Playing and Losing - Hard Times (1975)

Screened March 20th, 2023

Before Chuck Palahniuk and David Fincher showcased the innate queerness of men who want to touch each other so bad that they’ve gotta fight about it in FIGHT CLUB, debut director Walter Hill (The Warriors, 48 Hrs) gave us HARD TIMES, a depression-era neo-noir sports film about “hard men and how they got that way.” Chaney (Charles Bronson) is a freight-hopping drifter with an edge and nothing to lose when he’s discovered by Speed (James Coburn), a fast-talking hustler who introduces him to the grimy world of underground bare-knuckle boxing in 1933 Lousianna. I mean… y’all… some folks will argue with us that Charles Bronson films are perhaps so testosterone filled they couldn’t possibly be read as queer, BUT we would posit that that is exactly why they are SO queer. Bronson represents masculinity taken to its campiest and most ridiculous echelon and in HARD TIMES he is serving full wandering ronin daddy. The characters in HARD TIMES are outsiders, separated from society either by choice or exile, creating their own worlds and moral codes whole cloth in the gutters of New Orleans. That’s queerness, momma. Sweat, grit, and gumption permeate this rough-and-tumble tale of the desperate and lonely, a lost gem of 70s filmmaking that we just know you’re going to love.