Michael Winner’s 1974 Death Wish poses a problem — can the complacent, permissive liberalism embodied by its hero, architect Paul Kersey, withstand the wrenching changes that gripped American cities in the 1970s? The film’s answer is “no,” as we witness Kersey transform, bit by bit, into a one-man judge, jury, and executioner. As a night-stalking vigilante, Kersey discards any trappings of due process or societal consensus in favor of an atavistic notion of justice that sows fear through simple, brutal revenge. As the bodies pile up, Kersey finds that many New Yorkers are ready to follow him and to reject the permissiveness of postwar liberalism embodied by the procedural revolution enacted by the Warren Supreme Court, which leveraged an expansive reading of the Bill of Rights to safeguard the rights of accused criminals (narrowing the options for police seeking to enforce their own version of the status quo), as well as the newly assertive social movements that thrust previously marginalized people to the forefront of American political life during the tumultuous 1960s.

The combination of these startling changes with an economy veering towards crisis made 1970s American cities very anxious places. Death Wish reflected this anxiety and posed a fantastical solution drawn from its thematic forebears in the American westerns in which its star, the laconic and heavily-muscled Charles Bronson, had previously specialized.

The politics of the first Death Wish are crudely drawn. Kersey is “such a bleeding-heart liberal,” his co-worker Sam informs him after Kersey returns from Hawaiian vacation to a city in the grip of a crime wave. “My heart bleeds a little for the underprivileged, yeah,” Kersey replies, softly and without much conviction. “The underprivileged are beating our god damn brains out!” thunders Sam, who casually floats concentration camps as a solution to the way in which poverty and its consequences seemed to repeatedly spill across the boundaries of class and geography in the 1970s American city.