By Erin Free
FilmInk salutes the work of creatives who have never truly received the credit they deserve. In this installment: screenwriter Gerald Wilson, who penned Chato’s Land, Lawman, Scorpio and The Stone Killer.
The Unsung Auteurs column has recently featured a couple of figures who still managed to thrive creatively while existing in the large shadows cast by their most noted and far more celebrated collaborators. Next to directors Anthony Harvey (who edited for Stanley Kubrick) and William Dear (who frequently realised the on-screen visions of musician and producer Michael Nesmith), we now add screenwriter Gerald Wilson. A scribe of prodigious gifts, Wilson was a chief collaborator of often controversial British director Michael Winner throughout the 1970s, when the outspoken filmmaker did some of his best work. The verbosity and famously larger-than-life persona of the late Michael Winner (who passed away in 2013 after enjoying a second career as an outspoken food critic) meant that Wilson was often overlooked for his vital contributions to the director’s oeuvre.
Gerald Wilson was born in 1930 in Pittsburgh and raised in Canada. Wilson spent much of his youth as a seafarer, and then studied geology, after which he worked extensively in the field throughout America and The Arctic. In a major career shift, Wilson moved to the UK in the mid-fifties, and eventually began writing for television in the sixties, penning episodes of series like Crane, No Hiding Place, The Man In Room 17, Champion House, and Vendetta. Wilson made his big screen debut with the 1967 thriller Robbery, which was directed by Peter Yates (who would next helm the 1968 classic Bullitt with Steve McQueen) and loosely based on the case of The Great Train Robbery. A taut, muscular work, Robbery provides a glimpse of where Wilson would ultimately go with his screenwriting, though his original script for the film was drastically rewritten, leaving the burgeoning scribe with just the nebulous “based on a story treatment by” credit. The experience was not an especially happy one for Wilson, and after some uncredited work on the 1969 biker flick Scream Free, he bounced back with his next major effort.
Wilson’s script for the 1971 western Lawman found a far more sympathetic director in Michael Winner, who, unlike Peter Yates, pretty much put the writer’s work on the screen as is. The results are exemplary. One of the most unfairly forgotten westerns of the 1970s (a strong, interesting time for the genre), Lawman is a tough, dour work swirling with fascinating themes. The film’s simple plot – Burt Lancaster’s hardnosed, immovable lawman arrives in town to bring justice to a crew of rowdy cowboys, whose wild celebrations and indiscriminate gunplay have resulted in the death of an innocent bystander – belies a movie dense with a rich sense of social commentary. Wilson asks fascinating questions about the nature of justice and the law, and the film echoes strongly with the concerns of the era, with Lancaster’s absolutely straight-ahead, the-law-is-everything sheriff something of an avatar for what was going on with policing at the time in the US. Michael Winner’s vision of the west is admirably dusty and drab, and the performances are terrific (Lancaster is nicely backed up by Robert Ryan, Lee J. Cobb, Richard Jordan, Robert Duvall, Sheree North, John Beck and Ralph Waite), but Wilson’s terse, literate, and deeply thoughtful script is truly the hero here.
Wilson’s script would again be the star on the writer’s next collaboration with Michael Winner. Far better known than Lawman, 1972’s bloody western Chato’s Land is an absolute belter of a show. Like its predecessor, the plot here is misleadingly simple, as Charles Bronson’s killing machine, proto-Rambo Apache shoots dead a bullying sheriff, and is then pursued through the badlands by a ratty, morally askew posse led by Jack Palance’s former Confederate leader. Again, Wilson inlays his script with all manner of fascinating details, and essentially sets the film up as something of a Vietnam allegory, as an arrogant, armed-to-the-teeth force heads into unknown territory, where they are slowly bettered by a seemingly far less powerful opponent whose knowledge of the land gives them the upper hand.
Wilson’s dialogue is especially impressive here, with Palance’s deeply conflicted character prone to often unusual but extremely eloquent detours into the philosophical, and his men largely made up of foul-mouthed cretins. It’s a potent mix, and along with the film’s inventively staged violence and excellent performances (Bronson is great, but it’s really Palance’s movie), it makes Chato’s Land truly unforgettable. “I don’t know any Hollywood director except Sam Peckinpah who actually knew Indians as I knew them,” Wilson – who had lived with the Cree while working as a geologist – told Bright Lights Film in 2021. “I was fascinated by the fact that people who go into the wilderness without experience inevitably come to some disaster, but to a person who’s indigenous to that area, it’s a powerful ally.”
Wilson and Winner moved from The Old West to the world of contemporary espionage and politics with 1973’s Scorpio, on which Wilson did a ground-up rewrite on this icy, fast-moving, and very underrated thriller. Drawing on his own friendships with former CIA operative Miles Copeland (the father of Police drummer and fellow Unsung Auteur Stewart Copeland and Police manager Miles Copeland III) and Czechoslovakian communist Artur London, Wilson crafts a moody, winningly labyrinthine meditation on The Cold War in which Burt Lancaster’s CIA old stager is relentlessly pursued by his protégé, the eponymous assassin essayed by French legend Alain Delon. Scorpio is a compellingly bleak, unhaltingly cynical, and very 1970s thriller literally screaming out for rediscovery.
Though Lawman, Chato’s Land and Scorpio would stand as the most cogent collaborations of Wilson and Winner, the duo did work together on a few more films. Wilson was tapped by Winner to adapt John Gardner’s wonderfully titled novel A Complete State Of Death for what would eventually become the equally wonderfully titled 1973 actioner The Stone Killer. Wilson’s affinity for stories steeped in corruption, moral pause, and tough men engaged in tough work is again gloriously showcased as Charles Bronson’s hard AF, Dirty Harry-style cop finds himself wedged in the middle of a gang war. Though a strong, highly entertaining, and very gritty delight, The Stone Killer doesn’t quite have the same level of brutal power and hardscrabble poetry that defined Wilson and Winner’s previous three films.
The duo’s next collaboration was even less successful. After turning down the writing gig on Winner’s epochal 1974 smash hit Death Wish when the film veered too far from the ideals of Brian Garfield’s source novel (Wilson disagreed with the heroising of Charles Bronson’s vigilante killer), Wilson agreed to work on the script for 1979’s Firepower, which had begun life as an unmade Dirty Harry sequel, and eventually morphed into an international thriller starring James Coburn, Sophia Loren and OJ Simpson. Remembered by Wilson as “a real disaster”, Firepower did well enough in some territories, but the relationship between writer and director soured during its protracted, messy production, with the film standing as something of an ignominious end to what had been a wondrously fruitful and impressive collaboration, resulting in three truly excellent films. “I want to say one thing about Michael,” Wilson told Bright Lights Film in 2021. “We had terrible fights and we broke off finally with bitterness. But Michael was very fair. He always treated me well. I found him honest, and I found him supportive. When we were on good terms, I enjoyed his company enormously.”
If you liked this story, check out our features on other unsung auteurs Patricia Birch, Buzz Kulik, Kris Kristofferson, Rick Rosenthal, Kirsten Smith & Karen McCullah, Jerrold Freeman, William Dear, Anthony Harvey, Douglas Hickox, Karen Arthur, Larry Peerce, Tony Goldwyn, Brian G. Hutton, Shelley Duvall, Robert Towne, David Giler, William D. Wittliff, Tom DeSimone, Ulu Grosbard, Denis Sanders, Daryl Duke, Jack McCoy, James William Guercio, James Goldstone, Daniel Nettheim, Goran Stolevski, Jared & Jerusha Hess, William Richert, Michael Jenkins, Robert M. Young, Robert Thom, Graeme Clifford, Frank Howson, Oliver Hermanus, Jennings Lang, Matthew Saville, Sophie Hyde, John Curran, Jesse Peretz, Anthony Hayes, Stuart Blumberg, Stewart Copeland, Harriet Frank Jr & Irving Ravetch, Angelo Pizzo, John & Joyce Corrington, Robert Dillon, Irene Kamp, Albert Maltz, Nancy Dowd, Barry Michael Cooper, Gladys Hill, Walon Green, Eleanor Bergstein, William W. Norton, Helen Childress, Bill Lancaster, Lucinda Coxon, Ernest Tidyman, Shauna Cross, Troy Kennedy Martin, Kelly Marcel, Alan Sharp, Leslie Dixon, Jeremy Podeswa, Ferd & Beverly Sebastian, Anthony Page, Julie Gavras, Ted Post, Sarah Jacobson, Anton Corbijn, Gillian Robespierre, Brandon Cronenberg, Laszlo Nemes, Ayelat Menahemi, Ivan Tors, Amanda King & Fabio Cavadini, Cathy Henkel, Colin Higgins, Paul McGuigan, Rose Bosch, Dan Gilroy, Tanya Wexler, Clio Barnard, Robert Aldrich, Maya Forbes, Steven Kastrissios, Talya Lavie, Michael Rowe, Rebecca Cremona, Stephen Hopkins, Tony Bill, Sarah Gavron, Martin Davidson, Fran Rubel Kuzui, Elliot Silverstein, Liz Garbus, Victor Fleming, Barbara Peeters, Robert Benton, Lynn Shelton, Tom Gries, Randa Haines, Leslie H. Martinson, Nancy Kelly, Paul Newman, Brett Haley, Lynne Ramsay, Vernon Zimmerman, Lisa Cholodenko, Robert Greenwald, Phyllida Lloyd, Milton Katselas, Karyn Kusama, Seijun Suzuki, Albert Pyun, Cherie Nowlan, Steve Binder, Jack Cardiff, Anne Fletcher ,Bobcat Goldthwait, Donna Deitch, Frank Pierson, Ann Turner, Jerry Schatzberg, Antonia Bird, Jack Smight, Marielle Heller, James Glickenhaus, Euzhan Palcy, Bill L. Norton, Larysa Kondracki, Mel Stuart, Nanette Burstein, George Armitage, Mary Lambert, James Foley, Lewis John Carlino, Debra Granik, Taylor Sheridan, Laurie Collyer, Jay Roach, Barbara Kopple, John D. Hancock, Sara Colangelo, Michael Lindsay-Hogg, Joyce Chopra, Mike Newell, Gina Prince-Bythewood, John Lee Hancock, Allison Anders, Daniel Petrie Sr., Katt Shea, Frank Perry, Amy Holden Jones, Stuart Rosenberg, Penelope Spheeris, Charles B. Pierce, Tamra Davis, Norman Taurog, Jennifer Lee, Paul Wendkos, Marisa Silver, John Mackenzie, Ida Lupino, John V. Soto, Martha Coolidge, Peter Hyams, Tim Hunter, Stephanie Rothman, Betty Thomas, John Flynn, Lizzie Borden, Lionel Jeffries, Lexi Alexander, Alkinos Tsilimidos, Stewart Raffill, Lamont Johnson, Maggie Greenwald and Tamara Jenkins.
