obitcheries

 

The actor Chuck Norris has died. He had an appealing manner and easy charisma. He is unique among action movie heroes in that during fifty years of continuously making films, he never made a good one. The closest he came was Lone Wolf McQuade, a nasty piece of work whose opening credits with a wolf filmed in silhouette and a marvellous music score from Francesco De Masi, are laden with a poetic sensibility redolent of great art. The director of that movie was an exploitation veteran styling himself Steve Carver who later unsuccessfully sued Chuck for purportedly using elements of the movie in a TV series called Walker Texas Ranger. The poetic sensibility shouldn't surprise since a lot of the exploitation guys are poets who chose wrong.