Thunderbolt and Lightfoot (1974)

I don't want your watch, man. I want your friendship.

Michael Cimino was an outsider from the start. After making his bones in New York with several high-profile TV commercials¹, he moved to Hollywood, rocking up with a Rolls-Royce and a burning ambition to direct. But he wasn’t a typical movie brat: he wasn’t much of a cinephile, he wasn’t interested in authenticity, and he was financially comfortable enough to dictate terms. His plan was simple: write an original screenplay for an established star and demand to direct. That screenplay was Thunderbolt and Lightfoot, that star was Clint Eastwood, and that demand was about to be met.

Eastwood is one of those rare beasts, a largely hands-off producer/star who would rather shoot the script as written, knock it out in a couple of takes, and move on. Thunderbolt and Lightfoot impressed him enough to warrant a meeting, where Cimino made his demand. According to Cimino, an apparently amused Eastwood offered a counter: “I’ll make you a deal … I’ll buy your screenplay for scale and I’ll let you direct for scale on one condition: if I don’t like what you’re shooting after three days, then you’re gone and I take over.” This was no idle threat: Eastwood would later sack the meticulous Philip Kaufman from The Outlaw Josey Wales (1976) and would try again with Richard Tuggle on Tightrope (1984)². Knowing that the secret to control was efficiency, Cimino made sure to schedule his first three days without Eastwood, fearing that his star presence would slow the shoot; by the time Eastwood turned up, the picture was ahead of schedule.

As well it should have been: Thunderbolt and Lightfoot is not the kind of sprawling epic Cimino would become both famous and infamous for in his later career. It is instead a relatively tight hybrid of heist, romance, and freewheeling road movie. When Thunderbolt (Eastwood) is attacked by a member of his former gang, he collides with chirpy rapscallion Lightfoot (Jeff Bridges). The two find themselves pursued by the rest of Thunderbolt’s gang, the Mutt and Jeff duo of Red (George Kennedy) and Goody (Geoffrey Lewis), who believe Thunderbolt double-crossed them on the loot from a Montana bank job. Of course, Thunderbolt did nothing of the sort – the apparent recovery of the loot was a police trap, and the real half-million is still stashed in the wall of a one-room schoolhouse somewhere in Warsaw, Montana. Believing the loot is long gone, the quartet decide to pull the job again. And while the heist itself appears to go off without a hitch, the getaway proves challenging, with most of the gang dead by the end credits.

A lot has been made of Thunderbolt and Lightfoot’s homoerotic subtext, inspired in no small part by Peter Biskind’s typically prurient take in Jump Cut titled “Tightass and Cocksucker”, in which he appears discomfited by what he sees as a “frank and undisguised contempt for heterosexuality” and spends most of his piece detailing the various humiliations of heterosexual couples (particularly women) and obvious innuendo. Biskind has never been the kind of writer to let facts get in the way of his opinions, so he’s naturally wrong about many of these moments – Lightfoot never really “snuggles up to Thunderbolt in a parody of a heterosexual couple”, the middle-aged couples featured are stock comic types of battle-axe wives and hen-pecked husbands rather than shots fired in a culture war, and it’s a major stretch to suggest that women become “the scapegoats for male frustration and dissatisfaction”, considering most of the younger female characters (Melody, Gloria, and the motorcycle girl) have agency enough to give a little back to the men in their lives. Biskind’s obvious disgust says more about him than the film; had the film included an obvious “no homo” disclaimer (like Freebie and the Bean), he may have been more comfortable.³

That said, Thunderbolt and Lightfoot is intentionally subversive in its depiction of male relationships. Unlike most buddy comedies, where the protagonists show their affection through aggressive bantering, our heroes have immediate chemistry, demonstrated in a more positive, playful manner: Thunderbolt’s opening remark to Lightfoot about his blue eyes being the hallmark of “all great race champions”; their clear delight in reuniting after Thunderbolt spots Red at the bus station; Lightfoot’s almost-flirting with raccoon shit; and their clear devotion to each other throughout. Apparently Bridges was told to make Eastwood laugh as much as possible; while that was never going to be a recurring event, there are moments, primarily in the diner scene where Lightfoot flirts with the waitress, where Eastwood’s genuine amusement in Bridges’ performance shines through. Eastwood may have believed that Bridges was upstaging him – compounded by Bridges’ Academy Award nomination – but he never lets it upset the dynamic between them, instead allowing Bridges to be his goofy, lovable self.

Even the potentially cringeworthy drag scene is played with a lightness of touch so often missing from scenes of this type: Lightfoot’s primary talent is, after all, his flirtatious nature, so it makes sense that he’d be able to attract the porn-obsessed guard with little more than well applied makeup, a cheeky little grin, and a wee knock on the glass; Lightfoot is this guy’s Penthouse letter pages come to life. A lesser script would have expanded this scene with a cutesy seduction, but Cimino cuts straight to the blackjack and Bridges is quick to drop the act once the job is done.

Contrasting the Thunderbolt-Lightfoot relationship is the other couple in the film, Red and Goody. These guys are more obviously a Laurel and Hardy set-up, and it’s hard to think of a better duo than Kennedy and Lewis (they even sound like a double act). Kennedy was one of the great heavies of ’60s and ‘70s cinema, most notably his turn as Dragline in Cool Hand Luke (1967), seasoning his brutish turns with a self-deprecating sense of humour. Thunderbolt and Lightfoot is no exception. While Red is clearly the antagonist of the film, he’s a compromised one: he complains of asthma and hay fever, is routinely smacked around and intimidated by Eastwood, and he has a deeply uncomfortable, adolescent reaction to women (especially the prospect of naked women). His beating of Lightfoot near the end of the picture is inevitable after all the threats, but shocking in its brutality, and Lightfoot’s delayed demise feels all the more tragic because it doesn’t feel wholly intentional on Red’s part. In many ways, he’s just acting out his frustrations and asserting a hitherto unachieved dominance.

Similarly, his treatment of Goody – shot accidentally by pursuing police, shoved from the trunk of the car and left to die on a dirt road – is horrific precisely because of its juxtaposition with the slapstick scenes earlier in the film. As for Lewis, he’s an absolute gift in this film – constantly sweating, in perpetual need of a piss, he’s a wide-eyed stooge who’s both the weakest link of the gang and also one of the most sympathetic members. When the guys are forced to get job-type jobs in order to build a stake for the upcoming robbery, Thunderbolt and Lightfoot get solid, blue-collar work, while Goody is compelled to sell ice cream out of a scooter-truck to insolent kids. And while Lightfoot’s death is the more obviously tragic of the two, spare a thought for poor old Goody: he takes a bullet to his malfunctioning kidneys, he’s jettisoned like ballast, and his corpse stripped of its clothing so Lightfoot doesn’t have to trudge around in a dress. It is a singularly undignified end, and could so easily have been a footnote were it not for Lewis’s endearing performance.

And this is where Thunderbolt and Lightfoot shines as an example of ‘70s cinema – it is absolutely more than the sum of its parts. Cimino’s lack of narrative experience means he stuffs the movie with digressive scenes that allow for singular character moments - Dub Taylor’s disgruntled gas station attendant, Bill McKinney’s insane, rabbit-smuggling Plymouth driver, Burton Gilliam’s “pecker story”⁴ – that colour the story without derailing it. His visual expertise also comes to the fore in collaboration with Eastwood regular cinematographer Frank Stanley⁵: for a heist movie, Thunderbolt and Lightfoot is incredibly beautiful, making the most of Montana’s landscapes in a way that suggests both the insignificance of the protagonists and a rapidly disintegrating America without turning either point into a polemic. That it also represents a more progressive take on the buddy picture is just the cherry on top.

Unfortunately for Cimino, many critics ignored the fact that this was his debut feature, instead concentrating on Eastwood’s star power. And while it’s arguably Eastwood’s movie as much as Cimino’s – he is the star and producer, he provided the crew and the kind of limitations that forced Cimino to work at his best – it’s a shame that Cimino was largely lost in the mix, because it pushed him to take greater ownership in the future, leading him to an ill-advised and ultimately dead-in-the-water adaptation of Ayn Rand’s The Fountainhead (the quintessential egomaniacal arsehole book), and his infamous profligacy on both The Deer Hunter (1978) and the notorious Heaven’s Gate (1980).

There is an alternate timeline in which Michael Cimino swallowed his pride and developed his craft, turning out a few more idiosyncratic genre pictures and building up to his epics, rather than succumbing to his ego and ending up the poster boy for New Hollywood excess.⁶ There is also a timeline in which Eastwood was happy enough with the box office receipts on Thunderbolt and Lightfoot ($25m against a $2.2m budget isn’t bad, but it wasn’t good enough for ol’ Clint) that he continued to subvert his hypermasculine star persona in new and interesting ways. Perhaps then Thunderbolt and Lightfoot wouldn’t have been consigned to semi-obscurity, but hey, it’s freely available now, so let’s make the most of it.

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Next Up: “Any number can play. Any number can die.”

1. Including spots for Pepsi and United Airlines, as well as a bonkers Canada Dry ad featuring your friend and mine, Ms. Ann-Margret: “I’m ha soft drink ha-hexpeeerrtttt …”

2. The Kaufman situation prompted the DGA to establish “The Eastwood Rule”, which prohibited anyone on the production from hiring and replacing the director, something that would annoy Eastwood no end on Tightrope.

3. At least this was the case in 1974. Biskind may have changed his views on this since, but he clearly thought enough of the piece to include it in his 2005 collection Gods and Monsters.

4. Dub Taylor was most famous for his work as part of Peckinpah’s stock company; Bill McKinney will forever be known as the rapist in Deliverance; and Burton Gilliam is best known for the shit-eating doofus Lyle in Blazing Saddles.

5. Though not for much longer - an accident on the set of The Eiger Sanction (1975) would end their relationship for good.

6. For a reasonably balanced look at Cimino’s life and career, I recommend Charles Elton’s book Cimino: The Deer Hunter, Heaven’s Gate, and the Price of a Vision, not least for additional context on Steven Bach’s Final Cut, which I’ve always found to be a little self-serving.