Reeling Backward: "Thunderbolt and Lightfoot"

Clint Eastwood planned to direct "Thunderbolt and Lightfoot" himself, but then he met Michael Cimino, the young screenwriter who had written the script for "Magnum Force," the second Dirty Harry movie and a big hit.

Road pictures and Eastwood were both hot commodities in the early 1970s, and Cimino had been commissioned by agent Stan Kamen to do a script on spec with the squinty star in mind.

Eastwood, who'd already directed three movies himself by then, decided to let Cimino have his shot, leading to his first feature film as a director. His second movie behind the camera was "The Deer Hunter," winning him a pair of Oscars by the age of 40. His next was "Heaven's Gate," which ended his brief tenure as an A-list filmmaker. He made four more movies, none of them consequential.

I'd been meaning to see this buddy crime caper for years, and came away a teeny bit disappointed. It's now out in a handsome Blu-ray edition that's well worth a look.

It's a fine movie, and the screen relationship between Eastwood and Jeff Bridges is just as lovely and spirited as I'd hoped. Or at least it starts out promising.

Eastwood is Thunderbolt, an expert in breaking into banks vaults using a 20mm cannon, hence the nickname. As the story opens he's been hiding out as a preacher in a tiny unnamed town in Big Sky country.

Bridges is Lightfoot, a young hotshot car thief/rapscallion, who wandered off on his own as a youth and never stopped moving. He's repeatedly referred to as a hippie, though his clothing and hair is actually closer to Tony Manero from "Saturday Night Fever." He steals, has a good time with women and booze until the money runs out, then repeats the cycle.

Somehow these opposing personalities just click. Thunderbolt is an aging Korean War vet whose body is crisscrossed with scars, including a badly burned foot that requires a walking brace. He keeps to himself and speaks only when necessary, won't run from a fight but doesn't seek one out, either. Lightfoot is a gadly and gadabout who loves to laugh and avoid conflict whenever possible.

They meet when Thunderbolt literally jumps into the hot rod Lightfoot has just stolen while being shot at by a former member of his bank robbing gang. They pulled off a big job at the Montana Armory a couple of years earlier, and events transpired that the others mistakenly think Thunderbolt kept all the loot for himself.

(They never seem to question why 1) if Thunderbolt had the money he'd pretend to be a poor podunk pastor instead of living the high life behind guarded walls, and 2) they should just just kill him instead of trying to get the money back.)

Lightfoot almost immediately suggests they become friends and pull off some jobs together. Thunderbolt enjoys the younger man's innocence and pep. It's the start of a great Butch/Sundance type of partnership, and I looked forward to accompanying them on their bromance journey.

Unfortunately, the duo becomes a quartet and the movie morphs into a fairly straightforward heist flick, as they plan the job and then watch everything blow up in their faces.

I'm sort of astonished that "Thunderbolt and Lightfoot" is often described as a comedy. Certainly there are hijinx and laugh-out-loud moments. But it's also a movie with sadness and anger at its core.

The latter is personified in Red Leary, a thoroughly nasty piece of work played by George Kennedy. He's the one who wants to assassinate Thunderbolt for pure sake of revenge. They were friends from back in Korea, and each man claims the other saved his life.

At one point Red is asked why he's willing to sacrifice everything instead of just letting go and living his own life, and he responds that because he was (he thought) betrayed by a friend, no other choice was possible. If a stranger did him wrong, he'd probably let it slide if there was no benefit in pursuing retribution.

Red and Thunderbolt hash out their differences in a fistfight, then resolve to rejoin forces along with Goody (Geoffrey Lewis), their submissive wheel man. Lightfoot replaces Dunlop (Roy Jensen), the electronics expert who tried to kill Thunderbolt in the opening sequence and got busted up for his trouble.

It seems the one-room schoolhouse where Thunderbolt and the deceased gang leader stashed the loot was torn down and replaced with a modern building, meaning they have nothing to show for the biggest score of their lives. It's Lightfoot who suggests they pull the same job all over again using the same M.O.

Red takes an instant dislike to Lightfoot, egged on by the latter's teasing and devil-may-care attitude, and threatens repeatedly to do him in when the job is over.

At this point the movie wandered away from me, as the men take jobs in town so they can build a stake while planning the robbery. A few notable actors make appearances here including Gary Busey, Vic Tayback, Jack Dodson, Dub Taylor and "dem teef" background player Burton Gilliam. Catherine Bach turns up as a romantic fling for Lightfoot in a pre-"Dukes of Hazzard" role.

The fatal flaw that trips up the execution of the heist is sneaking into a drive-in movie theater near the armory with Goody and Red hiding in the trunk. The manager spots Red's shirttail hanging out the back and thinks extra people are sneaking in without tickets, setting off the commotion that puts the cops on their tail.

For veteran cons you'd think they'd instead try to get away from the scene of the crime as fast as they can. Or just have Goody and Red sit up front and buy two more tickets. But maybe it worked last time, so they're slaves to the tried-and-true.

"Thunderbolt and Lightfoot" is a notable car movie. Lightfoot repeatedly "acquires" new vehicles to throw people off their trail, so the movie has a hefty listing on the Internet Movie Cars Database. Dunlop rolls up in a black 1959 Cadillac, a model I'm well acquainted with, and things go from there.

At various points the boys drive a '73 Buick Riviera as well as a Pontiac Firebird and a Cadillac Fleetwood Eldorado, both of the same year.

In the film's looniest sequence, the pair are hitchhiking and get picked up by a madman driving a 1973 Plymouth Fury that has been jacked up with racing tires, who immediately careens around the road like a stuntman and intentionally rolls the car over. He then springs the trunk revealing that it is filled to the brim with white rabbits. He's played by Bill McKinney, forever the "squeal like a pig" hillbilly from "Deliverance."

It's a fun bit, but it's bizarreness for its own sake.

The most memorable car of the story is Goody's slate gray 1951 Mercury Coupe, which we suspect has been souped up by the way it keeps up with all the modern cars. It gets put through all sorts of paces, including jumps off cliffs and smashing into multiple police cars during the last desperate chase scene.

The film ends on a major downer note, with everyone in the gang dead but Thunderbolt. Red made good on his promise, repeatedly kicking Lightfoot in the head to cause fatal brain damage. Goody gets shot through the trunk lid and Red is mauled by a guard dog at the store he crashes into, ironically the same place he'd been working as a janitor for his cover job.

The injured Lightfoot and Thunderbolt muddle along for awhile, with the young man growing increasingly dizzy and his speech slurred. They stumble upon the one-room schoolhouse, which had been moved to an interstate rest stop historical display, and recover the half-million from the first heist.

Thunderbolt rides off into the sunset, his friend and partner dead and all the threats against him dissolved. What sort of life lies before him? The movie offers only stubborn ambiguity and the obligatory sad ballad for the soundtrack.

"You know something? I don't think of us as criminals, you know? I feel we accomplished something. A good job. I feel proud of myself, man. I feel like a hero," Lightfoot opines, right before slumping over dead.

"Thunderbolt and Lightfoot" accomplished less than it could. There's a great movie in there, one where Red is a peripheral villain and the duo arrives at their denouement all on their own, having passed through the fire and come out changed men.

Nothing ruins a good buddy movie like interlopers.

Reeling Backward: "Paper Moon" (1973)

"Paper Moon" is best remembered today for boasting the performance by the youngest actor to ever win an Oscar, Tatum O'Neal at age 10.  She beat out Candy Clark from "American Graffiti," Sylvia Sidney from "Summer Wishes, Winter Dreams," Linda Blair of "The Exorcist" (just 14 herself) and O'Neal's own co-star, Madeline Kahn, for the Best Supporting Actress statue for 1973.

(She wasn't the youngest to ever get a nod, though. Jackie Cooper was nine when he was nominated for "Skippy" from 1931, and the youngest nominee ever was Justin Henry, age 8 for 1979's "Kramer vs. "Kramer." Shirley Temple received an honorary Oscar at six.)

It really is an amazing performance, especially when considers she'd never acted in anything before. Director Peter Bogdanovich recruited her to play alongside her real-life father, Ryan O'Neal, as a Depression-era girl who accompanies a con man on a small-time crime spree through the Midwest. People accused Ryan of nepotism, of course, but actually the film was always conceived as a father/daughter pairing: It originally was to have starred Paul Newman and his daughter, Nell Potts, but they left the project when director John Huston quit.

Tatum spends much of the film with a sour-pussed expressed pasted to her adorable little pixie face -- especially when anyone mistakes her character, Addie Loggins, for a boy (which happens frequently because of her short, almost severe haircut).

The screenplay by Alvin Sargent -- who's still alive and kicking in his 80s, thank you very much, having penned the last two "Spider-Man" films -- was adapted from the novel, "Addie Pray," by Joe David Brown. Bogdanovich got the new title from the 1933 song, "It's Only a Paper Moon," and includes a brief scene where Addie has a picture of herself taken in front of a faux moon, which she gives to Ryan O'Neal's character, Moses "Moze" Pray.

What's most interesting about "Paper Moon" is that it has the tone and timbre of a comedy, but the setting and style of the film are somber and more reminiscient of a European art film.

Start with the fact that it was shot in gorgeous black-and-white (by László Kovács) with a deep-focus lens, suggested by Bogdanovich mentor Orson Welles (which is a pretty awesome person to have as your mentor). Coupled with the spare visuals of the Kansas and Missouri plains, a dustbowl of poor farmers straggling along the road and economic blight, it's practically a widescreen opus of dreariness.

And yet, for all that suffering, we never really feel like our two main characters are in danger. Even the big scary moment at the end, when Moze is cornered by a dirty sheriff looking for payback from Moze scamming his bootlegger brother, the worst that happens to him is he gets (lightly) beaten up and has the stolen money stolen back.

The other big confrontation of the film is when Addie arranges for Moze to stumble upon his newfound girlfriend, a stripper named Trixie Delight (Kahn), in flagranta delicto with a hotel clerk -- but the expected bloodletting never arrives. Addie's partner in crime, Trixie's long-suffering black assistant Imogene (P.J. Johnson), predicts that Moze will kill them both. But he is simply disappointed -- heartbroken is not really in his wheelhouse, since he avoids attachment -- and Moze and Addie depart.

Addie and Moze's relationship is understated, which I think only underscores how much these two scammers care for each other, since showing their cards is something they both eschew. Moze picked her up after the funeral of Addie's mother, who many people suspect (including Addie) dallied with Moze and produced her only offspring.

So it's an interesting fact-and-fiction parentage puzzle: A real father and daughter playing a pair we suspect might be an actual parent and child, though they deny it, posing as such.

Moze was charged with delivering Addie to her aunt in Missouri, but instead he found an accomplice for his habit of scamming recent widows into buying overpriced Bibles. Turns out no one thinks a man with a cute little daughter could be dishonest. She soon upstages both his skill and daring.

Addie acts as their accountant and moral conscience, carefully tabulating their earnings -- which she keeps stored in her totem-like Cremo box, which also contains her few possessions -- while suggesting they give some of it away to the downtrodden folks they encounter in their journeys. (Imogene gets $30 to help her return to the home she ran away from.) Moze, who poses as a blackheart but has a bigger soft spot than he admits even to himself, wants to avoid all risk, especially lawmen.

John Hillerman -- best known as Higgins from TV's "Magnum P.I." -- has a sly dual role as the bootlegger and his brother the sheriff. Moze comes up with a scheme to steal whiskey from the bootlegger's stash and then sell it back to him. Turns out the lawman is the biggest con artist of them all.

With its sweet disposition but striking backdrop, "Paper Moon" is a lovely, wonderful film that always keeps us guessing.

3.5 stars out of four