St. Ives (1976)

Directed by J. Lee Thompson. Starring Charles Bronson, Jacqueline Bisset, John Houseman, Maximilian Schell, Dana Elcar, Harris Yulin, Harry Guardino, Joseph Roman, Michael Lerner.

First collaboration between Charles Bronson and J. Lee Thompson isn’t a mean-spirited action/revenge pic, but rather a disorganized mystery-thriller with the stoic star in private-eye mode (technically, a retired cop named Raymond St. Ives trying his hand as a crime novelist), becoming entangled in a robbery and murder plot involving a bag of money, a corpse in a clothes dryer, stolen documents, a millionaire mastermind, a double-crossing femme fatale, a psychiatrist with questionable motivations, and so on. Thompson and his team demonstrate sufficient grasp of the genre tropes and atmosphere, but the plot (lifted from an Oliver Bleeck novel called “The Procane Chronicle”) is dim and far-fetched, and there are some poor casting choices. Bisset, for instance, doesn’t rate much as a potentially dangerous beauty, but at least the character wasn’t played by Jill Ireland. Elcar, on the other hand, elevates some of the routine dialogue with deadpan-funny line readings. Jeff Goldbum has a minor role as a thug, the second time he played such a type in a Charles Bronson picture (after Death Wish); Robert Englund appears briefly as well.

54/100