Today’s walk was reminiscent of the last section of Kansas, in that Highway 50 cut through the countryside at an angle, while the ADT zigzagged along dirt roads adjacent to it, before swinging far to the north to eventually join a smaller highway. I opted out of that approach, instead sticking with tracks south of the 50. It wasn’t great, but it was a bit shorter, and it allowed me to pass through one more town, Fowler.
The day’s lunch was the highlight. I mean, the food itself–a breakfast burrito, freshly made–was definitely good, but the location was even better. I was in the small town of Manzanola, Colorado, a spot that like many of its peers has turned over a good chunk of its historic buildings to antique shops. It’s surrounded by melon country, though that spotlight is centered one town over on Rocky Ford, famous apparently for its cantaloupes (plenty of pumpkins in the fields right now, too).
The lone place to grab a bite in Manzanola is the Majestyk Cafe, a modest, cement edifice, painted pink with its specialties hand-painted on one wall outside. That’s how I knew about the burritos. The decoration scheme inside, though, is quite different, where it’s all Charles Bronson, all the time. It turns out, Bronson starred in a film called Mr. Majestyk in 1974, and Manzanola (and this cafe) made a brief appearance, along with the neighboring towns, all of which I’ve walked through at this point.
While I’ve never seen the film (making it similar to 99% of films ever made), I’ve now read a plot overview, and it’s a reminder of the old phrase that everything old is new again.
It starts seriously enough. Bronson plays Vince Majestyk, both a veteran and an ex-con, who now makes his living by running a watermelon farm. Majestyk hires Mexican migrant workers to pick his crop, and he happens to fall in love with one of them in the process–a woman who also happens to be a union leader. Bear in mind that this film was produced near the peak of Cesar Chavez’s activism, so issues like migrant labor and the organization of that labor were prominent in the public eye at this point. Indeed, critics of the film bemoaned its failure to dig deeper into those themes.
Instead of focusing on those more substantive issues, the film pivots to a threat posed by a local hooligan, trying to run a small-scale protection racket. Instead of letting the migrants “take their jobs,” he wants his “unskilled drunks” to have the gig. Bronson/Majestyk refuses and turns his shotgun on the goon. The goon runs to the cops and has Bronson arrested.
And now it gets wacky. It turns out, Bronson meets an infamous mob hit man while held in prison–this is a small town prison, remember–and the hit man’s crew tries to break him out. Bronson escapes as well, but in the process he takes the hit man as a prisoner of his own, planning to trade the dude back to the sheriff in exchange for being allowed to go harvest his melons. The hit man offers Bronson $25,000 to just let him go and he refuses!
The hit man manages to escape, with the help of his girlfriend, and then learns–conveniently enough–that the charges he had been held on have been dropped. Of course! The hit man is advised to get the hell out of town, but it’s payback time. He kills one of Bronson’s friends and destroys the man’s melons. And then Charles Bronson goes into Charles Bronson mode. Don’t mess with a man’s melons.
In conclusion, I heartily recommend this film that I have never seen. It is best viewed while eating breakfast burritos.
