August 15th - For Charles Bronson

I love a good Mountain Goats biographical, almost as much as I love a good Mountain Goats "instruction song" where each line is something that the song's subject should or must do.

I was in the wrong generation for Charles Bronson. I was born after his great performances (Dirty Dozen, Magnificent Seven, The Great Escape) so my reference points were a mix of "films that people's dads liked that were played on Sundays during the day on BBC2", "star of extremely ropy TV movies like Family Of Cops", and most importantly, "cultural reference I didn't quite get". I've still not seen Death Wish, but I have seen the Comic Strip Presents episode "GLC: The Carnage Continues", where Robbie Coltrane plays Charles Bronson playing Ken Livingstone.

So I didn't know until now that he came up from extreme poverty in a mining town, that his break into acting was painting scenery, that he flew 25 combat missions on a B-29 and got a purple heart. A storied history reduced to tropes. It's always going to stick with me that to my knowledge there has never been a biopic of Charles Bronson the actor, but there has been a biopic of "Charles Bronson", the violent criminal and artist who took his name. I haven't seen that either.