Videophile: Thunderbolt and Lightfoot

I heard an actor on Bill Maher’s Realtime remark the other day about how boring the 70’s were, how he had ‘barely survived the most boring decade ever.’ What?! I don’t get it. From my point of view, that was the greatest decade of my lifetime, at least in terms of Rock & movies, and what could be as important as that? This was the real Golden Age of movies (or should I say Paisley Age?), that splendid transition of experimentation between the end of Big Hollywood and the beginning of Independent cinema – before that term became so complex, when guys like Scorcese and Coppola and Lumet and McNally and…Micheal Cimino made their mark. When guys could start redefining what a movie should be, what realism is – grit and street and dirty houses -- slathering two hour productions with broodiness, oversexed stars, silence, remorseless violence, and best of all, clean well lighted plots....Then of course Big Hollywood was birthed again out of many of these same folks.

I bring up Cimino, who most people know from the Vietnam war classic Deer Hunter movie (the second half of which is melodramatic crap), because he wrote and directed this incredible movie I saw the other day for the first time. I’d heard about Thunderbolt & Lightfoot from various cult movie magazines, but I’d never managed to get a hold of it to view until the other day. And man, did this movie impress me. I was not disappointed. There are still treasure troves of cool flicks out there. Dig, man, dig.

I’ve always been a big Jeff Bridges fan, mostly because of the 1978 King Kong, which I think still is the best giant Gorilla movie out there (I’m laughing), even better than the recent Hobbit-inspired version; and while his range as an actor is extremely limited, Clint Eastwood is always appealing to me, probably because of the way he created that incredible killer in The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly, the most enduring and iconic cowboy movie of all time. Gotta love the T.E. Lawrence of the West. These are the two leads in Thunderbolt & Lightfoot. Eastwood plays an itinerant, veteran crook-burglar, and Jeff Bridges latches onto him as an exuberant, footloose sidekick. Together the two manage to avoid pursuit from an old embittered colleague of Thunderbolt’s (Eastwood) and then pull off a classic big bank heist.

That’s the plot, really simply put; but the movie is really about the relationship that develops between the older, wizened Thunderbolt and the reckless, charming young Lightfoot. It’s a buddy movie, that corny Hollywood genre that never dies (think Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid or more recently the shameless shlock Thelma & Louise), and it’s also an exploration of the depravity of humanity. These are not nice guys, at least not to the people they encounter, like a middle aged tourist couple at a roadside who give over their valuables to the men when the two of them just stare at them – never saying a word, never suggesting anything. The movie really is about the peculiar friendship that springs up between these two. They're nice to each other, and they teach each other something -- first, being on the lamb is rough on the soul, and secondly, friendships are possible. Lightfoot is unabashed in his affection for the older crook, but Eastwood’s character, as you might imagine, is more reticent, more jaded, less inclined to let himself get close to the kid.

But he does get close, close enough to put his life on the line for him. The only thing you wonder in a movie like this, which relies heavily on long car chases and gunfights, is this: are the characters rich enough? That’s a hard call for me because I become so immersed in the sets and styles of these movies. I love the desert setting, and the Pacific Northwest setting, and I love how the whole movie feels shot on location. The Kodachrome ‘grit’ of these blood-splattered, nicotine-stained, plaid framed 70s movies is incomparable. There’s dirt in the lense all the time, but that feels right, that feels like the movie itself is sweating, just like Jeff Bridges as he steals a car. You can lick the perspiration of the window. The movie opens with a car approaching a church, across a wheat vista; the dust kicks up, obscures the car, and then settles around the church. That’s what these movies like, and I love the feeling, the dust and grime, not only of the scenes, but of the people, slowly setting on you.

Quentin Tarantino made what I think is his best movie, by far, recently. Deathproof. I didn’t hear much about this movie, and I’m sure it’s because people wrote it off for the very reasons I’m compelled by a movie like Thunderbolt and Lightning. It was dirty, messy, highly 70’s styled, full of violence and sex, and all about a car chase. It was an ode to the feeling that these movies created in people my age, the matinee rancor of

 murder, sex, and desperation. God it was cool. An incredible car chase, which is what many of the 70’s movies like Vanishing Point are all about – the great modern boat voyage up a river or the spacecraft exploration of the depths of space is just like the car chase across the vast diverse American landscape. So much more to say here. Suffice it to say, in brief, that Deathproof was an incredible testament to the spirit, verve, and the hot mood of movies like Thunderbolt and Lightfoot. Plus, it has an Aussis stunt-girl delivering a two minute monologue about the greatest car chase ever made, Barry Sarafin’s epic masterpiece Vanishing Point. Does it get better? Tarantino’s a mess as a diretor, more about the small moments in movies than the overall movies, but he nailed this one, and I was impressed, bedazzled no less.

Is it cheesy? Of course. But is it rich? You bet. One particular motif comes to mind. Throughout the movie, the smart-ass naive Lightfoot is cracking jokes about the relationship he’s developing with Thunderbolt, pretty harmless homoerotic jokes. And then what happens at the end of the movie? No, it’s not that kind of movie, but Cimino certainly plays with your mind a bit, as Bridge ends up wearing a wig and dress for part of the heist scheme. So, we get treated in one way to Bridges in drag with Eastwood at a drive-in movie theater where they’ve gone to hide from the cops. And to make it more believable, what does Bridges do? He siddles up to Eastwood in the driver’s seat. Think that wasn’t deliberate? What’s being said here? All kinds of things. Pay attention to the soundtrack too, that warm strumming guitar and bluesy beat like some hybrid of Cat Stevens and James Brown.

And that’s what happens in this movie as a whole. Each scene is filled with layers of meaning, style, and point-of-view. It’s about violence, of course, and it’s about men, and it’s a long meditation on desperation, the search for being a hero. As Lightfoot is dying in the car he’s always dreamed of owning, he says, ‘I feel like a hero. I know we did something wrong, but I feel good.’ He's dying of some freak injury to the head he got after he managed to pull of the heist, barely. And there’s Eastwood driving the car with his taut jaw and America sprawling behind him. The Man With No Name has become the Driver, the Journeyman. Still bad as hell, no doubt, but now we get a peak at his heart. His partner's death devastates him (but doesn't stop him).

Why does it work? Still trying to figure out. But I think it all has to do with the notion of realism that a guy like Cimino brought to the movies. Oh, and, there’s a great villain in this movie, too, played by George Kennedy. ‘Red,’ is his name, and he’s a hot-tempered, cheap-suit wearing killer from Thunderbolt’s old days. You know his fuse has been dipped in kerosene, and the longer the film goes, the closer he gets to smoldering, then blowing. He’s also ugly as hell, which I wish more actors wear nowadays. The folks in this movie look like people; that, I guess, is key. Great literature is driven by character, and so, too are great movies like this.