Film Review: Thunderbolt and Lightfoot (dir by Michael Cimino)

Posted on May 31, 2025 by Lisa Marie Bowman

1974’s Thunderbolt and Lightfoot opens with two men, one young and one middle-aged, facing a moment of truth.

The younger of the two is Lightfoot (Jeff Bridges), a wild and hyperactive rich kid who is in his 20s and who steals a corvette right off of a used car lot. The other man is simply known by his nickname, Thunderbolt (Clint Eastwood). When we first see Thunderbolt, he’s giving a sermon in a small Montana church. When a gun-wielding man steps into the church and promptly starts firing at Thunderbolt, he takes off running. Pursued by his attacker, Thunderbolt runs through a field and just happens to jump onto Lightfoot’s speeding corvette. Lightfoot runs over the Thunderbolt’s pursuer. Thunderbolt slips into the car and Lightfoot drives on for a bit. Lightfoot is excited and talkative. Thunderbolt is more concerned with popping his shoulder back into its socket. A stop at a gas station leads to the men stealing someone else’s car.

And so it goes for a good deal of the movie. Thunderbolt and Lightfoot is a road movie, the majority of which is taken up with scenes of the two men just hanging out. Thunderbolt and Lightfoot take an instant liking to each other. When Lightfoot picks up a prostitute (Catherine Bach), he makes sure to ask that she bring along a friend for Thunderbolt. When a criminal punches Lightfoot, Thunderbolt is quick to punch back. “That’s for the kid,” Thunderbolt says. That’s the type of friendship that they have. Jeff Bridges is handsome and full of energy as Lightfoot and Clint Eastwood smiles more in this film than I think I’ve seen him smile in any other film. For once, Eastwood is not playing a perpetually grumpy stranger or a supercop. Instead, he’s just a blue collar guy who enjoys having a friend to travel with.

Eventually, Thunderbolt and Lightfoot meet up with two of Thunderbolt’s former associates. Red (George Kennedy) is a brutal brawler who, it is suggested, served with Thunderbolt in the Korean War. Goody (Geoffrey Lewis) is a gentle soul who takes orders from Red but still can’t bring himself to shoot anyone, no matter how much Red demands that he pull the trigger. Red and Goody have always assumed that Thunderbolt stole the loot from a bank robbery that they pulled off. Thunderbolt explains that he didn’t steal the money. He just got arrested after hiding it. Lightfoot suggests that maybe the four of them could pull off another bank heist….

Kennedy and Lewis are perfectly cast as the two criminals who end up working with Thunderbolt and Lightfoot. In many ways, the relationship between Red and Goody mirrors the relationship between our lead characters. The main difference is that Red is sadistic and quick to loose his temper, whereas Thunderbolt controls his emotions and tries not to hurt anyone while committing his crimes. Lightfoot looks up to Thunderbolt and Goody looks up to Red. Again, the difference is that Thunderbolt actually cares about Lightfoot, whereas Red is incapable of truly caring about anyone but himself. Eastwood, Bridges, Kennedy, and Lewis make quite a team and it’s hard not to worry about all four of them, especially when the film takes an unexpectedly dramatic turn during its third act.

I really wasn’t expecting Thunderbolt and Lightfoot to make me cry but the final thirty minutes of the film brought tears to my eyes as what started out as a buddy comedy turned into a tragedy. (I shouldn’t have been surprised. I’ve seen enough 70s movies that I really should have known better than to have expected a happy ending.) Thanks to the perceptive script by Michael Cimino (who would go on to make The Deer Hunter and Heaven’s Gate) and the performances of Eastwood and Bridges, the movie’s final moments carry quite a punch and they leave you wondering if Thunderbolt and Lightfoot’s road trip was worth the price that was ultimately paid. The film works as not only a tribute to friendship but also as a fatalistic portrait of life on the backroads of America.

Thunderbolt and Lightfoot was the first Eastwood film to receive an Oscar nomination, with Jeff Bridges competing for Best Supporting Actor. (He lost to Robert De Niro’s star turn in The Godfather, Part II.) Eastwood, reportedly, felt that he deserved a nomination for his performance as Thunderbolt and, considering that that Oscar itself was won by Art Carney for his pleasant but hardly revelatory work in Harry and Tonto, Eastwood was correct. Instead, Eastwood would have to wait for another 18 years before he finally received Academy recognition for starring in, producing, and directing Unforgiven.

Film Review: Drive, He Said (dir by Jack Nicholson)

Posted on March 13, 2023 by Lisa Marie Bowman

First released in 1971, Drive, He Said tells the story of two college roommates.

Hector (William Tepper) is a star basketball player who everyone expects to turn pro. His intense coach (Bruce Dern) is always yelling at him to stop fooling around on the court but Hector is more interested in fooling around elsewhere as he’s having an affair with Olive (Karen Black), the wife of a self-styled “hip” philosophy professor named Richard (Robert Towne).

Gabriel (Michael Margotta) is Hector’s best friend. They live together, even though Hector’s coach thinks that Gabriel is a bad influence. Gabriel is a self-styled campus radical. He has a devoted group of followers who will do just about anything that he tells them to do. Gabriel is big into guerilla theater and symbolic protests. Nothing he does seems to add up too much but, unlike Hector, he’s good at giving speeches.

Together, they worry about the draft!

Of course, they’re both worrying about two different types of drafts. Hector is worried about the NBA draft and whether he should enter it. He’s been playing basketball for as long as he can remember. The only thing that he’s really good at is playing basketball. And yet, Hector isn’t sure if he wants to spend the rest of his life taking orders from his coaches and devoting every minute to playing the game. However, Hector’s worked himself into a corner. When one NBA official asks him what he’s going to do if he’s not drafted, Hector admits that he doesn’t know. When asked what his major is, Hector replies, “Greek.”

Gabriel, on the other hand, is worried about being drafted into the military and being sent to Vietnam. Gabriel considers himself to be a revolutionary but it soon becomes clear that he really doesn’t have much of a plan for how to start his revolution. Indeed, the film suggests that his activism is more about his own insecurity over his own sexuality than anything else. Gabriel particularly seems to be obsessed with Hector’s affair with Olive. While Hector reaches new highs on the court, Gabriel comes closer and closer to having a psychotic break.

Director Jack Nicholson found a way to work in shout out to his friend, Harry Dean Stanton

Drive, He Said was one of the many “campus rebellion” films that were released in the early 70s and, much like Getting Straight, it’s definitely a product of its time. Today, it it’s known for anything, it’s for being the directorial debut of actor Jack Nicholson. (Nicholson has said that, before he was cast in Easy Rider, he was actually planning on abandoning acting and pursuing a career as a director.) The film features many of the flaws the are typically present in directorial debuts. The pacing is terrible, with some scenes ending too quickly while others seem to go on forever. At times, the film feels a bit overstylized as Nicholson mixes jump cuts, odd camera angles, and slow motion to little effect. It’s very much a film about men, so much so that the film’s ultra-masculinity almost verges on self-parody.

And yet, there are moments of isolated brilliance to be found in Drive, He Said. Some of the shots are genuinely impressive and the army induction scene shows that Nicholson could direct comedy, even if he does let the scene drag on for a bit too long. Though Nicholson doesn’t appear in the film, his approach to the story features his trademark cynicism and sense of fatalism. Though he was often associated with the counterculture, Nicholson was more a member of the Beat generation than of the hippies. As such, Drive, He Said has more in common with Jack Kerouac than Abbie Hoffman. Drive, He Said is definitely an anti-establishment film but, at the same time, it doesn’t make the mistake of glorifying Gabriel or his followers. Gabriel, with his constant demand that everyone join him in his ill-defined revolution, is almost as overbearing as basketball coach and, towards the end of the film, he commits an act of violence that leaves no doubt that his “revolution” is all about his own self-gratification. The film is less a polemic and more a portrait of people trying to find their identity during a time of political and cultural upheaval.

The film’s biggest flaw is that neither William Tepper or Michael Margotta really have the charisma necessary to carry a movie, especially one in which even the main characters often do unlikable things. Tepper is dull while Margotta overacts and, at times, comes across as if he’s trying too hard to imitate his director. It falls to the film’s supporting cast to provide the energy that Tepper and Margotta lack. Fortunately, Bruce Dern and Karen Black are both perfectly cast. Bruce Dern seems to be having a blast as the fanatical basketball coach while Karen Black brings a fierce intelligence to the role of Oliva, an intelligence that one gets the feeling wasn’t really in the original script. Considering how misogynistic every other character in the film is, it’s impossible not to cheer when Olive announces, “I’m not going with anybody, anywhere.”

(For whatever reason, there was a definite strain of misogyny that seemed to run through the majority of the late 60s and early 70s counterculture films. Just consider the amount of time Getting Straight devoted to Elliott Gould shouting at Candice Bergen.)

Drive, He Said is flawed but interesting. As a director, Nicholson understood how to frame a shot but he wasn’t quite sure how to tell a cohesive story. That said, the film itself is a definite time capsule of a very specific cultural moment.

Back to School #10: Pretty Maids All In A Row (dir by Roger Vadim)

Posted on August 24, 2014 by Lisa Marie Bowman

Pretty Maids All In A Row, which — as should be pretty obvious from the trailer above — was originally released in 1971, is a bit of a historic film for me. You see, I love movies. And, as a part of that love, I usually don’t give up. Regardless of how bad a movie may turn out to be, once I start watching, I stick with it. I do not give up. I keep watching because you never know. The film could suddenly get better. It could turn out that what originally seemed like a misfire was actually brilliant satire. If you’re going to talk or write about movies, you have an obligation to watch the entire movie. That was a rule that I had always lived by.

And then, one night, Pretty Maids All In A Row popped up on TCM.

Now, I have to admit that I already knew that Pretty Maids was going to be an extremely 70s film. I knew that it was probably going to be more than a little sexist. I knew all of this because the above trailer was included on one of my 42nd Street Forever DVDs. But I still wanted to see Pretty Maids because the trailer hinted that there might be an interesting hiding underneath all of the cultural baggage. If nothing else, it appeared that it would have some sort of worth as an artifact of its time.

(If you’re a regular reader of this site, you know how much I love my cinematic time capsules.)

So, the film started. I logged onto twitter so that I could live tweet the film, using the hashtag #TCMParty. And from the moment the film started, I knew it wasn’t very good. It wasn’t just that the film’s camerawork and music were all extremely 70s. After all, I like 70s music. I don’t mind the occasional zoom lens. And random psychedelic sequences? WHO DOESN’T LOVE THOSE!? No, my dislike of the film had nothing to do with the film’s style. Instead, it had to do with the fact that there was absolutely nothing going on behind all of that style. It wasn’t even style for the sake of style (which is something that I usually love). Instead, it was style for the sake of being like every other “youth film” that came out in the 70s.

And then there was the film’s plot, which should have been interesting but wasn’t because director Roger Vadim (who specialized in stylish decadence) had no interest in it. The film takes place at Oceanfront High School, where the only rule is that apparently nobody is allowed to wear a bra. We meet one student, Ponce De Leon Harper (played by an amazingly unappealing actor named John David Carson), who is apparently on the verge of having a nervous breakdown because, at the height of the sexual revolution, he’s still a virgin.

(Because, of course, the whole point of the sexual revolution was for losers like Ponce to finally be able to get laid…)

Ponce is taken under the wing of high school guidance counselor Tiger McDrew (Rock Hudson, complete with porn star mustache). Quickly figuring out exactly what Ponce needs, Tiger sets him up with a teacher played by Angie Dickinson. However, Tiger has other concerns than just Ponce. Tiger, it turns out, is a sex addict who is sleeping with nearly every female student at the school. But, American society is so oppressive and puts so much pressure on the American male that Tiger has no choice but to kill every girl that he sleeps with…

This is one of the only film I can think of that not only makes excuses for a serial killer but also presents him as being a heroic character. And, while it’s tempting to think that the film is being satirical in its portrayal of Tiger and his murders, it’s actually not. Don’t get me wrong. The film is a very broad comedy. The high school’s principal (Roddy McDowall) is more concerned with the football team than with all of the girls turning up dead at the school. The local sheriff (Keenan Wynn) is a buffoon. The tough detective (Telly Savalas) who investigates the murders gets a few one liners.

But Tiger, most assuredly, is the film’s hero. He’s the only character that the audience is expected to laugh with, as opposed to at. He is the character who is meant to serve as a mouthpiece for screenwriter Gene Roddenberry’s view on America’s puritanical culture. If only society was less hung up on sex, Tiger wouldn’t have to kill. Of course, the film’s celebration of Tiger’s attitude towards sex is not extended towards the girls who sleep with him. Without an exception, they are all presented as being empty-headed, demanding, shallow, and annoying, worthy only of being leered at by Vadim’s camera until Tiger finally has to do away with them.

(The film’s attitude towards women makes Getting Straight look positively enlightened.)

Rock and Angie

ANYWAY! I spent about 40 minutes watching this movie before I gave up on it. Actually, if you want to be technical about it, I gave up after 5 minutes. But I stuck with it for another 35 minutes, waiting to see if the film was going to get any better. It didn’t and finally, I had to ask myself, “Why am I actually sitting here and wasting my time with this misogynistic bullshit?” So, I stopped watching and I did so with no regrets.

What I had forgotten is that I had set the DVR to record the film while I was watching it, just in case I later decided to review it. So, last week, as I was preparing for this series of Back to School posts, I saw Pretty Maids All In A Row on my DVR. I watched the final 51 minutes of the film, just to see if it ever got better. It didn’t.

However, on the plus side, Rock Hudson does give a good performance in the role of Tiger, bringing a certain seedy desperation to the character. (I’m guessing that this desperation was Hudson’s own contribution and not an element of Roddenberry’s screenplay, which more or less presents Tiger as being a Nietzschean superman.). And beyond that, Pretty Maids serves as evidence as to just how desperate the Hollywood studios were to makes movies that would be weird enough to appeal to young people in the early 70s.

Watching the film, you can practically hear the voices of middle-aged studio executives.

“What the Hell are we trying to do with this movie!?” one of the voices says.

“Who cares!?” the other voice replies, “the kids will love it!”