Look at the leading men of today. When I saw Leonardo DiCaprio as a tough guy in Gangs of New York I wasn’t sure if it was a drama or a comedy. Matt Damon isn’t too bad but I‘m not convinced he could take a punch. I like Bill Pullman but he looks like he is always on the verge of breaking into tears. George Clooney, please my sister could throw him down and twist him up like a pretzel.

Here are my top five unrecognized real men of filmdom. I skipped the obvious choices like The Duke and Clint and went for some guys who are well known but not often looked at as Alpha dogs. Can you imagine any of these guys sitting in anything but a leather barber chair? Can you see any of them wondering if they should get frosted tips or a mani-pedi? Just being a tough guy wasn’t enough for my list they also had to have the craft of acting down too!

Even modern actors who seem to know their way around a good street fight like Vin Diesel and The Rock don’t have the acting chops that a lot of the classic tough guys did.  What’s that?  Chuck Norris, Steven Seagal and Jean Claude Van Damme? I like Chuck’s politics and Seagal’s new reality show has promise but please don’t waste my time trying to convince me that those guys wouldn’t wilt under the steely eyed stare of any of the five guys in my list. Hum… While you’re reading I’m stepping out for a burger. 

5. Richard Roundtree 

One word – Shaft! They say this cat is a bad mother….and he is! Richard is a New Yorker, football player and manly enough to beat a rare form of male breast cancer.

4. Lee Marvin  

One of my favorite all time movie bad guys is Liberty Valence. So much pure evil without a hint of any redeeming social value he could have been a Democrat. He served in World War Two and was wounded in the battle of Saipan. He would have been higher on my list but I have talked to a few people who knew him and he was apparently a pretty nasty guy in real life. They invented the word “palimony” for this guy.

3. Charles Bronson 

From The Magnificent Seven to his series of Death Wish films he was a man of few words. He hung in with wife Jill Ireland as she suffered through cancer. That’s a man!  

2, Edward G Robinson

The real OG! From being Little Caesar Rico to the evil Dathan and then slapping down a straight flush on fellow tough guy Steve McQueen in the Cincinnati Kid nobody was more the quintessential American tough guy than Eddie G.  Not bad for a Jewish kid from Romania!

1.  Denzel Washington  

The epitome of the modern strong silent type. Who else could play Malcolm X, the rogue cop in Training Day, a stoic naval officer and a tort lawyer and make them all sympathetic? I can’t wait to see the Book of Eli. My favorite Denzel tough guy line is when as Detective Keith Frazier in Inside Man he enters a restaurant and the maître d asked him, “May I have your hat?”  He comes back with, “No get your own!” Shades of Philip Marlow!

You’ve probably experienced the Basterds publicity blitz.  Brad Pitt looks like he stepped out of a Calvin Klein underwear ad. Folks I know who have been around him say he really is a pleasant and laid-back guy, and these are hardly the characteristics of a beady-eyed killer.  Creepy Eli Roth, taking some time off from directing his degenerate torture movies, is just a leering clown – he looks like he should be squatting in the back of his Ford panel van offering Tootsie Rolls to passing tweens.  And B.J. Novak?  The guy is a hilarious writer and is really funny in The Office , but I’m not buying this cat as the scourge of the Third Reich.

In contrast, Lee Marvin’s tough guy legacy lives on despite the fact that his body rests with thousands of other heroes in Arlington National Cemetery. He earned that right when he was wounded fighting the Imperial Japanese Army in the Pacific as a Marine private. His Purple Heart is 100% USDA certified proof positive of his prime badassary. Who is the Hollywood tough guy of today who can dare step up to the Lee Marvin plate and take a swing?

Nobody.

Marvin got discharged from the Corps, came home and started doing crummy odd jobs to support himself – his willingness to work instead of freeloading off of others is itself an anachronism in today’s entitlement culture. He found acting and appeared in various supporting roles until he starred in a hit television series (M Squad) and moved on to bigger roles. He even won an Oscar for Cat Ballou.  Serving his country, working hard, honing his craft and winning the recognition of his peers – Lee Marvin’s career had a lot in common with that of fellow all-American badass Ernest Borgnine.   

How tough was the on-screen Marvin? He brawled with the Duke in Donovan’s Reef and stalked Chuck Bronson as a Mountie (!) in Death Hunt. His classic performance as the grizzled First Infantry Division squad leader in The Big Red One has inspired legions of American sergeants.

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Check him out in 1967’s Point Blank. As Walker, a single-minded human tsunami of violence, he smashes through the psychedelic Sixties’ Summer of Love with his .357 and mantra of “I want my money!” This flick works for me on several levels. As a soldier, I respect his character’s fearsome firepower choices; as an attorney, I find his character’s single-minded focus on getting paid inspiring.

Remade in 1999 as the tepid Payback, Point Blank was harder-core than any of the watered-down, focus-tested, suit-neutered, glorified filmstrips that limp out of the studios today and pretend to be edgy.  

For sheer cinematic awesomeness, his performance in The Dirty Dozen as Major Reisman, leader of the cutthroat band of condemned convicts on a mission to solve the Nazi overpopulation crisis, is never going to be matched. It’s actually unfair to even use it as a standard against which to measure subsequent action films. In the teachable moment regarding action movies that accompanies the release of The Inglorious Basterds, The Dirty Dozen would be Sgt. Crowley’s Full Moon beer while Little Quentin’s movie would be the President’s Bud Light.

Marvin was totally fearless, including when he should have been afraid. He did a terrifying musical, Paint Your Wagon, and even had something of a hit song – Wanderin’ Star. Sadly, that little ditty sounds like a duet between Tom Waits and a drunken leaf blower, but it did lead to Marvin being paid homage to by The Simpsons – another great honor he shares with Ernest Borgnine. 

In his personal life, his shacking up with his girlfriend led to a lawsuit that led to the creation of the legal concept of “palimony,” empowering a new generation of golddiggers. And politically, according to the always accurate Wikipedia, he was a liberal Democrat – hey, nobody’s perfect. But if you get shot fighting for this country, dude, for all I care you can vote for a transsexual Marxist cocker spaniel that buys into global warming.

Hollywood needs to look harder for its tough guys because the new ones just can’t cut it. All the fake blood and stylized mayhem in the world are no substitute for the hard edge of real life experience that WWII vets like Lee Marvin and Jimmy Stewart – I should say, Brigadier General James Stewart – brought to their roles.  Today, the critics’ favorite director sends boy toys, torture pornographers and comedians to battle the SS. Yawn.

If Tarantino really wanted to kill Nazis, he could just bore them to death with his endless, pseudo-academic dissertations on so-bad-they-are-just-plain-bad B-movies. Too bad Eisenhower didn’t have a videotape of QT sounding off at Cannes about his personal artistic vision to use to soften up Omaha Beach. But fortunately for us, he had men like Lee Marvin.

William Wyler’s “The Children’s Hour” (1961)

One was Weird Woman (1944), a neglected camp classic that was part of Universal’s low-budget Inner Sanctum series - about a scorned librarian (scream queen Evelyn Ankers) who seeks revenge on her ex- (Lon Chaney Jr.) by spreading gossip about his new wife (Anne Gwynne), an all-American voodoo princess he met on a South Seas expedition (don’t ask).

After several people inadvertently die as a result of Ankers’s aspersions, Chaney and gang steal a move straight out of the Democratic playbook - they devise an elaborate, fear-mongering ruse to guilt her into submission (and make her confess).  Here’s a clip of Ankers being browbeaten – with prophecies of gloom and doom – by little-known B-actress Elizabeth Russell:

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Justice is served, but only after Chaney’s deception turns into an eerie, Twilight Zone reality.  Moral of the story: like black magic, lies can be a powerful, tricky weapon to demolish your enemies.

The other movie was The Children’s Hour, William Wyler’s 1961 remake of his own These Three (1936).  Both Wyler films were adaptations of the controversial play that put Lillian Hellman on the map, about two lady school teachers whose lives are ruined when a spiteful student accuses them of being gay.  (What these movies were doing on local TV at 4:30 in the afternoon is beyond me, but they never failed to keep me glued.)

Lying was something Hellman knew quite a bit about. The Children’s Hour was banned in London, Chicago, Boston and other cities, before opening in New York in 1934 to rave reviews – turning Hellman overnight into the darling of Manhattan progressives. The lone sour note was critic John Mason Brown’s pesky observation that Hellman had plagiarized her plot from William Roughhead’s Bad Companions – a novel Hellman’s lover, Dashiell Hammett, had introduced her to – which was based on a 1910 Scottish case concerning a mixed-race girl who charged two schoolmarms with being lesbians, wrecking their lives.

Lucky for Hellman, Brown’s inconvenient fact fell on a society of deaf conformists.  But then, Hellman already knew how to play the game: she simply never acknowledged Bad Companions, and bided her time until the truth blew over.  The understanding that it just takes a little time for myth to become reality is pure Leftist doctrine.

Lillian Hellman

Decades later, in her memoir Pentimento, Hellman pilfered again, fabricating the self-aggrandizing story of “Julia,” an imaginary childhood friend who allegedly enlisted Jewess Hellman’s help in smuggling funds through Nazi Germany to aid the anti-fascists.  The episode was quickly made into an award-winning feature film, starring liberal sex goddesses Jane Fonda and Vanessa Redgrave, that solidified Hellman’s sainthood.

The trouble was no “Julia” ever existed – at least not in Hellman’s life.  The lie briefly stirred up some controversy, but once more, Hellman sat tight until the clouds of doubt dissipated – and what Paul Johnson hailed the ”Lillian Hellman myth industry” kept spewing smoke into peoples’ eyes.

“Just as south Italian peasants continue to make offerings and present petitions to their favourite saints long after their very existence has been exposed as an invention,” Johnson noted, ”so the lovers of progress too cling to their idols, feet of clay notwithstanding.”

The little girl’s lie in The Children’s Hour is that the two targeted women are lovers.  But in order for These Three to pass the Hays Code, William Wyler had to water it down to a heterosexual menage a trois (both women sharing the same man).  Dissatisfied with this compromise, the director revisited the story twenty-five years later, restoring the drama’s original content.

Which brings us to the next point: lies are also useful in rewriting history.

Thanks to Vito Russo’s The Celluloid Closet, a groundbreaking, somewhat skewed chronicle of the treatment of gays and lesbians on screen, The Children’s Hour is often held up as a prime example of old Hollywood’s homophobia – the ultimate in negative gay stereotyping – because the character of Martha Dobie (played by Shirley MacLaine) struggles with her lesbianism and commits suicide.

William Wyler and Hellman

In fact, The Children’s Hour offers one of the most three-dimensional gay characters in film history. Closeted Martha is tormented by the unexpressed love she feels for her bff, Karen Wright (Audrey Hepburn) – and by the harsh ostracism they both endure after the accusation. But at no point in the script is Martha ever presented as anything but completely sympathetic.

Even after the histrionic “coming out” scene, heterosexual Karen still asks Martha to come away with her so they can start a new life together. Wyler clearly lays blame for Martha’s final, heartbreaking decision on the cruelty of the local bigots – not on Martha’s being a “freak of nature.” If anything, the film succeeds in showing the pain that can come from living in the closet (and from human malice).

But don’t tell that to Shirley MacLaine. In 1976, the staunch Democrat and New Age priestess was one of the first to accuse white male patriarch Wyler of trying to erase Martha’s lesbianism from the film.

“Lillian Hellman hadn’t just fallen out of a tree when she wrote The Children’s Hour in the early Thirties,” MacLaine declared.  “She had experienced a lot of it herself [tell that to William Roughhead]. In the play, scenes were developed so that you could see Martha falling in love with Karen and realizing why she was jealous of Karen’s boyfriend… but when Wyler put it on the screen, he cut those scenes out. He thought they would be too much for middle America to take. I thought he was wrong and I told him so, and Audrey Hepburn was right behind me [see next paragraph]…. Even so, I conceived my part as if those scenes were still there…. But Willie Wyler didn’t want that, and that’s why the story didn’t work on film.”

Note: In the 1995 film version of The Celluloid Closet, MacLaine takes her version of the truth a step further, claiming that no one on set had any idea that the movie was about a woman who realizes she’s in love with another woman. She even contradicts her earlier interview, stating on camera that “Audrey and I never talked about this – isn’t that amazing?”

Here’s MacLaine’s big scene:

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Moral of the post-script: lies are a terrific way to hijack reality after the fact, taint the legacy of dead white males – and take credit for their work while you’re at it. 

If MacLaine were correct, then why did Wyler, one of Hollywood’s great “women’s directors,” bother to remake the film at all after his first, heterosexual version?  Sorry, Shirly, but the moments of Martha with romantic stars in her eyes, and hurt by Karen’s affection for Joe (James Garner), are all there to be seen in glorious black-and-white.

Thanks to Wyler’s direction and, yes, MacLaine’s commitment, no amount of politically correct, post-modern revisionism - blaming a nonexistent whitewash on an evil Anglo – can dull the movie’s emotional impact. And tough/tender Martha remains my favorite MacLaine performance after her sweet-and-sour turn in Billy Wilder’s The Apartment.

The Children’ s Hour was remarkable for 1961 – as was its frequent showing on local TV at an hour that probably should have been reserved for after-school specials. Meanwhile, on the big screen, vigilante films were all the rage in the 1970s - Death Wish, Dirty Harry, Lipstick – stories of ordinary people who were victimized, outraged, and fought back by taking the law into their own hands.  There were no lies in these violent films, except the debunked one - that leaving justice up to a bureaucracy works.

These visceral, cathartic films allowed viewers to live vicariously through the avenging characters, and begged the question: How would “I” respond if a random party – that has no respect for me, doesn’t take into account my life experience, my feelings, my personal struggle - decided to force its will on me? Would I, like Charles Bronson, flip that tricky mental switch and turn on the rage full force – or would I cower?

We could still entertain such fantasies then.  Speech codes hadn’t tongue-tied us yet. Oprah, Chopra, and Obama weren’t around to tell us we were guilty and deserved to be punished. The thought police hadn’t fully ascended yet to push their good intentions on us, against our will.

Yet despite our national softness, bigotry remains eternal, part of the imperfect human condition. Nowadays, being proud of your flag, your military, your freedom, is the latest love that dare not speak its name. ”Conservative” is indeed the new “gay.”  (In fact, you’d be hard-pressed to find a liberal in New York, San Francisco or L.A. capable of showing the same compassion to a conservative that straight Audrey Hepburn shows to MacLaine in The Children’s Hour – enlightened Bush-basher MacLaine probably included.)

This creeping cultural revolution is nothing new; it’s been in the works for decades. “There was no doubt that there was a vast organization which was making fools of all the liberals in Hollywood and taking their money,” said director Elia Kazan, “that there was a police state among the Left element in Hollywood and Broadway.”

At the forefront of this morphing social tyranny: blacklist survivor Lillian Hellman. Again, she knew just how to make it work – for her. According to author Paul Johnson, after the release of the movie Julia, based on Hellman’s fake memoir, the aged playwright enjoyed a renaissance as “the queen of radical chic and the most important single power-broker among the progressive intelligentsia and the society people who seethed around them…. She compiled her own blacklists and had them enforced by scores of servile intellectual flunkies.”

Similarly, Karl Marx – the man – extolled the virtues of the working class, agitating for violent revolution, yet “so far as we know,” wrote Johnson, ”never set foot in a mill, factory, mine or other industrial workplace in the whole of his life. What is even more striking is Marx’s hostility to fellow revolutionaries who had such experience – that is, working men who had become politically conscious…. Marx made sure that working-class socialists were eliminated from any positions of influence.”

Today, in America, we have a President who, rather than level with the trusting, hard-working voters who put him in office, plays mind games with them - asking them to believe that increasing the national debt is decreasing it, that less choice in health care is more choice, that standing up to violent savages makes us the savages, that reverse racism is post-racial. He seems to suck the meaning right out of words as he speaks them, always sure to distract with a mechanical smile.

But maybe he’s just stupid.

Meanwhile, this sort of mendacious pacifying has a malignant side effect. In the gay ghetto, for instance, the cult of “equality” encourages resentment towards straight white males, Christians, and other fellow Americans – sending the pampered, short-sighted LGBT community rushing to bolster another two-faced foe, that disguises itself as a kindred, downtrodden victim of Judeo-Christian oppression. And, to riff off Hillary Clinton, you know who I mean.

Word of advice to gays and lesbians: enjoy your comfort zone while you can.

Leftists claim to be die-hard humanitarians, yet they are the continual robbers and stiflers of free expression – always for the greater good - a compulsion that has nothing whatsoever to do with altruism, spirituality, or even with thought. The reality is they loathe people one on one, and prefer the safety of Utopian ideas.

Six months ago, to crib from Martha Dobie, I started to feel so damn sick and dirty I couldn’t stand it anymore. So I declared myself an apostate right here - because, as the New Age slogan goes, you’re only as sick as your secrets. If conservative really is the new gay, then the time for all closet cases to come out, loud and proud, is now.

My phone’s been ringing a lot less since then - a generous tactic better known as the silent treatment. Silence is supposed to be golden. When it’s a personal choice, it can be sacred. But petty tyrants walk among us – at the supermarket, in the gym, at the office, the stoplight – and some of them are your friends.

Once you’re out, some of them may choose to remember you the way you were before you woke up. And I suppose there’s something touching, maybe even flattering, about a loved one who clings to a fond memory of the past.

But make no mistake: there’s nothing considerate, or peace-loving, about silence when it’s used as a muzzle. And for the Left, past and present, the ultimate goal is to keep the lies current, no matter how much denial, fear-mongering - or voodoo – it takes.

This is one of my favorite genres, especially when it comes to the smaller, lesser known – or better yet – less respected members of this family. Sure, there’s “Star Trek II,” “Once Upon a Time in the West,” “The Sting,” “Man on Fire,” and both “Kill Bill” films – love ‘em all, and so do you, but here are five you may have missed that are even more satisfying than their better known cousins.

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1. Death Wish II (1982) – Michael Winner’s first “Death Wish” (1974) is often mistaken as a revenge film when it’s really a vigilante film. For we purists that distinction matters. The original may show up on all kinds of Top 10 Revenge Film lists but at no time does Bronson’s Paul Kersey look for the thugs who murdered his wife and raped his daughter. What he does do is take it to the streets as an avenging angel to overcome his own sense of helplessness. Don’t get me wrong, it’s great because punks get blown away and liberal critics howl, but a revenger it is not.

Winner’s follow-up, however, is an epic of revenge, one of the most exploitive, manipulative and satisfying movies ever made. Bronson was 60 at the time and at the height of human achievement in pure badassery. Watching The Mighty One, dressed in black from top to bottom, stalk the seedy streets of Los Angeles hunting the punks who raped and murdered his daughter as Jimmy Page’s howling score skews the tone into something surreal is as good as it gets.

The cherry on top? Well, that would be the subtextual viewing pleasure of knowing how much critics hate it.

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2. Act of Violence (1948) – In “The Searchers,” John Wayne’s Ethan Edwards describes his own determination with this famous quote:

Seems like he never learns there’s such a thing as a critter that’ll just keep comin’ on. So we’ll find ‘em in the end, I promise you. We’ll find ‘em. Just as sure as the turnin’ of the earth.

Post-war Los Angeles — when California was still known as “Sunny California,” — and war hero Van Heflin’s done quite well for himself: Nice home, thriving business, cute little son, and best of all, his wife looks exactly like Janet Leigh. Unfortunately, there’s this…

Scrape … scrape … scrape … scrape…

That sound has relentlessly haunted Heflin over an ocean and across America, and now it’s knocking on the front door in the form of Robert Ryan who will have his revenge on Heflin … just as sure as the turnin’ of the earth.

Fred Zinneman directs this splendidly shot, tightly plotted piece of noir that’s deserving of a revival and finally available on DVD. I won’t spoil a drop of story, but the performances are as good as it gets, especially Oscar-winner Mary Astor in a late-career supporting role, and the wrap-up is hugely satisfying on every level. Well worth a Netflix, to say the least.

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3. Coffy (1973) – A masterpiece of blaxploitation thanks to Pam Grier’s ridiculously sexy and determined presence as a nurse out to get The Man who fed her sister contaminated heroin. Every scene reaches for “cool” and delivers. Sure, the acting’s stiff and the action’s over-rehearsed, but with dialogue like this…

Vitroni: Crawl, ni**er!
Coffy: [pulls gun] You want me to crawl, white motherf**ker?
Vitroni: What’re you doing? Put that down.
Coffy: You want to spit on me and make me crawl? I’m gonna piss on your grave tomorrow.

… if you catch me on the right day I’ll tell you “Coffy” is the greatest movie ever made. There’s just something distinctive and sublime about a genre film that aims for a target and hits the bullseye.

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4. Chato’s Land (1972) – Two years before kicking off the “Death Wish” franchise, director Michael Winner and Charles Bronson teamed up for the first time to give the revenge genre a test-drive with this  satisfying and violent Western about a half-breed Apache (Bronson) hunted by a posse after he kills a sheriff in self-defense.

You don’t need me to tell you that some tables find themselves turned and thanks to a splendid supporting cast consisting of Jack Palance, James Whitmore, Ralph Waite, Richard Jordan and  Victor French, there is all kinds of pleasure to be had in that table turn as the posse degenerates into lawlessness and in-fighting.

Imposing over every frame is the stoic and fearsome Bronson whose transformation from a quiet, peaceable man wanting to get home to his family, into a relentless revenging angel with a righteous cause is something few actors could pull off believably.

Acting’s in the eyes, not the affectations … and Bronson made you believe.

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5. Hannie Caulder (1971) – Raquel Welch starred in three outstanding Westerns between 1968 and 1971 — this, “Bandolero!” (1968) and “100 Rifles” (1969). Beyond her stunning physical appearance, Welch is progressively better in each of them and with “Hannie Caulder” impressively carries the film mostly on her own. There to help her is Robert Culp (one of my favorite unheralded actors in one of his best film roles) as a slightly offbeat bounty hunter, but Raquel adds some real brawn to her beauty as a woman determined to learn the way of the gun in order to have her revenge on the three men who raped her and killed her husband.

Burt Kennedy directs and adapted the screenplay, so it’s sure to be a lean, satisfying 85 minutes. Ernest Borgnine, Strother Martin, Jack Elam and Christopher Lee fill out an excellent supporting cast and a surprisingly (for director Kennedy, anyway) odd sense of humor pervades everything.

An unconventional  film, but more than worthy.

Unlike “The Dark Knight,” which used allegory and theme to richen its story and characters, the first two X-Men movies (haven’t seen 3) were unduly burdened by political subtext. At no time did either achieve the most important moment in a superhero film – at no time did they soar. It’s not hard to figure out why. How do you accomplish lift-off weighed down by a blinding nuance which won’t allow an all-out rumble between good and evil? “Wolverine” never soars either, but it’s not a superhero film, it’s a genre flick; a satisfying, old-fashioned revenger, a B-movie whose characters just happen to possess extraordinary powers.

The story opens just before the Civil War, introducing us to Logan (Hugh Jackman) and Victor (a well-cast Liev Schreiber) as young brothers forced to come to terms with who and what they are. A nifty credit sequence, not unlike “Watchmen’s,” quickly takes us through their lives and the development of their relationship until we land somewhere around 1970 where both are mixed up in a secret and elite U.S. Military hit squad made up of other mutants and commanded by the oily General Stryker (Danny Houston).

A particularly ugly mission involving the killing of innocent civilians ends up being too much for Logan and he decides he’s had enough. But Victor (now Sabretooth) has shred much of his humanity over the decades, enjoys him some killing and feels he’s finally found a place for his mutant self among his own kind. For reasons that never fully make sense, this tension results in the brothers becoming mortal enemies.

In Canada, Logan builds himself a new life working as a lumberjack. He lives in a beautiful mountain home no lumberjack not living in a movie could ever afford and has found true love with Kayla Silverfox (the quite fetching Lynn Collins), his tender, understanding, live-in girlfriend.

What could possibly go wrong?

Yeah, I could’ve done without the old trope of the “sinister” military and really could’ve done without the arch-villain’s wildly out-of-place Dr. Evil speech about the necessity of “pre-emptive war” (I thought Obama told everyone to look forward?), but remove the superpowers and special effects and “Wolverine” is the same movie Charles Bronson made a dozen times between 1972 and 1987. And that’s a compliment.  

The story’s lean, simple and thankfully, unlike its predecessors, more concerned with pacing than moralizing. The special effects are a little cheesy, but that only heightens the winning lack of ambition which is the film’s strongest element. Best of all, the action scenes don’t have you reaching for the Dramamine nor do they numb you with blazing overkill. The unholy shaky-cam is nowhere to be seen and the three or four set-pieces are choreographed and shot in a way that allows you to follow them.

If you worry as I do about origin stories that get bogged down in those layers of mythology that so please Those-Who-Have-Never-Felt-The-Touch-Of-A-Woman, no worries here, which is why the fanboy crowd might be disappointed.  The introduction of new mutants and a younger version of an old favorite might help, but the story surrounding what made Wolverine Wolverine is refreshingly straight-forward and simple.

Emotionally the relationships never really connect, especially the central one between Wolverine and Sabretooth. The demands of the plot drive these characters when it should be the other way around. The need for an action scene or a “surprising” turn of events seems to change their relationship dynamic on a dime which makes it impossible to grasp or to invest in it. Logan’s relationship with Kayla is only a little better, but his connection with an elderly farm couple is the strongest element in the film but also the shortest.

This is Jackman’s fourth tour as Logan, the mutant who will be Wolverine, and he’s as good as I’ve seen him. The most important aspect of a movie star is clear-eyed confidence and an ease in your own skin.  Jackman’s performance is effortless in that respect and shows no sign of the self-consciousness I’ve seen in his other work. Hopefully this will translate beyond the “X-Men” franchise.

“Wolverine” satisfies and works because it respects what it is and never pretends otherwise. Good actors and plenty of action expertly paced over 107 minutes with no aspirations beyond holding our attention.

So far, this is my kind of summer.

I bring you glad tidings. Like a gritty, avenge grinder Charles Bronson might’ve made around, oh, 1973, “Taken” is about as satisfying an action thriller as you’re likely to see all year.

What a sad thing to have to say in January.

Bryan Mills (Liam Neeson) spent his adult life in the service of his country doing what he describes as “preventing bad things from happening.” This cost him his wife Lenore (Famke Janssen) and estranged him from his seventeen year-old daughter Kim (Maggie Grace). To make up for lost time, Bryan’s retired and moved into a small, depressing L.A. apartment hoping to form some kind of relationship with Kim before she heads off to college.

The competition for his daughter’s affection is substantial, however. Mom remarried into L.A. money which comes with the mansion and a whole lot of “beautiful people.” When Bryan shows up for Kim’s birthday party with a karaoke machine likely purchased at the local Costco, Stepdad trots out a real, live horse. There’s a value gap, as well. Bryan understands how the real world works. Lenore and Kim, having benefitted from the security hard men like Bryan make possible, do not.

Bryan’s quickly discovering that the world he sacrificed so much for to keep safe holds no place for him. He’s a reminder of something people don’t want to be reminded of. Until the kidnapping, that is. Then Bryan’s worldview doesn’t seem so inconvenient and his unique skills so brutish.

If you’re thinking this sounds an awful lot like John Ford’s “The Searchers“ (1956), you’re not alone. To its credit, “Taken” has no ambition beyond holding your attention for 90 exceptionally well paced minutes, but like John Wayne’s Ethan Edwards, only death will stop Bryan Mills. He’s a thing that will never stop coming “just as sure as the turning of the Earth.”

“Taken” is a simple story extremely well told with about six scenes so beautifully crafted you’ll want to turn right around and see it again. The kidnap scene alone is worth the price of admission but a torture sequence that would make Jack Bauer join the ACLU is a finger dead in the eye of moral illiterates who refuse to acknowledge the vast difference between those who target the innocent and those who kill those who target the innocent. No hand wringing here, no pause to contemplate man’s inhumanity to man – not when there’s evil to exterminate.

My only complaint, and it’s not a small one, is this new, grotesque style of presenting actions scenes filmed with an epileptic shaky-cam and edited in a blender set on “incomprehensible.” Luckily the story has enough drive to make up for these messy action sequences, but this trend can’t die soon enough.

Neeson’s terrific as the single-minded killing machine. One of the story’s best moment comes right after the kidnapping. Obviously Mills is heartsick over what happened, but the situation also allows him to reclaim his place in the world. Suddenly he has value and can take charge. Neeson’s rugged and believable in a role that demands nothing more, and he’s well-equipped to carry a boilerplate action film whose only surprises come from a lack of political correctness. 

“Taken” isn’t out to reinvent the wheel. Years ago, Hollywood used to drop one of these in drive-ins and downtown theatres about once a month. But unlike last year’s “The Bank Job,” which strived for throwback only to get bogged down in a convoluted script, or Tarantino’s “Grindhouse” which made the mistake of thinking we were dying to relive the experience of seeing bad movies, “Taken” is what it is. Twenty-five years ago no one would’ve thought a thing of it, but today its lack of pretension and moral preening makes it downright original.

“Taken” just wants to give us a good time. What a concept.

The film was highly successful with audiences, making Bronson a big star and inspiring several sequels. Critics hated it.

Both reactions were caused by the same thing: the film’s uncompromising truthfulness. Death Wish marked the death of liberal illusions about crime and punishment: the idea that crime is caused by disadvantageous social environments and that the solution is to pour even more taxpayer money into bad neighborhoods in an attempt to buy submission from the poorer elements of society.

Death Wish showed that process to be an absurd sham. The film, based on a novel by Brian Garfield, clearly showed that giving in to such political extortion was making social conditions worse and exacerbating the nation’s already terrible crime problem.

Death Wish and its sequels refused to sugarcoat the villainy of the criminals the architect Paul Kersey pursues, nor did it state that he was justified in what he was doing. It simply showed the characters doing what they were inclined to do, making their choices and following the consequences. Such truth was impossible for Pauline Kael, Roger Ebert, and other elitist critics of the time to stomach.

As direct and truthful as Death Wish is, it is not simplistic or political, despite the ravings of critics at the time. It is a story that was all too plausible, and the characterizations and situations were accurately and insightfully portrayed.

In the years since its release, Death Wish and its sequels have received some of the positive reconsideration they deserve—long after I wrote a lengthy article defending Death Wish, Dirty Harry, and other vigilante films in Chronicles magazine in the mid-1980s.

AMC will show the film several times in the coming days; click here for a synopsis and schedule, and click here to have AMC send you a reminder to watch it.

Death Wish: Highly recommended.