ireland overplays the role of
bubble-headed moll to an embarrassing level, as though she is a
character in a sitcom sketch. She is saddled with intentionally
laughable fright wigs but the real joke comes when she decides to
discard them for her natural hair style, which proves to be even less
flattering. Absurdity piles upon absurdity as the film becomes one long,
extended chase sequence with Bronson and Ireland squabbling like Ralph
and Alice Kramden, if you can imagine The Honeymooners being
pursued by assassins. Steiger is in full scenery-chewing mode and an
impressive array of supporting actors (Val Avery, Michael V. Gazzo,
Henry Silva and Strother Martin) are pretty much wasted along the way.
I'm generally undemanding when it comes to the pleasures of watching an
unpretentious Charles Bronson action movie but Love and Bullets represents
the latter period of his career where he rarely even tried to elevate
his films beyond being vehicles for an easy pay check.
(The film is currently streaming on Shout! Factory TV and the app and subscription are also available through Amazon Prime Video.)