It’s a shame the director apparently cut the dialogue that must have gone something like this:
“Got plans for the evening, Mr. Bronson?”
“I’m just going to touch my muscles and enjoy being manly. No visitors, please.”
I liked him in The Magnificent Seven, too. He had a good speech to some kids about what real courage is.
My husband and I were watching some TV Land a few months ago, and saw an episode of the old Roy Rogers show. It was called “The Knockout”, and had a very young Charles Bronson in a supporting role as a boxer. He and Roy Rogers duke it out in the ring!
In his introductory scene he is doing one helluva job chopping up wood – one stroke is all he needed to split those logs. At one point he lifts his axe with half-split log like it was nothing. Unless that was “prop” wood, Bronson was *really *in good shape in those days.
No that’s him getting out of bed with David McCallum’s wife.
Hey, if you’ve seen one unfaithful wife, you’ve seen 'em all! 
Early Bronson was frequently fairly good. Still a lot of type casting, but he sometimes went past that. I think that period lasted up until about 1975.
But after that I think he mainly just did his usual thing and didn’t really try to bust out of the stereotype much. (That’s also when that commercial came out.)
The movie, [Once Upon a Time in the West](Once Upon a Time in the West), is pretty great. I don’t know that I’d say that Bronson brought anything in particular to it, that another actor wouldn’t have (there’s only so much you can do when there’s almost no lines or action in a movie), but it’s worth a watch.
That was exactly the image that popped into my head at the thought of Bronson smiling.
There’s a nice juxtaposition! I think I’ve had a life-long crush on David McCallum, and a life-long loathing of hideous meatsack Charles Bronson! It’s like matter and anti-matter.
Imagine some peoples surprise when they received their Florida concealed weapon license.
Heh. 
When I was a kid playing Army back in the early/mid '60s, my best friend had a younger brother who was the spitting image of Charles Bronson. I swear, he could have been Bronson’s illegitimate son. Man, how I wanted him to join my infantry squad! :o
Bronson’s early career including several appearances on TV’s Bonanza, playing the Mexican bandito.
One of his and his wife’s movies that I really enjoy is a comedy-western “From Noon till Three”
I watched an episode of Man With a Camera yesterday. Kovic (Bronson) visits a guy in jail who is, in the standard 50s show, innocent. A cop comes, unlocks the cell and takes the prisoner out. Then he locks Kovic in the cell. 
Kovic is later talking to the police lieutenant sidekick while he files his nails.
It had humor, but the ending, to me at least, was sad. But in the last scene, to settle something from early in the thread, he smiled.
according to roger corman in his autobiography Bronson was in a movie of his and even though it wasn’t an action movie he found out he was actually physically tough
roger used to exercise between takes with shadowboxing and Bronson seen him one day and gave him a few tips and roger proposed a little spar … well chuck only got one hit in because he unintentionally almost floored roger … come to find out Bronson learned to bareknuckle box in the Appalachian coal mines where we worked as a kid/teen and did it pretty successful to make extra money …
He always seemed like a nice guy who made a good life after coming through a hard life. He’s one of those guys you almost feel you’d have to buy a beer for… even though he was probably a multi multi millionaire.
Ok… the unfaithful thing. Yeah… not pretty.
Still, do you really doubt that he ever spent a single day of his life not loving Jill Ireland or her children? I remember when critics were making fun of his Death Wish sequels… teasing him and goading him for not retiring.
If he read that, I could almost imagine him saying:
“This…” Bronson pause and half turn “This… is for Family.”
I bet he was a great husband to her as well as a great father to all of their kids.
One of my favorite scenes in *The Great Escape *is when Bronson and James Coburn are trying to slip out with the Russian prisoners, and Bronson teaches Coburn the only sentence of Russian he knows:
In The Dirty Dozen, he tells Lee Marvin as they masquerade as Germans, “This isn’t like any German I ever heard.”
I don’t remember that scene, I will watch it again. I do recall James Gardner saying, “There is an airplane I think I can start.” (without a battery truck.)