White Lightning and Gator arrived on Blu-ray on Nov 11 from KL Studio Classics.
Burt Reynolds has become one of my favorite actors in the last few years as I’ve become familiar with his output. The charming swagger, fast cars, southern fried action; it all adds up to a lot of fun. While Smokey And The Bandit is probably the best — and best–known — distillation of that formula, he’s essentially played that same sort of rascally character in many great movies (and some not so great ones).
Arguably the first of these was 1973’s White Lightning, which introduced the world to Gator McKlusky, a moonshiner and expert driver who spends as much time behind bars as in cars, but can sometimes be convinced to cooperate with the police and government as the situation demands — usually because his back is up against the wall in some way. While Gator isn’t exactly a hero, he’s always a lesser evil when compared to the real villains, and that makes him easy to root for.
White Lightning (1973)
Director: Joseph Sargent
In 1972, Reynolds had what is generally considered his big breakout hit, Deliverance. That film introduced newcomer Ned Beatty, thus marking their first film collaboration. The pair would go on to appear in several more movies together, starting with White Lightning.
White Lightning finds the pair on opposite sides of the conflict. When his brother is murdered, Gator McKlusky immediately suspects the dirty Bogan County Sherriff, J.C. Connors (Beatty), known for his hatred of young protesters, and resolves to go and set things straight. The problem is, he’s in the slammer with a year still left on his sentence for running moonshine. He offers the Feds a deal: let him walk, and he’ll re-enter the moonshine business to find evidence that Connors is the man at the top of the pyramid. Everyone knows that he is, but the Feds need proof that will stick in court.
Already knowledgeable of the craft, Gator easily joins up with the Bogan County moonshiners with his winsome attitude, driving skills, and impressively stacked muscle car. He begins building a case against the crooked Sheriff, but finds it harder than expected to nail the slippery lawman.
Beatty’s villain similarly set a template for the sort of antagonists that Burt Reynolds would continue to find himself up against: a criminal, lawman, or as in this case, both. Like any good villain, Beatty’s sweaty, racist J.C. Connors doesn’t see himself as the bad guy. He’s more like the mighty hand of justice, killing long-haired hippies and degenerate liberals who would take down his fair county, and skimming the unstoppable moonshine racket to afford his underpaid deputies basic living wages.
Naturally car chases and crashes are a major component of this kind of film, and White Lightning delivers. Legendary stuntman Hal Needham served as the film’s second unit director, coordinating huge action sequences, including a pair of very dangerous big-air leaps — one of them off a dock onto a moving barge. Needham promptly fainted after half-landing the barge jump.
The movie is lighthearted and fun, with plenty of mostly good-natured comedy complementing the action. There’s even a joke which winkingly references Deliverance. Fans of Quentin Tarantino may also be in for a pleasant surprise when watching the film, as QT borrowed the recognizable White Lightning theme for Kill Bill.
The antihero Gator resonated with audiences in a big way, and in a large part shaped the balance of Reynolds’ career, both in terms of pigeonholing the sort of character he would continue to be typecast in playing, and by putting him in the director’s chair for the sequel.
Gator (1976)
Director: Burt Reynolds
Gator’s back, and this time the Feds want him to spy on one of his childhood pals. Bama McCall (Jerry Reed) has cheated, stolen, and coerced his way to becoming the racketeering king of Dunston County. Facing his third moonshining offense in a three-strikes situation, Gator reluctantly agrees to help a bumbling New York detective check things out.
He quickly becomes a member of Bama’s crew, and the pair rekindle their old friendship. In addition to running his gang, Bama also has the local government in his pocket. As Gator works for the gang, though, he sees their corruption — not only running liquor but shaking down business owners and even prostituting underage girls. There’s a much different kind of antagonism at play here than the first film, as Gator and Bama are friends and don’t necessarily want to fight each other, but as the extent of Bama’s evil becomes clear, it surely can’t go unanswered.
Besides his undercover detective partner, Gator finds a pair of unlikely allies: Aggie Maybank (Lauren Hutton), a resourceful investigative reporter who wants to shine a light on the corruption downtown, and Emmeline Cavanaugh (Alice Ghostley), a crazy cat lady who used to work as a courthouse secretary and has knowledge of incriminating documents that can put the bad guys away. The addition of a sidekicks provides some fun variety and also some silliness (Emmeline, who looks like a female Mel Brooks, insists that her cats accompany her everywhere, even when the gang makes their nighttime infiltration of the courthouse). With the increase in female presence (one of them is a strong, pro-feminist type) and another openly racist villain, Gator again delivers subtle messages about equality and progressive social thought in what is essentially a redneck comedy.
Jerry Reed, who is known for his music career at least as much as his acting, provides the catchy swamp tune that opens the film. Reed, of course, would go on to co-star with Reynolds again in Smokey And The Bandit as well as both of its sequels, graduating into the “Bandit” title for the third film.
Gator marks Burt Reynolds’ directorial debut, and some stylistic changes to the formula make the sequel a slightly different animal from its predecessor. There’s an odd jump in continuity where Gator and his father (played by a different actor than in the first film) and previously unmentioned daughter inexplicably live in a swamp rather than the old farmstead, and Gator’s mother is no longer in the picture. This all seems to suggest that much more time has passed than the three years between the films. It’s not by any means an impossible jump, but it’s never explained either, so things start off feeling a bit weird right off the bat, almost as if this were a different film refashioned into a Gator picture, spaghetti western style.
There’s definitely an increase in general silliness and across the board, beyond the antics of the crazy cat lady. Bama’s two top enforcers are cartoonishly over the top: a perpetually smiling, flamboyantly gay dandy, and a lumbering, thickly accented giant who barely talks and is so tall his head and shoulder protrude out of his car’s sunroof as he drives. It’s worth mentioning that this towering behemoth predates Richard Kiel’s Jaws, a very similar henchman who would become the only worthwhile aspect of the Roger Moore era Bond films.
The action and vehicular mayhem is perhaps a bit toned down in favor of comedy, but we still get this amazing sequence in which Hal Needham nearly died.
(again)
Ultimately, Gator is simply not as good as its predecessor, but manages to be both enough of the same and enough different to entertain and surprise.
The Packages
White Lightning and Gator arrived on Blu-ray on Nov 11 from KL Studio Classics. Both discs come with subtitles and a minimal amount of features. The films are rated PG.
Between the two films, White Lightning has a much softer and grainier profile, whereas Gator, only three years newer, looks like a much “fresher” print — I’m guessing this has more to do with the way the films were shot than differences in their restoration, but that’s just speculation. Both look appropriate enough for the era and are unquestionably a massive step up from the wretched DVDs that came before. I think this may actually be the widescreen home video debut for both films.
Special Features and Extras
Both discs include original trailers and a roughly ten minute interview segment with Burt Reynolds (and a few others) on each respective film. Burt discusses the making of each film and remembrances of stunt director Hal Needham, among others. Entitled Back To The Bayou, the interview featurette is produced and edited by genre enthusiast and documentary filmmaker Elijah Drenner. If you don’t know that name yet, it’s one to keep on your radar — he’s becoming one of the primary documentarians of classic genre films.
Oddly, the movie clips used in Back To The Bayou are not from the Blu-rays, and look not only of a lower quality, but have weirdly jerky framerates.
White Lightning
- Back To The Bayou Part 1 (9:55)
- Trailer (2:26)
Gator
- Back To The Bayou Part 2 (10:22)
- Trailer (1:09)
Bringing this to a close…
The Gator films are pure entertainment, but there’s something to be said for their attitude. Unapologetically Southern, they defy their audience a bit by injecting a good dose of progressive themes about racial justice and standing up for the poor and downtrodden.
Burt Reynolds wasn’t the only man from the Gator films who would go on to direct. Stunt expert Hal Needham took the reigns for a number of films with and without Reynolds, including the Smokey And The Bandit and Cannonball Run franchises, and Megaforce, among others.
Southern fried vehicular carnage action comedies are one of my favorite subgenres, and the 70s and 80s certainly had no shortage of amazing entries by everyone from Roger Corman to Sam Peckinpah to John Landis. Many of these would surpass the Gator franchise in many ways, but Burt Reynolds and Hal Needham would forever remain the figureheads of this special era, and the Gator films are where it all began.
Here’s a parting shot of Gator petting a kitty.
A/V Out.