Smart televisions just piss me off. It takes 15 minutes for me to figure out how to turn them on. Then, it takes me at least another 15 minutes to find and decide on a viewing choice. I miss the good old days when there were just a paltry 3 choices over an antenna, but at least they were new shows. Now, most of the options on smart televisions are the same shows I watched when there were just 3 networks decades ago. I think smart televisions are the only TVs being sold these days and fancy hotels are equipped with them. On a recent vacation we stayed at a hotel with a smart television, and I did enjoy watching an old favorite cult movie–Hard Times on Tubi.com.
Hard Times was released during 1975. It starred Charles Bronson, James Coburn, Jill Ireland, and Robert Tressier. The movie is about gamblers betting on bare knuckle street fights during the Great Depression. The movie begins when a mysterious drifter (Cheney played by Charles Bronson) gets off a train and watches a bare-knuckle bout in a nearby warehouse. Sleep, a gambler played by James Coburn, bets on a fighter he backs, and his fighter loses. Cheney later meets with Sleep in a diner and offers all the money he has ($6) to match him against the winner of the fight he witnessed. Cheney knocks the fighter out with 1 punch. Sleep takes Cheney to New Orleans to make more money betting against a rich gambler. They watch his scary looking bald fighter destroy a skilled boxer, and they challenge him, but the rich gambler demands they put up more money than they have. To get more money, Cheney needs to win more fights, so they go to the country where Cheney defeats a big young Cajun man. However, the gambler, Pettibone, staking that fighter refuses to pay them and sends them packing at gunpoint. My favorite scene of the movie is next. Cheney makes a surprise entrance into Pettibone’s bar, knocks out his bodyguard, takes his gun, and forces Pettibone to pay them the money. He proceeds to shoot up the bar before they leave.
This scene has an odd flaw. Cheney shoots up the bar. He takes 7 shots with his left hand and 1 with his right. The movie never shows him switching hands.
Cheney defeats the scary bald fighter. Sleep blows all his money on whores and gambling and also falls into debt with gangster loan sharks. The rich gambler who staked the scary bald guy offers to pay the debt, if Sleep agrees to let him take ownership of Cheney. Cheney refuses, infuriating Sleep who makes some unkind comments early in the morning while drunk, seemingly ending their relationship. However, gangsters kidnap Poe, their intellectual drug addict cut man and threaten to kill him and Sleep, unless Cheney agrees to fight an undefeated street fighter from Chicago, staked by the rich gambler. Cheney defeats him, and they all win a lot of money again.
I don’t understand the ending. Cheney gives his share of the money to Sleep, hops on a train, and leaves town. He did all the work, risking his health, and gives all of his money to a degenerate gambler who used him. Cheney has no backstory and no certain future. Maybe the character is simply a metaphor for a gambler’s luck. It’s a curious ending.
Jill Ireland, Bronson’s wife in real life, plays his love interest in this movie. She’s a semi-shore who dumps him. Perhaps that’s why he left town. This subplot is extraneous.
Scene showing Cheney fighting the big Cajun. He won, but they didn’t give up the money easily.
Sleep and Cheney played by James Coburn and Charles Bronson, respectively.
Cheney fighting the scary bald guy.
Hard Times was produced by Larry Gordon and directed by Walter Hall who also wrote the screenplay. Philip Lathrop was behind the camera. The movie is beautifully shot on location in New Orleans and still looks really good on high definition. The movie was a great success. Filmed for $2.7 million, it made $26.3 million at the box office. It received good reviews and audiences rate it 4.7 on a 5-star scale. Charles Bronson starred in the movie at the peak of his career.
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