Set during the Great Depression, Hard Times is easily Charles Bronson's best film.  Without a word, the poverty, ugliness, and grim desperation of a world turned against its people fills the screen from the very beginning.  Bronson, looking out the open door of a slow-moving freight car, watches as a family, all its members and their meager possessions loaded into an old car, waits at a railroad crossing for the train to pass.  Where are they headed?  It hardly matters.  Despair prevails everywhere.  Where is Bronson's character, known only as Chaney, headed?  Same answer.