1976 - ST. IVES, a Charles Bronson murder mystery

 Coming a few years after Charles Bronson's movie star making hit Death Wish.  St Ives is a change of pace film for a middle aged star who made his career shooting up lots of movie bad guys.  Bronson somewhat improbably plays a writer who gets involved with a shady businessman (crook?) who uses Bronson to get back some ledgers that will incriminate him to the police.  The businessman is played by of all people John Houseman.  Houseman's associates are played by Jacqueline Bisset in the femme fatale role and Maximillian Schell.

One thing leads to another and a simple exchange of money for the ledgers leads to lots of murders and double crosses.  Bronson is the smooth thinking and talking courier trying to figure things out.  Actually Bronson who doesn't waste a lot of people for a change does a good job playing the writer. The director J. Lee Thompson whose best days were behind him does a competent job putting the film together and the cinematographer Carroll Ballard was an old Hollywood professional who gave the film a nice noir look to it.

 

St. Ives has a good cast,besides the already mention leads.  Character actors, Harris Yulin, Harry Guardino, Dana Elcar and everyone's favorite 1940's actor Elisha Cook Jr. show up.  Bronson had been kicking around Hollywood since 1951 as a character actor himself.  By this time in his career all that experience had made him a very good film actor.

 

The mystery itself is no great shakes, it's the typical mix of obscure clues, lots of dead bodies and the usual withholding of information to the viewer until the very end making it essentially impossible to solve until Bronson explains everything.  Not a great film or a great mystery, however with this cast it's worth a look

The film was written by  Barry Beckerman, the running time is 94 minutes.

1977 - THE WHITE BUFFALO, yup JAWS as a western.

Producer Dino De Laurentiis was never one to miss and opportunity to rip off a successful movie particularly Jaws,  bought the book The White Buffalo and had the author Richard Sale turn it into a screenplay.  Past his prime director J. Lee Thompson was signed as director and Charles Bronson got the role as Wild Bill Hickok.

The story seems to be about Hickok confronting his demons which take the form of a white buffalo in his dreams.  Hickok teams up with legendary native American Crazy Horse when it turns out the white buffalo actually exists.  The white buffalo in fact reminds me of the "land shark" sketch that the early days of Saturday Night Live used to pull out for a few cheap laughs until they finally ran that joke into the ground.

The White Buffalo buffalo was built by Carlo Rimbaldi and ran on a track on a film set.  Rimbaldi had built the giant arms for De Laurentiis version of King Kong in the 1970's.  But probably Rimbaldi was most famous for constructing ET for Steven Spielberg and the weird succubus creature in Possession.  The cast was loaded with lots of old time Hollywood people.  Clint Walker, Stuart Whitman, Slim Pickens, Kim Novak and John Carradine.

The White Buffalo is watchable but not particularly good.  It's fun to see Bronson who was always a screen presence in a film but the final battle with the buffalo on the ORCA, the fake snowy set is a little silly.

97 minutes.