Walter Hill’s most talked-about movies are The Warriors, 48 Hrs., and The Driver, but there’s a lot more to the prolific action filmmaker’s career. The director’s decades-spanning filmography is filled with underrated gems, including his 1975 directorial debut Hard Times. Best described as a period sports neo-noir, it stars Charles Bronson as drifter trying to scrape a living as a bareknuckle boxer in the Great Depression. This premise – and the basic story of the movie itself – would make a fantastic jumping-off point for a Rockstar open-world game in the mold of Grand Theft Auto or Red Dead Redemption, but with a beat-‘em-up approach.
The film opens with Bronson’s character Chaney arriving in Louisiana on a freight train (freighthopping would be an interesting lifestyle to explore in an open-world environment) and taking part in a bareknuckle boxing tournament being held by gamblers down a back-alley. After taking out his first opponent with a single punch, Chaney attracts the attention of Speed, played by James Coburn, who takes him under his wing as a sort of manager. When the movie gets into full swing, the two head down to New Orleans to make a killing. This could easily be adapted into the opening levels of a Rockstar game. The team behind West Elizabeth and Los Santos could flesh out the Big Easy circa 1933 into an immersive environment with stunning visuals and hundreds of subtle historical details.
Chaney is a quintessential “freelance outlaw” in the mold of John Marston or Trevor Philips. He lives a lot like the Red Dead franchise’s cash-in-hand frontiersmen, bouncing from dingy apartment to dingy apartment, trying to make it in a harsh America, but in the urbanized America of the GTA series. The Depression-era setting of Hard Times could be used to explore a crucial turning point in American history between the Old West setting of RDR and the contemporary setting of GTA when Americans were struggling financially and had to resort to whatever they could (not necessarily bareknuckle boxing down by the docks, but in that ballpark) to put food on the table. With Bronson’s gruff likeness (assuming Rockstar could secure the rights to use it), Chaney embodies the grit and frustration of this time. Just as Red Dead Redemption was essentially “GTA in the Wild West,” a Hard Times game would essentially be “GTA meets Red Dead in the Great Depression.”
The bareknuckle boxing matches that Chaney takes part in are illegal, so the story has the same tantalizing undertone of lawlessness found in Rockstar’s other open-world franchises. The game would effectively be a grandiose brawler, with a complex plot strung from street fight to street fight with increasingly tough-as-nails opponents (and bigger audiences as he rises through the ranks of the street-fighting scene). In the movie, Bronson plays Chaney as a lean, mean fighting machine who wins most of his fights effortlessly and wins all the others after a brief struggle. In a video game adaptation, whether or not Chaney is a well-oiled champion would be up to the player and how they handle each opponent.
The interpersonal relationships between the main characters of Rockstar games and the supporting players in the story – Niko and Roman Bellic, John Marston and Bonnie MacFarlane, Franklin Clinton and Lamar Davis etc. – would suggest that the company could do a lot with Chaney’s relationship with his unscrupulous manager Speed. Chaney is a man of few words who usually avoids making lasting connections with people, while Speed is a crooked business mind just looking for a quick buck. Speed’s role in Hard Times established a trend that would continue throughout Hill’s filmography: giving the softly spoken protagonist a motormouth sidekick with an abundance of quippy dialogue. This would later be seen in Bruce Dern’s The Detective opposite Ryan O’Neal’s The Driver and Eddie Murphy’s Reggie Hammond opposite Nick Nolte’s Jack Cates. This allows for Hill’s heroes to be a strong, silent type, which is perfect for a video game character being controlled by a player in the third person – and Charles Bronson is the poster child for the strong, silent type.
Any action-driven game worth its salt needs a memorable villain and a boss battle at the end, and Hard Times has both. Chaney meets his match when a notorious street fighter from Chicago named Street is brought in to face him in the climactic fight. Played by Nick Dimitri, Street is a sleek, agile fighter to match Chaney’s brute force. If the boss battle in a potential game adaptation could be half as intense and brutal as the final fight in Hill’s movie, it’ll be a riveting gaming experience.
It might not seem likely that the hit factory behind the second highest-selling video game of all time would gamble their next big open-world franchise on adapting an obscure sports noir from the ‘70s, but there are prevalent cinematic influences in all of Rockstar’s games. GTA IV has a bank heist mission ripped straight from Michael Mann’s Heat, Vice City borrowed its plot from Scarface and its lead actor from Goodfellas, and the Red Dead games are an affectionate patchwork of every revisionist western from Unforgiven to The Wild Bunch. There are clearly some cinephiles working at this company. And they already turned one of Hill’s other movies, The Warriors, into an acclaimed video game, so there is a precedent for this.
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