I don't normally combine these two, but today offers an interesting example of early 20th Century conditions in the form of the centennial of the birth of Charles Bronson.
Bronson as the central figure in Man With A Camera, a television series of the 1950s.
I don't idealize actors the way some people do, and that would include Bronson. But his early life really provides a glimpse of how things were in "the good old days". Indeed, of his films, only the short speech in the film The Dirty Dozen about why his character speaks German mirrors his own origins. Bronson spoke, in addition to English, Lithuanian, Russian and Greek, unlike German and Polish like his character in the film.
Bronson was born Charles Dennis Buchinsky, the eleventh of fifteen children of his parents. His father was a Lithuanian immigrant who changed the family name to that from. Bučinskis. His father was actually a Lithuanian Lipka Tatar, many of whom are Muslims. His parents were however Roman Catholic.
Bronson's family was desperately poor. His father died when he was ten and he began working in Pennsylvania coal mines at that age. He nonetheless graduated from high school, being the first member of the family to do so. He was a full-time miner until 1943, when he joined the Army and entered the Army Air Corps. He ultimately became a B29 crewman and was wounded in action over Japan. After the war he returned to Pennsylvanian and worked odd jobs until breaking into acting in the early 1950s. Unlike many of his acting contemporaries, his wartime service had nothing to do with acting at all. He was acting in movies by 1951 and had regular television and even leading television roles by the mid 1950s. His breakthrough star role came with The Magnificent Seven in 1960.
Reviews like this tend to become hagiographies, and I don't intend for that to be the case. In fact, I don't like most of the Bronson movies from the 1970s, when his star power was at its height. Interestingly, he broke into full-scale stardom after age 50, which is rare in acting, but a lot of his roles of that period were cartoonish violent exercises. He was married three times, the first time to aspiring 18 year old actress Harriet Tendler which ended in divorce nearly twenty years later, then to Jill Ireland, and lastly, after her death, to Kim Weeks. His character in real life always remained hard to get at as he was intensely private and shy, but he was known to hold grudges for protracted periods, seemingly caused, in some people's minds, by lasting surprise that he'd succeeded in movies.
So what, if any, lessons can we draw from this life?
Well, for one thing, while poverty certainly remains in the United States, early childhood stories like Bronson's have gone from common to extremely rare. We don't read about families of fifteen much, and if we do, they tend to more often than not be regarded as interesting oddities, like the now fallen Dugger family. Bronson's family was big, because it was big, and there's not much else to that.
We also don't see miner works himself to death and then boys begin mining as kids stories either. But at that time, that was common. Child labor laws were in effect by 1920, but in the coal mining regions of Appalachia, they obviously weren't really enforced. This is an American story we thankfully don't see much of, even with the very poor, and even with immigrants.
It also demonstrates that even relatively recently an era remained in which people could be intensely private, even secretive. Surprisingly little is known about Bronson as a person. Finding out what happened to his fourteen siblings is darned near impossible, other than that they all retained the Buchinsky name. We know that he was raised in a Catholic family, and his fist father-in-law, who was Jewish, objected to the marriage partially on those grounds, but we don't really know how observant Bronson was, if at all, as an adult. Indeed, some rumor mills have him as a Lutheran or Russian Orthodox believer, both of which are unlikely. He clearly wasn't observant in regard to the Catholic views on marriage. He was a Nixon supporter and his series of early 1970s crime films are of a stout right-wing vigilante character, neither of which tells us more about his deeper views. We just don't know that much about him.
American success story or American tragedy? Hard to say.
