"It's just people!": Walter Hill's Hard Times

 Charles, Bronson, Jill Ireland, James Coburn, Robert Tessier. Dir. Walter Hill, Columbia, 1975

Could you make Hard Times today? Sure, easily. You wouldn't, though. A fighter/grifter picture like this has to be, like Scorsese's The Irishman, about important gangsters, or about famous gangsters, like Michael Mann's Public Enemies. It has to feature an all-star cast and a known-quantity director and a colossal budget and the critics should see it as a deliberate exercise in genre conventions. It has to be big, expensive, and important. Hard Times is none of these. 

Part of what makes Hard Times so enjoyable is how rare its type movie has grown without being offensive or racist or hateful in some way. It's a straight genre piece, a character study of two guys driven by economic necessity, smalltimers, not famous, or infamous, dead people, not historical movers and shakers, not celebrities. It's something of a morality play, as well, but again, in a small way. The only time Hollywood makes movies like these is Oscar season, and yet Hard Times was budgeted for $2M, returned $26M, and that's what Columbia expected. Two million to make a picture wasn't much, but 24 in profit was. 

Even the Oscar-bait version of Hard Times today costs as much as $40M with an expected $1-150M return. Hollywood literally has no idea how, or why, to market a movie as modest as Hard Times. In 1975, Columbia Studios paid its bills with 20-to-1 returns like Hard Times. Today, they're looking for 200-to-one. Minimum.

Charles Bronson plays Chaney, a journeyman bare-knuckle boxer who rides the rails to Depression Era New Orleans, where he hooks up with Speed Weed (James Coburn), a mouthy fight promoter/manager in debt to everyone, to take down the top promoter's main draw, a bald bruiser named Jim Henry (Robert Tessier, who may be familiar as the bald Nazi Harrison Ford fights around the flying wing in Raiders of the Lost Ark.)

Chaney and Speed have nothing in common outside of street brawling. They're not kindred spirits. Speed gambles and squanders his winnings. Chaney saves his. Speed talks all the time, usually to his detriment. Chaney's a block of wood. He speaks with his fists, and only when it's time to make money. Not unlike Ratso and Joe Buck in Midnight Cowboy, each has something the other needs, however. 

Hill's movie is often about male loneliness, I think, and its silence. Chaney accepts his loneliness, fades into it. Speed combats it, throwing words into the wind all day long. In each other's unlikely, often unwilling company, they find an antidote to lonely silence.

I've said part of what makes Hard Times stand out today is what an oddity a once-traditional picture looks like, now, but at $2M Hard Times has to be Hill's lowest budgeted film ever and it looks it, an unusual aesthetic for the director of The Warriors, 48 Hours, Streets of Fire, and the producer of the Alien movies. He makes the most of it, though, crafting a film as quiet as Chaney. Hill uses almost no score throughout the picture, and none at all in the fight sequences. Using nat-sound and choreographing fights to look and feel messy makes their violence more brutal, more visceral. Hill uses his budgetary constraints to lean into the gritty. Hard Times feels as tired and rumpled as its characters look. 

You would not make Hard Times today, though you could. Not as a big studio picture, maybe not even as a streaming-platform movie. Its scale is just so small, its characters so decidedly unimportant and unglamorous. That's a loss for moviegoers, though some don't know it. A genre exercise like this, that succeeds by being a humanistic character piece, reminds us people don't need to be fabulous and rich, or wear capes, or have made influential pop records, to be real, to have problems and hopes and ambitions and feel the pain of their failure or ecstasy of their success. They remind us people on any side of the tracks and from every part of town have stories as compelling and vital to tell as the rich and connected and "important." 

It makes me think of the befuddled First Order officer who, at the climax of Rise of Skywalker, says, "It's just people, sir." Hard Times and Midnight Cowboy are just-people pictures. The people, in this person's opinion, need more just-people pictures.