Rolling Thunder (1977)
"Major Charles Rane Has Come Home To War!"
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© 1977 American International Pictures
All Rights Reserved
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The late '70s boasted a long list of fucked-up-from-the-war Vietnam Vet
flicks including, but not limited to, Martin Scorsese's "Taxi Driver" (1976),
Jeremy Paul Kagan's "Heroes" (1977), Hal Ashby's "Coming Home" (1978), and
Michael Cimino's "The Deer Hunter" (1978). All eventually culminating with Fancis Ford Coppola's napalm-drenched opus "Apocalypse Now" (1979).
But one heavy vet-on-a-rampage flick called "Rolling Thunder" somehow, sadly,
slipped through the cracks after it finished the rounds on the drive-in
circuit in 1977. In retrospect, "Rolling Thunder"—written by Paul Schrader,
not long after he and Scorsese blew cinema apart with "Taxi Driver"—is just
as incendiary as the Scorsese flick but not nearly as complex. Where Travis
Bickle (Robert De Niro) was constructed with an almost impenetrable degree of
motivational ambiguity in "Taxi Driver," Schrader, with "Rolling Thunder,"
writes the character of Charles Rane (William Devane) in wholly black and
white terms.
Returning from Vietnam after 2,500 days in a POW camp, Rane and his friend,
Johnny Vohden (Tommy Lee Jones), have a difficult time adjusting to life in
the "world." When Rane's family is shot up by a bunch of hill rod thugs
(psychotically spearheaded by James "Roscoe P. Coltrane" Best), the vets head
down to Mexico on a bloodletting spree of murderous revenge. Pretty
straightforward, pretty simple. But that doesn't lessen the film's power.
While certainly not a dumbed down version of "Taxi Driver," "Rolling
Thunder," with its linear plot and minimal dialogue, was definitely written
for the drive-in masses.
Director John Flynn shoots the scenes in Mexican brothels with grainy film
stock that glows with bleeding reds and oranges. His south-of-the-border
saloons are stocked with boozed up gringos and slippery Pancho Villa types—not unlike the festering chili dumps prowled by Warren Oates in Sam
Peckinpah's "Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia" (1974). Flynn's cathartic
violence is operatic yet less extreme than the slow-motion stylings of
Peckinpah's "The Wild Bunch" or the final hallucinatory tabloid nightmare of
"Taxi Driver." But that doesn't make the explosive finale of "Rolling
Thunder" any less potent. While Flynn's overall direction is relatively
static, the impact of Schrader's minimalist words has the power to permeate
and haunt long after the final credits roll.
Credits:
Directed by John Flynn
Written by Paul Schrader
Actors:
William Devane
Tommy Lee Jones
James Best
Linda Haynes
Links:
Internet
Movie Database
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