Michael Winner’s violent 1974 thriller demonized inner-city living and rationalised bloody revenge, a film that still acts as a telling Republican text
We denizens of the present like to presume a higher degree of moral clarity over the past, but some things don’t require the benefit of hindsight to be correctly assessed. They had Michael Winner’s 1974 film Death Wish dead to rights the first time around, for instance, when a solid faction of critics cried foul at its shameless stoking of reactionary fears about inner-city living.
In one of his two broadsides against the low-budget thriller turned surprise blockbuster, the New York Times’ Vincent Canby branded it “a tackily made melodrama, but it so cannily orchestrates the audience’s responses that it can appeal to law‐and‐order fanatics, sadists, muggers, club women, fathers, older sisters, masochists, policemen, politicians, and, it seems, a number of film critics”. Some took its despairing depiction of New York City as a lawless hellscape teeming with street criminals at face value; others charged Winner with panic-mongering, playing on a paranoid conservative imagination to his own benefit. So the culture war lines were drawn, and so they remain.
