A guy comes back from Vietnam and runs into a whole load of trouble in 1977’s Rolling Thunder, the sort of “guy comes back from Vietnam” movie they used to make around then. Except this one’s all messed up.
William Devane plays the guy, Major Charles Rane, who returns from seven years in a Vietnam prisoner-of-war camp where he’s been tortured but has survived. At what personal cost is what the film sets out to examine, until it decides to stop doing all that and instead turn into a genre movie.
A film ostensibly about survivor’s guilt, PTSD and the sexual revolution that’s changed America while Rane has been inside, Rolling Thunder gets off to a promising start in opening scenes where Rane arrives back in his hometown to a hero’s welcome, accompanied by army buddy Johnny Vohden (a young and handsome Tommy Lee Jones). After the marching bands and speeches are over Rane tries to put his life back together, with a wife (Lisa Blake Richards) who now wants a divorce. And with a son, Mark (Jordan Gerler), who has no recollection of his father at all.
Things are looking good, for the film, I mean. For Rane, played like an unexploded bomb by William Devane, they look decidedly patchy. And then everything changes, for the film and Rane, when a bunch of bad guys arrive to steal a box of silver dollars gifted to Rane by the town. By the end of this encounter, Rane has had his arm pushed into the garbage disposal and had his hand minced off, and his wife and kid are dead.
All opening positions have now closed. Instead of a thoughtful and character-driven psychological examination like The Deer Hunter would carry out a year later, a handbrake turn. Rane now has a sense of purpose and, equipped with a sharpened hook where his hand used to be, he sets out to kill the guys who have wronged him, while the film shifts firmly into Death Wish territory.
The story is by Paul Schrader and the screenplay is also by Schrader, with rewrites by Heywood Gould. Schrader loves his stories of redemption and the skeleton of one is visible here, as is a Taxi Driver-esque concern with cleaning the scum off the streets. The film was originally intended to be a follow-up of sorts to Taxi Driver, with Devane as a no-less-unhinged but better educated Travis Bickle. Gould’s rewrites muddy the water a fair bit but his dialogue is good – “You learn to love the rope,” is one of his lines, apparently, a reference to the prisoner of war surviving endless torture by embracing it.
But somewhere between Schrader and Gould the film falls into a hole marked “between two stools”. In a world where directors shoot films and critics pin them with an “auteur” badge, this would normally be put down as John Flynn’s fault. But this perennially underrated director does not put a foot wrong. This is a well made film, shot bright and clean so we can see what’s going on, with great use of locations, especially once the action shifts to Mexico, where payback is finally extracted. Flynn makes the yucky stuff properly yucky – though after test screenings the loss of Rane’s hand was toned down a bit – and his focus on Linda Haynes’s braless breasts swinging in her T shirt is entirely justified, bralessness being one of the unfathomable things that’s happened to the world since Major Rane was taken prisoner.
Defending the stereotyped Mexicans we meet, drooling and dick-driven to a man, is harder to do. But it is well cast. Devane, at this point being groomed for stardom, cannot quite make sense of a character who makes no sense but he does his best as the terse husk who’s had all the hope and expectation tortured out of him. Haynes is perfect as the goodtime girl who’s been given a tiny status upgrade by the sexual revolution. As for Tommy Lee Jones, he’s barely in it, disappointingly. And the drooling, dick-driven Mexicans we meet are so stereotyped they’re inadvertently funny, so that’s something at least.
Really, someone should remake it, using Schrader’s original screenplay, and then we could see who did what and where. Using guesswork and on the evidence here we’d have a much better movie. As it is, it has good bones.
Rolling Thunder – Watch it/buy it at Amazon
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© Steve Morrissey 2024
