1973 may not have been the best year for a country inching upward towards its bicentennial. Our involvement overseas was winding down, while our economy was beginning its spiral into nearly a decade of woes. The trend of urbanization was beginning its second ouroboros-like cycle of eating itself. The bright lights of the cities once the attractors of a promising future were growing dim as the inhabitants looked out to the suburbs. Lost in this shuffle of generational change was knowing where the mighty ship was being steered ahead or whether the lack of a compass was sending us in yet another circle.
Marketed as a “road movie/heist movie/ buddy movie,” Michael Cimino’s “Thunderbolt and Lightfoot” remains a mismarketed meditation on the lost soul of America. As it opens, we encounter its true star Clint Eastwood in the most unlikely of roles, a humble, one-room church preacher. The laconic Eastwood is a match for this gentle place of humility. However, cinematographer Frank Stanley is more interested in making this setting seem out of time and dwarfed by spacious Montana. It’s all amber waves of grain and crystal blue skies. The simple church even has a horse parked out in front of it as a 1951 Mercury sputters up its unpaved path. Even with a slight hesitation in his scripture reading, we believe that tough guy Eastwood would draw some inspiration from these words.
Next, we meet long-legged bright-eyed Jeff Bridges. Weirdly adrift but optimistic, his charm and youthful appeal are built-in just like the features on the Pontiac T/S we know he is about to steal. Deep in the conversation between a limping Bridges and the outspoken car dealer is deceit and contempt. “It’s a repo” and “you kids are just too smart” are diametrically opposed in this controlled release of information. The dealer speaks not from experience but pure uncut pessimism. What better motivation to “right” the wrong of grand theft auto than for the kid to also outplay the hand of the dealer at his own game?
To borrow from Luigi Pirandello, Cimino has presented us with Two Characters in Search of a Plot. The series of events in opposition in Act One continues to illustrate the true confusion we were living in at the time. A man enters the church while Eastwood is delivering the homily to his parishioners and begins shooting at him. The more urban gunman struggles to run through those amber waves of grain. Through the action-movie “meet cute,” we are now heading south with Eastwood and Bridges.
Of course, you cannot drive that muscle car without a tank of gas. When they stop for some high test, we get a lecture on the systems failure in play from the great character actor Dub Taylor. “In this business, you’re always one step away from bankruptcy. Funny money. Credit. Speculation. Somewhere in this country is a little ol’ lady with $79.25. The five cents is a Buffalo nickel. When she cashes in her investment, the whole thing will collapse. General Motors. The Pentagon. The two-party system. The whole shebang.” The passengers in the car Taylor is servicing, are not listening to the message. But we are.
Before “Thunderbolt” discovers its heist plot, this first act journey is also studying generational gaps and a willingness for our best intentions to quietly cross the line into Darwinian instincts. Even as the wide-eyed Bridges takes it all in as the proverbial chalice half full, Eastwood continues to quietly and grimly preach “survival.” The dusty backroads of America have become its badlands. The locations chosen here have been selected as examples of a land that time has forgotten. Bus stations. Drive-in movie theaters. Pool halls. We even have a man working the night shift downtown at the old telegraph office. Eastwood sometimes makes small talk with the other thieves about towns being so small: “The bank just leaves the phone off the hook all night, so the operator on call can listen in.” In large part, that is the purpose of this first act. By illustrating their differences in perceiving this environment, we see who is intransigent and who is ready to welcome change. Unlike the characters in this microcosm of the world, it is the survival that Eastwood threads his brief conversations that keeps them from choosing one side or another - thus leading to a world shielded by mountains, rivers, and fields that is slowly becoming lost.
