The Bang-Bang Men (1972)

D. John Flynn
Colour


This is actually the movie Gene Wilder made directly after ‘Willy Wonka’ and in many ways it seems like the same performance. Once again he is quixotic, changeable and prone to bursts of rage, so much so it’s impossible to believe a word he says. Okay, that magical look has gone from his eyes. When he stares off into the distance in ‘The Bang-Bang Men’ it’s like he’s contemplating not just shooting some fat kid up a tube, but torturing him a little first. But clearly, even before Gene Wilder’s portrayal of Willy Wonka became a cultural touchstone, Gene Wilder was doing his own riff on Willy Wonka – although a far more dangerous version. You see Gene Wilder’s character in ‘The Bang-Bang Men’ doesn’t have the heart of gold Willy Wonka has, instead he’s a hired killer who’d think nothing of blowing up a pleasant and picturesque (almost Germanic) little town if it would get him what he wants. There are some things that The Candyman can’t do, but The Bang-Bang Man certainly can.


Taking this Willy Wonka-esque performance and putting it in a far edgier film does make for a strange dissonance, and that’s before we’re introduced to Wilder’s co-star – the redoubtable Charlton Heston. It’s amazing to see them together. Of course their careers overlapped (Heston actually made his last big screen appearance after Wilder) but to say that a pixyish Gene Wilder and a stolid Charlton Heston is a clash of styles is like suggesting that strawberry jam and marmite really shouldn’t find themselves together in the same sandwich. By the 1970s Heston was a face of the glorious past now become the vision of the frightening future. America had grown up with him in all those historical/biblical epics, but now he was ‘The Omega Man’, now he was visiting ‘The Planet of the Apes’, now he was investigating ‘Solyent Green’. Everything was going swiftly to hell and Charlton Heston was our weather vane, showing us just how bad things were going to be. In ‘The Bang-Bang Man’ he is even saying that the present isn’t so brilliant – playing a CIA agent forced to hire Wilder’s psychotic assassin to clear up a mess after an agency wetjob goes wrong. But the plot is almost irrelevant, there just to facilitate granite faced with mercury; Heston’s manly snarl against Wilder trying a little too hard to be funny (and he does try a little too hard, which has the effect of making his character even more deranged and frightening). This is jittery and nervous young America facing off against its wonderful and macho history.


We are in the shadows here, with covert operations, counter covert operation and operations which are probably confused about whether they covert or not. There are assassinations, car chases and angry confrontations. There’s Susan George as a possibly rogue British agent, seemingly enjoying a highly unlikely sado-masochistic relationship with – of all people – Roy Kinnear (Veronica Salt’s father in ‘Willy Wonka’). There’s Angie Dickenson as the chanteuse with a secret and Joseph Cotton as the senator who probably commits three corrupt acts before breakfast. You get the picture. It’s moody and atmospheric, has no faith in any of the structures and players of government, and every single frame just drips with paranoia.


And it really says something for the paranoia of 1970s America cinema that even Gene Wilder and Charlton Heston could be affected by it.