Michael Cimino directed Thunderbolt and Lightfoot in 1974 at the start of his career as a film-maker. Cimino died in 2016, twenty years after releasing (straight to video) his last film, Suncatcher with Woody Harrelson. Of course, he was famous for The Deer Hunter and, then, even more infamous for the debacle of Heaven's Gate. His personal journey was as bizarre and peculiar as his filmography. Thunderbolt and Lightfoot was produced by Clint Eastwood's Malpaso Company and stars the actor -- this was the movie that propelled Cimino to the industry status that allowed him to make The Deer Hunter with Robert de Niro, Merrill Streep, and Christopher Walken. The Deer Hunter remains a controversial movie, certainly one of the strangest war pictures ever made and, viewed in retrospect, Thunderbolt and Lightfoot is also a very unusual movie and one that seems to include harbingers of events to come with respect to Cimino's own personal transformation.
Thunderbolt and Lightfoot is divided into two parts. The first part is a on-the-road buddy movie, a bit like an American version of Wim Wenders -- a seasoned career criminal (Thunderbolt played by Eastwood) travels around Montana with an admiring, if wildly erratic and irresponsible, younger man (Lightfoot acted by Jeff Bridges). Thunderbolt doesn't need the distraction of tending Lightfoot who idolizes him. But he can't quite shake the younger man and they remain together until the second part of the plot kicks in, about half-way through the movie. Around its midpoint, Thunderbolt and Lightfoot becomes a heist movie, with the principal characters conspiring to steal money from the Montana Armored Car Company. This heist involves elaborate planning, careful down-to-the-second timing, and is implemented by way of an armor piercing cannon used to blast open a vault. (The advertising for the film is unashamedly phallic -- it features Eastwood grinning at the camera with the long barrel of the gun emerging from below his body.) The second half of the picture is fairly conventional and ends with the destruction of everyone in the movie except Eastwood's Thunderbolt. Poor Lightfoot, who has sustained a brain injury, dies riding through the majestic mountains of Montana in a Cadillac purchased by Thunderbolt -- Lightfoot fumbles with a cigar and, then, passes out: elements of his demise remind me of the death of Ratso Rizzo in Midnight Cowboy. In the first half of the movie, Thunderbolt is pursued across the great plains and the high mountains by "Red" Leary (George Kennedy) and a sidekick driver, Goody. These two crooks are chasing Thunderbolt (who has concealed his identity by becoming a preacher) in an attempt to recover money from a previous heist that Eastwood's character has stolen from them. When "Red" Leary shoots up a church service officiated by Thunderbolt, Lightfoot, who has stolen a car, picks him up and inadvertently saves the film's hero from Leary's revenge. Later, Leary and Thunderbolt are reconciled and work together to engineer the climactic heist in the last part of the movie. The film is only marginally plausible -- how has Thunderbolt managed to become a preacher? -- and contains comic sequences, some of which are meanspirited. The movie is moderately entertaining and contains lots of excellent landscape footage of the Rocky Mountains in Montana -- there are car chases on mountain passes and lots of scenes of cars carooming off embankments and speeding down sheer hillsides. At one point, the movie ventures into Hell's Canyon and the two buddies escape Red's pursuit by hitching a ride on a mail- boat that plies the waters of the gorge delivering the post to the folks living in the remote and rocky terrain. It's not clear to me how the hero manages to get and assemble an armor-piercing cannon and the movie's construction is more than a little haphazard -- Cimino seems to have conceived of certain set-pieces and, then, manhandled the plot into providing occasions for those scenes. For instance, one of the principals is mauled to death by a savage dog, a pretty gratuitous scene that isn't exactly believable but that which must have amused Cimino to stage. The film's widescreen is state of the art for 1974 -- characters are deployed in a somewhat camp manner, posing against picturesque backgrounds and there are a lot of big close-ups and jittery, stuttering handheld camera work.
The movie is very gay, homo-erotic: men kiss each other on the lips (as a joke, of course) and the attractive, girlish Jeff Bridges spends about a quarter of the movie in drag -- he wears s short dress and is much cuter than any of the actual women in the film. (The women in the movie are either stacked temptresses, a bit like cartoon figures by Robert Crumb, prostitutes, or horny teenagers yearning to get laid.) I don't know to what extent audiences in 1974 would have been hip to the gay subtext in this film. But it's all become increasingly clear that Cimino's somewhat idiosyncratic sexuality is on display in this movie. For the last twenty years of his life, Cimino seems to have labored to transform himself into a pants-suited and attractive older woman -- nearing the end of his life, he looked like a somewhat shady version of a Southern California female realtor dressed a bit like Hilary Clinton. (He called himself "Nikki" although he denied being homosexual or, even, transgender up to the end of his life.) The oblique love scenes with Clint Eastwood and Jeff Bridges at a motel or the climax, with Bridges in drag cuddling up to Eastwood so that they can plausibly attend a drive-in movie together, are a pretty overt indication of what was to occur in Cimino's life 35 years later. In retrospect, Cimino's movies all seem to be strongly colored by personal obsession -- Christopher Walken has a strangely feminine aspect in The Deer Hunter and the megalomaniacal content of Heaven's Gate is the product of a uniquely ruminative imagination that couldn't be economically channeled into more commercially viable enterprises. Cimino wanted to make genre films (a buddy movie, a war movie, a Western) but he got diverted into some very weird and personal channels, subject matter that undercuts the audiences' genre expectations. It's for this reason that the weird Thunderbolt and Lightfoot is worth watching today.
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