While his directorial debut date from the beginning of the 1960s, his name is superficially attached to a post-Hollywood cinema, a form of decadence gender , tried to opportunistic commercial success that obtained almost never, in their time, favored by the critics. From all this, it will probably never really cared. But its importance has been widely underestimated because it was one of those who made the 1970s a golden age of American cinema.
The British filmmaker and producer Michael Winner has died of liver cancer Jan. 21, 2013. He was born in London on 30 October, 1935. It begins very young career as a journalist specializing in film before becoming assistant to the BBC while writing scripts for series B. He directed his first documentary for the small screen in 1957 and directed his first feature film, Shoot to Kill, in 1960.
MEETING WITH BRONSON
He signed various innocuous bands sacrificing trivial modes like rock and roll (Play it cool) in 1962 and the film praise of naturism, Nudes in the sun in 1964. It takes lace with dramatic comedy starring Oliver Reed (Scotland Yard-scented, What will happen next?). The success of The Extraordinary Escape, always with Reed in 1969, in which a prisoner of war to escape the clutches of the Nazis in the company of an elephant, opened the doors of international productions. He directed and produced in 1971, The Man of Law, with Burt Lancaster, a western filmed in Mexico.
The following year, he imagines a curious prologue Turn of the Screw by Henry James. This will be The Corruptor with Marlon Brando. His meeting with Charles Bronson, became a star in Europe after it was once in the West but little esteemed in America, will prove decisive. In The Hills of terror Bronson plays an Indian hunted in the desert by a group of racist exterminate it one by one. The Mechanic, with its coolly behavioral approach (not a dialogue during the first coil) and homosexual subtext is arguably the best film winner. Bronson is a hitman transmitting his knowledge to a kind of spiritual son which he became the target.
A SCENARIO SULPHUR
In the early 1970s, a sulfur passes from hand to hand scenario Hollywood adaptation of a novel by Brian Garfield recounting the exploits of an ordinary man practicing self-righteousness coming out at night in the streets of New York to kill thugs. Nobody wants it and it is ultimately the producer Dino de Laurentiis that offers Winner, then spinning the black circle with Bronson. Winner would summarily presented r? Main film like a man who shoots thugs. The actor reportedly replied: “I’d love to do that?”. “Turn in the film?” Asked Winner. “Not. Pull thugs.” In 1974, a vigilante in the city will be a huge success while being considered a critical blinded by naive ideological clothing of his time as a fascist film.
Is that cinema Winner seems to oppose what seems then define a new form of American wave-impregnated against culture. What has been called since the “New Hollywood.” The films of the author of the Gunslinger, oppose the spirit of the cons-culture while taking formal elements to it. Its very obsessive taste for graphic brutality (which later get angry with Bronson) earned him the reproach of convenience. His style, tried mannered, making use of zoom and wide-angle shots, was in fact a form of expressionism reflecting the contamination of the real world by the tormented psyche and abandoned characters.
The Man of Law is the portrait of a psychopath that circumstances have placed on the side of Good, a vigilante in the city, the descent into hell of an individual, the more violence he acted n ‘ is an acting subject. Winner realized in 1977, The Sentinel cursed an original horror film, filled with frightening visions. It will continue in a much trade route, signing for the Cannon in 1982, a grin? Ante and bloodthirsty “sequel,” A Death Wish 2. Then inspiration will wither and movies, less good, is espaceront. Michael Winner had built a character image both politically conservative, sensual and cynical. He had, in the Sunday Times, a chronicle of food critic.
