Viking Night: Mr. Majestyk
By Bruce Hall
March 21, 2017
BoxOfficeProphets.com
There have been many great action stars over the years, and they all tend to have their particular way of making an entrance. Clint Eastwood usually shoots a street punk in the face, right after delivering a withering quip by way of his patented Perma-Sneer. Arnold was always fond, in his heyday, of doing something that required all 22 inches of bicep to be in shot. High-fiving Carl Weathers, lifting a car over his head, or punching Henchman #12 so hard his head splatters like an overripe tomato.
Throw in some napalm, put up a title card with those cool letters that look like they’re made out of metal, and you’re ready to roll your opening credits.
But there’s a different kind of hero; one who needs no such introduction. The first time we meet John McClane, he’s on an airplane listening to some schlub talk about carpet. But you know you’re looking at a badass, because he smirks a lot and illegally carries his service weapon across state lines. But this isn’t the kind of man I’m talking about. Later in the film, McClane loses his shit and is running around, screaming and snapping necks like Jack Black after a crash six week weight loss regimen of cocaine and Pixie Stix.
The variety of hero to which I refer is the kind of guy who never raises his voice, never loses his composure, and is at his best behind the wheel of something both distinctly American and wholly environmentally appalling.
What I’m saying is, you may not like his methods but he gets results.
And he doesn’t have to DO anything to be cool, other than walk on screen. The only parts of Bullitt I remember are the ones where Steve McQueen was either driving a car, or walking through the airport with a gun, hunting down mafia scum and crushing a turtleneck/blazer combo in ways that would make Sterling Archer spot himself.
When you’re that goddamned cool, it doesn’t MATTER how they introduce you. I guess that’s why the very first shot of Mr. Majestyk is Charles Bronson exiting a gas station rest room, with a look on his face that suggests that restroom just got its ass kicked. Can you imagine a James Bond movie starting with Daniel Craig stepping out of an airplane lavatory, gruffly yanking up his fly just as the characteristic WHOOSH abruptly disappears behind that weird faux-wood telephone booth door?
Granted, this would already be a better film than Spectre, but I don’t want to get off track here. Not only does Mr. Majestyk begin in this fashion, but that particular bathroom, as it turns out, plays the most critical role in the film. It serves as a plot device that A) reveals Vince Majestyk (Bronson) to be a disciplined, no nonsense man of principle who doesn’t take kindly to casual racism, and B) provide the female lead with her first and only effective scene. You know how it was back then. It was okay to have a strong female lead, as long as she was strong in her first scene, and spent the rest of the movie either not IN the movie, or getting her extremely shapely ass handed to her.
So, Mr. Majestyk doesn’t exactly pass the Bechdel test, but it actually gets a bit of a pass from me. Nancy Chavez (Linda Cristal) does play a pivotal part in the story, even if overall she has less to do than Megan Fox usually does. Still, Nancy and Majestyk are part of the circle of life in Edna, a (fictional) small southeast Colorado town that gets by mostly on the yearly melon crop and whatever else really small towns do to keep themselves from spontaneously blowing away in the wind.
Nancy and her friends are itinerant workers. Majestyk is an ex-Green Beret who after Vietnam, naturally decided to grow watermelons in the most unlikely place in which one CAN grow watermelons. Full disclosure - they actually DO grow watermelons in Colorado, just not in the parts of Colorado you think of when you think of Colorado. They actually filmed Mr. Majestic in that part of the state, and I guess if you want the complete opposite of the climate in Vietnam, Colorado isn’t a bad choice. So in that sense, sure. I can see it.
And that’s really one of the first things that stood out to me about Mr. Majestyk. Not only does it take a wild chance with setting and premise, but I expected it to have been filmed somewhere in southern California, which has been used as a cheap stand-in for just about every environment on (and off) earth. I was half expecting a chase scene under the sixth street viaduct bridge, like you see in 75 percent of all action movies ever made. But no, they actually went on the road with Mr. Majestyk, and it’s part of what lends this movie a weirdly inconsistent level of charm.
There’s an efficiently utilitarian quality to the production values of Mr. Majestyk, and it mirrors Bronson’s approach to the character. I’m not sure an actual expression crosses his face the whole damn movie - this is a salt-of-the-earth guy who has learned to take whatever life hands him, turn it over in his hands and make something useful from it. This most practical of men watches as the gas station attendant behaves contemptuously when Nancy and her companions ask to use the restroom. Majestyk steps in and insists they are allowed to be treated with respect, and he does not do it for self serving reasons.
He does it because he’s a badass ex-Green Beret/watermelon farmer who didn’t watch his buddies die face down in the mud so he can come back home to goddamn restroom racism.
Yes, I am being a little sarcastic. But...only a little. There are no explosions, no neck snapping, and no eye-rolling bon mots. Just a quick zip-up, a beautiful Mexican woman in high waisted jeans and a crop of melons that needs to be picked in five days or someone’s going to lose the damn shirt off their back. That is what prompts Majestyk to hire Nancy and her friends, that is what runs him afoul of a local protection racket, and THAT is the premise of the film. An Army Ranger-melon farmer who has five days to turn in his crop, but these assholes won’t let him.
They just messed with the wrong watermelon farmer.
Of course, the reason I can’t imagine that elevator pitch is because the person making it doesn’t get to finish before they and their dumb script are thrown from the top of the building. Or maybe not, if they’re Elmore Leonard. This is the man whose work is behind this film, Get Shorty, Jackie Brown, and that show Justified my one friend keeps begging - BEGGING me to watch. I guess that’s a good thing, because Mr. Majestyk is far more than the sum of its parts. This is a really solid, small town action-revenge flick that both does and does NOT follow all the traditional beats.
Yes, Vince Majestyk is just back from ‘Nam (which in 1974 wasn’t yet a cliche). Yes, his character is a man of honor with a checkered past, a failed marriage and an antisocial streak. And yes, he ends up running afoul of the law, is accused of a crime he did not commit, and has to go on the run to clear his name. Those are the kinds of things you’d expect from a popcorn flick starring Chuck Bronson, or Sly Stallone, or Arnold “gets to use the nerdiest name in the world as a mononym” Schwarzenegger.
But there are a few things about Mr. Majestyk that make it kind of a rare little gem.
First, there’s that whole “ex-Green Beret/melon farmer” thing. That’s just awesome. I can see “driving a cab” or “bouncer” or “kindergarten teacher,” but melon farmer? Genius! The second thing, as I mentioned, is that Majestik is eventually framed for a (very minor) crime which he did not commit. Like most action/revenge flicks, the police are not what I would call “incompetent.” No, this is more a case of police who openly decide not to do their jobs for no reason other than because it would get in the way of the story.
That’s also probably why while he’s in prison, Majestyk immediately - and I mean IMMEDIATELY - runs afoul of famed mafia hitman Frank Renda (Al Lettieri). Frank and his mafia overlords operate out of Denver, because if there’s anything Andy Garcia has taught us, it’s that Denver is a wretched hive of scum and mafia villainy. And when the Denver mafia wants to kick back, they do not head up to Vail, land of heated swimming pools and movie stars. No, they chill out in Edna, almost three hours into the part of Colorado that is largely indistinguishable from Kansas.
It just makes sense.
Long story short - Renda has it out for Majestyk, leading to a really odd game of cat and mouse. At least, insofar as you can have one of those in a city whose population can barely fill a basketball court. But what makes me love Mr. Majestyk so much is that if you watch closely, Bronson’s character does very little to bring any of this on himself. He just wants to get his damn melons picked. Unfortunately, he is arbitrarily surrounded by characters whose vested interests are not only stupid, but seem to universally involve him NOT getting his melons picked on time.
But the film plays all this off with the cool, even-handed appeal of a man with total confidence in himself - just like real-life war hero Charles Bronson. It’s largely his sedateness that grounds a story seemingly steeped in utter madness. The plot is what you might charitably call “improbable,” and it’s saddled with an antagonist who serves no purpose other than to be a dick. For most of the film, Renda could go back to Denver whenever he wants; he just decides to hang around Edna and blow things up, which really doesn’t seem to rankle the local police all that much.
And no matter what happens around him, Bronson takes it all in stoic (and sometimes dryly snarky) stride.
Until the third act of course, when he finally drops all pretense and straight up Bronsons the crap out of everything that moves. At the end of the day, I’ll call this a surprisingly engaging genre picture that is driven almost entirely by a man whose general lack of charisma not makes him intimidating, but endows him with earnestness and credibility that other action stars lack. So if you’re a Charles Bronson fan and you haven’t seen Mr. Majestyk, then you are NOT a Charles Bronson fan, sir.
And if you are not a Charles Bronson fan, I’m sorry to have bothered you. Please go back to being a meth dealer, a member of ISIS, or whatever people like you do with your time.