St Ives was the first fruit of what turned out to be a fecund collaboration between tough-guy actor Charles Bronson and veteran British filmmaker J Lee Thompson. Based on a novel by Ross Thomas (The Procane Chronicle), St Ives is clearly a contribution to the 1970s neo-noir cycle, the Watergate-era revival of the hard-boiled detective story. It's not a major contribution to the genre – it pales beside The Long Goodbye, Chinatown or Night Moves – but it's an entertaining watch, well cast (including a cameo by genre veteran Elisha Cook) and it leaves a subtly bitter taste in the mouth.
Raymond St Ives (Bronson) is a retired sports writer and wannabe Great American Novelist who agrees to act as a go-between for a rich old villain Abner Procane (John Houseman channelling Sydney Greenstreet) who has had his memoirs stolen. St Ives is dragged into a world of swank mansions, sordid downtown locations, corrupt cops, petty criminals who meet nasty ends and, of course, a femme-fatale (Jacqueline Bissett) who is looking out for herself. This last character doesn't subvert the genre expectation in the post-feminist way of Chinatown, nor are the Bogart/Bacall exchanges between Bissett and Bronson entirely convincing (there is an air of pastiche here).
The film is set in Los Angeles and it is no coincidence that Procane spends his time watching old silent epics as a form of (American) dream therapy, an escape from his neuroses; even his criminal scheme takes place at a drive-in cinema. There's a subtext involving old Hollywood being used as a screen which hides the sordid realities of contemporary American life – the climax involves the rich old man's screen being rolled back to reveal his friend and psychiatric as the prime mover of a plot against him, a plot motivated by envy, greed and Oedipal hatred. The final has Bronson refusing four million dollars ("it's expensive being honest") and handing over the cash and the femme-fatale, leaving both in the hands of an 'honest' cop, his honesty held in the balance as sex and filthy lucre present themselves as temptations to climb into the 'bucket of faeces', as the cop had previously described the world of criminality. The ending presents us not with the happy denouement we first saw Procane lulling himself with in front of a silent film but an ambiguous moment of ever-present inducement to dirty one's hands with ill-gotten gains, the truth of the American dream.
Raymond St Ives (Bronson) is a retired sports writer and wannabe Great American Novelist who agrees to act as a go-between for a rich old villain Abner Procane (John Houseman channelling Sydney Greenstreet) who has had his memoirs stolen. St Ives is dragged into a world of swank mansions, sordid downtown locations, corrupt cops, petty criminals who meet nasty ends and, of course, a femme-fatale (Jacqueline Bissett) who is looking out for herself. This last character doesn't subvert the genre expectation in the post-feminist way of Chinatown, nor are the Bogart/Bacall exchanges between Bissett and Bronson entirely convincing (there is an air of pastiche here).
The film is set in Los Angeles and it is no coincidence that Procane spends his time watching old silent epics as a form of (American) dream therapy, an escape from his neuroses; even his criminal scheme takes place at a drive-in cinema. There's a subtext involving old Hollywood being used as a screen which hides the sordid realities of contemporary American life – the climax involves the rich old man's screen being rolled back to reveal his friend and psychiatric as the prime mover of a plot against him, a plot motivated by envy, greed and Oedipal hatred. The final has Bronson refusing four million dollars ("it's expensive being honest") and handing over the cash and the femme-fatale, leaving both in the hands of an 'honest' cop, his honesty held in the balance as sex and filthy lucre present themselves as temptations to climb into the 'bucket of faeces', as the cop had previously described the world of criminality. The ending presents us not with the happy denouement we first saw Procane lulling himself with in front of a silent film but an ambiguous moment of ever-present inducement to dirty one's hands with ill-gotten gains, the truth of the American dream.