Thunderbolt and Lightfoot (1974) is a delightfully minor buddy-crime film that would absolutely never be made today. Sure, we’ve got our share of buddy cops, anti-heroes, and road movies today, but none with quite the commitment to quirk, iconography, and relationship that this film is built around… and at a very relaxed pace at that. I mean no offense when I say the film is minor, especially since it garnered an Academy Award nomination for the impossibly young Jeff Bridges’ supporting role as the titular Lightfoot. And it comes from star Clint Eastwood’s own production company, Malpaso. It was even written and directed by a young Michael Cimino who would follow up this film with a career high: The Deer Hunter (1978), and would follow that up with a historic flop in Heaven’s Gate (1980). With so much retro-active prestige attached to this picture, it feels like a major work today. But the story itself is simply a small one. We focus on two roamers and we follow them through several mis-adventures set against enormous and endlessly beautiful Montana country.
We meet Bridges’ Lightfoot as he charms his way through the theft of a Trans Am. Meanwhile Eastwood’s Thunderbolt is posing in plain view as a country preacher and finds himself on the run from a gunman out to get him for reasons unknown. Our protagonists literally run into one another, and immediately form a classic-feeling bond. The grizzled mentor with a past and the eager young protege who has something to prove, but likely a few things to teach as well. Today, characters like Thunderbolt and Lightfoot would never come together under such seemingly random circumstances. Their origins and skills would be made plain through a bunch of exposition and probably a pre-credits adventure to busy up proceedings. Thunderbolt and Lightfoot takes so much time introducing us to its characters that one tends to begin seeing them as (shocker) real people.
That Montana landscape serves as its own character, and suggests a wider intention behind the film as some kind of American fable exploring freedom and friendship through its bank-heisting heroes… much in the way stories about John Dillinger romanticize a certain heroism and true freedom that comes from a life on the road/on the run. There is a big country here, and our small-time heroes have the run of it. Cimino, it seems, just might take us anywhere.
Where he does end up taking us is on a non-traditional bank heist adventure. Roughly half of the movie is spent letting Bridges and Eastwood form their unique friendship. They do a little “whoring” together, swap out several boosted cars and end up wearing the hilariously pimp-ish clothes they find in one car for large parts of the film since they have absolutely no money. They even hitch a (seemingly meaningless to the actual story) ride with a muscle-car driving psychopath with a racoon in his car and a trunk full of live rabbits. I kid you not.
Eventually we learn that Lightfoot is exactly as he appears, an all-smiles loner with a handsome face and a sense of humor that seems to carry him through life. And it turns out that those people trying to kill Clint (who is only ever referred to as “Thunderbolt” on occasion, when he is referred to by name at all) are sore with him about a bank heist from years back that went sour. Eventually his pursuers and would-be killers (a mean George Kennedy and a doltish Geoffrey Lewis, both of whom are wonderful) are forced to team up with our heroes in order to pull the very same heist they tried years before.
I found it hilarious that part of the long-con for this heist involves settling in to the town where the bank vault in question is located and simply… getting jobs. As a denizen of 2014 who has been looking for work on and off over the last three years, it just cracks me up that these shady-looking drifters all end up with relatively normal jobs that conveniently set them up to case the joint. If only it were that easy to land work these days… even as an ice cream man, which is what Geoffrey Lewis hilariously ends up as.
Through it all, the friendship between Bridges and Eastwood makes up the soul of this adventure. And the raging George Kennedy provides a lot of the tension and plotting elements needed to allow these guys to continually bond in naturalistic ways. Sure, this is a heist movie, but the planning and preparation that so fascinates audiences in movies like Heat or even the Ocean’s films takes a back seat to our characters here.
The ending (which I won’t spoil at all) cements the movie as something special, something more than just a care-free comedy or thrilling action/heist film. As our heroes drive off into the never-ending Montana sunset, everyone has grown and changed, and we as an audience have been entertained and engaged… always kept off our feet and never quite knowing where it was all going to go. And I’d argue that the car headed into the sunset in the final moments of the film has no destination at all, so it doesn’t know where it is going either.
Thunderbolt and Lightfoot is just plain better than the heist thrillers of today. It entertains well, but it certainly isn’t slick and twisty like so many of today’s films. Above and beyond a nice twisty yarn, we get a slice of humanity and atmosphere and ideas without a ready-made, easily digestible lesson to swallow in the end. Cimino and Eastwood crafted a small story against a huge backdrop and let us take what we will from it.
The Package
You may have noticed (if you pay attention to Cinapse on the regular) that we’ve covered several Twilight Time home video releases over the past week. We made a new connection with these fine folks and hope to continue reviewing many of their releases going forward. I first learned of Twilight Time’s existence when I found out a blu-ray for Walter Hill’s seminal car thriller The Driver was being released by them. It turns out that Twilight Time create limited edition blu-ray releases (usually only 3000 copies, and then they’re gone) and sell them exclusively through www.screenarchives.com. Much like other small distributors, they license certain titles from studios and put out releases of films they love or believe in. This was the first Twilight Time release I’ve had the opportunity to watch, and I was very pleased with the package over and above the great film itself.
The high definition transfer looks wonderful. From the opening frame you’ll see that filmic grain remains visible, but the faces and landscapes here are stunning throughout. There’s also a commentary track, an isolated score track, original trailer, and even an insightful essay included as a booklet inside the casing.
I had never seen this film before, so I’m not sure I would have been the target market for this kind of limited edition release. But I can’t imagine there being a single fan of Thunderbolt and Lightfoot out there who wouldn’t be absolutely thrilled to add this disc to their collections. The movie is the star, as it normally is, but this package is a fabulous one that is worth a look for fans of any of the talent involved.
Side Note: The dismissive way that all the characters treat Geoffrey Lewis’ Goody feel oddly reminiscent of the ways in which a certain Dude’s friends treat a guy named Donny in a beloved film from Jeff Bridges’ future catalogue. What a double feature that would make.
And I’m Out.
Originally published at old.cinapse.co on February 25, 2014.