Hard Times (1975)
Directed by Walter Hill
In the depression, Chaney, a strong silent streetfighter, joins with Speed, a promoter of no-holds-barred street boxing bouts. They go to New Orleans where Speed borrows money to set up fights for Chaney, but Speed gambles away any winnings.
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What critics compared Hard Times to
“Fighting” has a hook perfectly timed for the new Great Depression and recalls such previous films as “Hard Times” (1975) and “Every Which Way But Loose” (1979).
Oh, and there’s a lot of Walter Hill cooped up in there, as in his 1970s street-boxing tale, “Hard Times.”
Walter Hill, a fine writer-director who knows a thing or 12 about helming testosterone-tinged flicks with an existential bent about them (Hard Times, The Warriors, The Long Riders, Undisputed, many more), once orchestrated a solid little film in this milieu called The Driver.
The bare-knuckle battle between Charles Bronson and Robert Tessier in 1975’s Hard Times certainly looked tougher.
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He pitted Charles Bronson and James Coburn against each other in his first picture, " Hard Times " (1975), and reinvented the cop buddy movie with Nick Nolte and Eddie Murphy in "48 HRS."
In some ways, Hill returns to his roots; he tackled a gritty boxing tale in his 1975 debut "Hard Times" with Charles Bronson.
From his early days helming down-and-dirty barnburners like Hard Times and The Driver , to his frequently overlooked 1990s run of Trespass , Geronimo: An American Legend , and the criminally underrated Wild Bill with Jeff Bridges and Ellen Barkin, his solid genre craftsmanship and insistence on digging into the thornier recesses of the human condition has always excited me.
The director, who has been making movies for almost 50 years — his debut was 1975’s Hard Times — has returned with his first film in six years, and his first full-on Western in an even longer time than that.
Instead of subjecting us to his usual artless thuggery, Stallone has enticed the auteur action darling Walter Hill (my favorite of his films: The Long Riders, Southern Comfort, Hard Times) out of retirement and, based on the evidence, didn’t meddle too much with the camera placement and editing.
For those unfamiliar with the name (and if that is the case, then please take a moment or two to hang your head in shame), Hill started off as a screenwriter for projects by the likes of Sam Peckinpah ("The Getaway") before moving into the director's chair with the Charles Bronson boxing film "Hard Times."
The director of record is the nonexistent Thomas Lee, a name assigned after Walter Hill, whose directing credits include ''Hard Times'' and ''48 Hours'' and whose producing credits include ''Aliens'' and ''Aliens 3,'' distanced himself from the project.
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Hill, who was a screenwriter before directing his first film, "Hard Times," with Charles Bronson, can be exasperating in his fidelity to genre-movie conventions — last year, he worked so hard at making a film noir out of "The Driver" that he came up with film gris.
Walter Hill's direction here is of a piece with his previous work in Hard Times and The Driver.
Having earned industry respect with his scripts for Hicky and Boggs (1972) and The Getaway (also 1972, and directed by Sam Peckinpah), The Thief Who Came to Dinner (1973), The MacKintosh Man (1973) and The Drowning Pool (1975), he made his mark as a director with the stylish brutality of Hard Times (1975) and the existential crime thriller The Driver (1978), but it was The Warriors that really brought him to international attention.
Gordon had produced Hill’s two films – Hard Times and The Driver – and was prepping a western Hill had written with Roger Spottiswoode called The Last Gun .
The movie, which opens today at neighborhood theaters, was written and directed by Walter Hill, who once wrote and directed a good movie, "Hard Times," with Charles Bronson.
The Twilight Time label was gracious enough to release Walter Hill's first film as writer-director, 1975's Hard Times (reviewed here ), on Blu-ray earlier this summer, and now it's already brought out his sophomore effort long before the leaves are set to start dropping.
As handsome as, and even artier than, those in his first directorial effort, Hard Times, they relentlessly define cold, dark, life-expunging spaces—some as austere as Bresson frames, others consecrated to a chilly luminescence that makes Pakula places seem like glowing hearths.