The Death Wish Series (1974 -1994)



I’ve never read Brian Garfield’s novel DEATH WISH but everything I’ve heard about it makes it sound a world and a half away from the image of Charles Bronson stalking hellish urban landscapes. Published in 1972, “Death Wish” told the story of Paul Benjamin, a New York CPA, and his downward spiral following his wife’s murder and daughter’s brutalization during a home invasion. Inspiration for the novel came from incidents in Garfield’s own life, the theft of his wife’s purse and his car getting vandalized, leaving him so enraged he was ready to quote, “kill the son of bitch” should he ever get his hands on him, which left Garfield wondering what would happen to a person that fell into that way of thinking and couldn’t pull themselves out of it. Clocking in at a slim two hundred and nineteen pages, Paul doesn’t even get his hands on a firearm until the book is nearly three quarters over, with the bulk of its page count being devoted to detailing our protagonist’s unraveling mental state before he turns to violence as a way to retake the control he’s felt he’s lost. As Zack Handlen noted in own discussion of the book and original film on his much-missed site The Duck Speaks, the “death wish” of the title is Paul’s, his vigilante spree motivated as much by a desire to commit suicide by cop or crook than anything else, really.

With this in mind, I guess we can all understand why Garfield wasn’t too happy with the film series that sprung from his novel. Garfield had sold off the film rights to DEATH WISH with those of another of his books, RELENTLESS, to producers who eventually took the project to United Artists. Early drafts of the script were handled by Wendell Mayes, as Garfield had chosen the write the RELENTLESS adaptation himself. By all signs, Mayes work stuck relatively close to source material, and Sydney Lumet was slotted to direct the film with Jack Lemon and Henry Fonda in the lead roles of vigilante and pursuant cop respectively. However, a chance to direct a certain movie named SERPICO came up and Lumet jumped ship to that project instead. British director Michael Winner was chosen to step in for his experience in directing violent action films like THE MECHANIC and THE STONE KILLER, both of which starred Charles Bronson, who would be slotted into the role of Paul Benjamin, now re-christened Paul Kersey for the final film. The production would hit a few more speed bumps before it finally made its way to the screen though. Budgetary constraints would lead United Artists to drop the project and the original producers were forced to give up the film rights which would eventually find their way into the hands of infamous Italian film giant, Dino ‘When monkey die, everybody cry” DeLaurentis, who would take the project to Paramount Pictures. Paramount would eventually release the movie in 1974.