Like Hunger, it's a study in intransigence, the story of a man deliberately pitting himself against society, against the world and, apart from Hunger, the nearest cinematic analogues are Paul Newman's bloody-minded individualist in Cool Hand Luke and the transcendental treatment of prison life in Robert Bresson's A Man Escaped. Nor is it, at least directly, about the soul-destroying effects of incarceration. This film, however, bears no resemblance to the humanistic Birdman of Alcatraz, where Burt Lancaster played the lifer redeemed by his fascination with birds and contributing to the study of avian diseases. He became a famous convict, not a celebrated criminal, has been judged both clinically sane and insane, and over the years he developed considerable gifts as an author and painter, several times winning one of the annual awards established by Arthur Koestler to encourage prisoners to express themselves creatively. From his school days, he showed a propensity for violence and his reputation as the ultimate hard man was established by his frequent assaults on prison guards and his destructive, widely headlined action of taking to the roof of Broadmoor.
Since his first conviction for a botched armed robbery of a post office in 1974, he has spent 34 years in prison, much of that time at high-security psychiatric hospitals and in solitary confinement, with just brief periods of freedom, the longest little more than two months. There's another curious coincidence for those who collect such things in that the director of the first and the central character of the second share their names with movie stars who first became famous through appearing as gunslingers in John Sturges's 1960 western The Magnificent Sevenīronson was born in Aberystwyth in 1952 and raised in Liverpool and Luton by a respectable working-class couple.
The second is Nicolas Winding Refn's Bronson, about the notoriously violent Michael Peterson (who adopted the name Charles Bronson), memorably impersonated by Tom Hardy. The first, one of last year's most notable movies, was Steve McQueen's Hunger, about Bobby Sands (played by Michael Fassbender), the IRA terrorist who died after a much-publicised hunger strike in Ulster in 1981. B y a curious coincidence, two of the most accomplished British films of the past year, each with a riveting central performance by a young local actor, have centred on very different self-publicising prisoners, both thorns in the side of the criminal justice system.
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