Hard Times (Walter Hill, 1975)

This is most definitely not a Dickens adaptation, but Walter Hill announcing his trade as a maker of films for men on his debut, with a straightforward story of a drifter in the Great Depression years whose bareknuckle boxing skills attract the attention of a chancer indebted to the gills to loan sharks. The knowledge that Charles Bronson as the former and James Coburn as the latter are cast pretty much according to type gives a fairly accurate idea of how the dynamics between them work out and consequently how the plot will pan out too, the decent and taciturn Bronson stoically soldiering on to save his manager's bacon after the showy Coburn's big mouth and gambling keep landing them in trouble. It's fully populated by archetypes and stock scenes, but it does have a certain no-nonsense cool that Hill would go on to develop later in his directorial career.

5/10