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The retired lawman who put away a violent criminal must again track him down when he escapes.
Starring Charlton Heston, James Coburn, Barbara Hershey, Jorge Rivero, Michael Parks, Larry Wilcox
Written by Guerdon Trueblood
Produced by Walter Seltzer, Russell Thacher
Duration 98 minutes
What are the great cinematic face offs? What about FACE/OFF itself? Nicholas Cage and John Travlota: the battle of the scenery-chewers. That turned out pretty good.
Still, there were plenty of missed opportunities. The obvious one was Arnie vs Sly, but Van Damme vs Seagal would also have worked; ditto Bruce Willis vs Mel Gibson. But if I had to choose, I’d’ve gone for Danny DeVito facing off against Bob Hoskins. Short and bald vs bald and short.
Alright, fine, but THE LAST HARD MEN is a western. Well, there have been plenty of one-on ones in that territory. My limited knowledge of the genre means that I’m not about to trawl through IMDb to come up with multiple examples; let’s just mention Russell Crowe and Christian Bale in the 3:10 TO YUMA remake (2007) and Pierce Brosnon and Liam Nesson in SERAPHIM FALLS (2006) and be done with it.
And so that brings us to Charlton Heston vs James Coburn. Pitting them against each other? Sure, makes sense. Couple of rugged stars with genre bona fides. OK, sure, but this movie makes a pretty bold claim. What could have inspired their casting not just as men, but as hard men – and the final ones, no less?
Let’s see, then. First of all, is there anything in the pair’s private lives to suggest they were hard, and is it clear which of them was, indeed, the hardest?
Well, they were both in the army. But while Charlton served for two years as a radio operator and aerial gunner aboard a B-25 bomber, probably wincing from the sounds of planes blowing up all round him while risking his own skin, James had a more low-key time of it: he was a truck driver and a DJ on an Army radio station in Texas. Hardly life-threatening.
On the other hand, Coburn was a close friend of Bruce Lee’s and learnt Jeet Kune Do from the master. Heston doesn’t appear to have got any comparable training; the closest comparison is his stint as the president of the National Rifle Association from 1998 until 2003, which is far less impressive.
So, honours even so far. How about their experiences on screen, prior to this film?
Well, blimey. Heston was only bloody Moses, in THE TEN COMMANDMENTS (1956)! You don't go about parting the red sea without some moxy. He’s no slouch in his other most famous Biblical epic BEN-HUR (1959), either. And in PLANET OF THE APES (1968), he delivers the classic "Get your stinkin’ paws off me, you damned dirty ape!" to his primate captors – on their planet! (Except – spoiler alert – it’s actually not.)
Coburn obviously can’t beat his rival for iconic manly roles. But still, he was one of only three who managed to actually escape in THE GREAT EACAPE (1963); he played a smooth Bondian spy in OUR MAN FLINT (1966 and a sequel the following year); and he was the one blowing everything up in Sergio Leone’s A FISTFUL OF DYNAMITE (1971).
Hmm. So it’s actually rather hard to choose from the two when it comes to being hard.
What about during THE LAST HARD MEN itself? Well, the younger actor at first has the edge. Coburn enters as part of a chain gang out in the desert, laying railway tracks. He grabs the guard’s shotgun and blasts him in the chest; now left unsupervised (one guard?), he goes about setting everyone loose.
"What I think up here," he tells his accomplices while tapping his forehead, "I’m two or three minutes ahead of you. And that’s what counts." So, he's a hard thinker, too.
The getaway includes hanging onto the bottom of a moving train and later stabbing a disloyal accomplice in the back, right after showering the man with compliments. Brutal.
And the whole escaping thing was just so he could get his revenge on Heston’s character, which he does by kidnapping the man’s nubile daughter (Barbara Hershey) and holding her hostage with his predatory gang out in the hills, in a bid to lure his foe into an ambush.
Heston, meanwhile, is not immediately promising. He’s a retired captain who sports an impressive moustache and mutton-chops combo, so that’s a plus, but he also lets the sheriff, a baby-faced Michael Parks (FROM DUSK TILL DAWN, KILL BILL), smartmouth him.
But he soon snaps back into form and shows everyone who’s really the boss when Coburn re-enters the scene. Charlton’s the man who sent our James down, you see, and he wants to repeat the trick. "I ain't dead, I'm retired," he growls.
Turns out his is more of a simmering rage, kept dormant for a while and now about to erupt. And so, battle commences.
It won’t surprise you to learn that the right side of the law prevails. But does that mean Heston was truly harder? I have to say, just about. He gets shot like six times by Coburn before flinging his adversary off a cliff, and yet seems to survive. So, let’s say it’s a win on points.
Still, in the annals of cinema, Coburn did come back 20 years later with one of the hardest characters ever: Nick Nolte's abusive, alcoholic father in 1997’s AFFLICTION. Put him against the Heston character in THE LAST HARD MEN and I think the outcome would have been very different.
Three stars out of five.
Valid use of the word ‘last’? Not really – many more hardman actors were still to come. Heck, even in 1976, there was plenty of work going for Clint Eastwood, Robert Mitchum (whose son Christopher is in this film), Charles Bronson, Steve McQueen …
What would a movie called THE FIRST HARD MEN be about?
Well, Louis Cyr, a Canadian bodybuilder who died in 1912, was known to be ‘the strongest man who ever lived’. You certainly wouldn’t
accuse someone like that of being a big softie. (And he presumably had plenty of hard mates, too.)
Previously: LAST PASSENGER
Next time: THE LAST DETAIL
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