150 Word Review: 'Hard Times' (1975)
The brawl guy
Charles Bronson is an old school man’s man, strong, quiet, skin weathered like my therapist’s leather couch. He’s got one of the great unblinking stoic glares in all of Hollywood history, second only to Mr. Clint Eastwood. In Hard Times, he’s a Depression-era bare-knuckle boxer with a code. Bronson is joined by one of his co-stars in his two biggest movies, 1960’s The Magnificent Seven and 1963’s The Great Escape, James Coburn, a rough-and-tumble silver fox with a wide smile, who always came off as a looser, warmer Lee Marvin-type.
This is director Walter Hill just doing his thing. Hard Times is a nuts-and-bolts boxing picture set in a time of economic desperation. It’s a western, only it’s hobos and old-timey cars. Coburn plays a silver-tongued fight manager and degenerate gambler. The great Strother Martin (“What we got here is failure to communicate”) is a junky cut man named Poe.
Strother Martin, not Mather.
Although, you did convince me to re-imagine "Leave It To Beaver" with Strother Martin in the title role rather than Jerry Mathers.