A while back, a friend of mine and his wife were trying to get pregnant. They were having difficulties and were unable to afford fertility treatments, so it became a long, frustrating process. Finally, at the end of his rope, my friend pinned a photograph of Charles Bronson over the marital bed. Six months later his wife was pregnant. With twins. Never underestimate the power of Bronson.

Best known for his stone face and its expressive squinting, Charles Bronson epitomized a strain of 1970s machismo that was as distinctive as musk, at one point even becoming the face of a Japanese cologne called “Mandom.” In his 1970 film “Violent City,” produced in Italy, the spaghetti-Western director Sergio Sollima, working from a script by the bare-knuckled art-house director Lina Wertmüller, captured Bronson just as the actor was phasing out of his career as a character actor (notably in “The Dirty Dozen” and “The Magnificent Seven”) and phasing into his period of megastardom (with “Death Wish”). “Violent City,” which is released on DVD today by Blue Underground, is the kind of manly showcase that puts hair on the backs of its viewers.

The film starts with a metal-crunching, wordless car chase, culminating with Bronson rolling out from beneath his exploding vehicle and gunning down his assailants, before a last-minute betrayal lands him in the slammer. Once he’s released, he tries to reunite with his special lady friend, played by the British actress Jill Ireland, only to find that she’s now married to the boss, Telly Savalas. The latter is in fine form here, not just chewing the scenery but rolling it around in his mouth like a fine wine. Savalas wants Bronson to kill Ireland, but she may be playing each of them against the other. Twisty!

We’re not here for the plot, nor are we here for the overheated dialogue, nor even for Ms. Wertmüller’s deviant sex scenes (Ireland only gets in the mood for love after Bronson slaps her around a bit). No, we’re here for the Mandom. And as Savalas and Bronson fog the screen with the scent of their jousting male hormones, “Violent City” feels like a cinematic testosterone treatment. One stylish action scene after another avalanches downhill, whipped into a frenzy by Ennio Morricone’s shredded electro soundtrack, until they crash into the finale, in which Bronson goes up on the roof with a sniper rifle and teaches everyone that it’s no use trying to make him do something he doesn’t want to do.

Another Italian actioner out on Blue Underground today, “Beast With a Gun,” doesn’t hit the highs of “Violent City,” but this final film from the exploitation hack Sergio Grieco (“Agent 077: Fury in the Orient”) is a study in Mandom run amok. Helmut Berger (“Garden of the Finzi-Continis”) plays Nanni Vitali, who busts out of prison in the first 60 seconds of the movie and proceeds, for the next 89 minutes, to burn the film to the ground. With nothing better to do than punch people in the face and kill, kill, kill, the rabid Mr. Berger makes the rest of the overacting cast look as if they’re fast asleep.

The first stop on his rampage is the snitch who put him in the slammer, whom he dispatches with generous applications of shoe leather to the face before throwing the hapless stoolie in a shallow grave and covering him with quicklime. From there we get a payroll robbery gone awry, numerous hostage takings, kidnappings, shoot-outs, and sexual assaults. The film itself is never more than competent action trash, but there are scenes in which one gets the feeling that Grieco is just standing back and filming Mr. Berger in awe as the out-of-control actor switches from savage to simpering to psychotic in the blink of an eye.

Shot in 1977 when, apparently, all a cop could offer a rape victim was a glass of whiskey and a cigarette, “Beast With a Gun” (also known as “Mad Dog Killer”) can be a tough watch. But Mr. Berger’s haunting performance, the stark beauty of the visuals, and the droning, Tangerine Dreamesque synthesizer soundtrack occasionally come together to invest this B movie with flashes of brutal elegance.