Reeling Backward: "White Lightning" (1973)

"White Lightning" is the film that made Burt Reynolds a breakout star -- the biggest in the land, for a not-inconsiderable amount of time -- and also firmly established his niche of fast cars, bad cops, frisky women and smoldering machismo.

It's not a particularly great movie, landing more toward the trash end of the action/comedy spectrum with lots of poor car chases and ill-staged fistfights. Reynolds boasted it was made so cheaply that they didn't care if it played in any theaters north of the Mason-Dixon line. 

The movie was also a big break for Ned Beatty, who had played with Reynolds in the previous year's "Deliverance." Beatty helped set the stereotype of the fat, corrupt, red-faced Southern lawman that would become ubiquitous in subsequent popular film such as Reynolds' own "Smokey and the Bandit" series. 

Beatty was only in his mid-30s when these two films came out, one of those actors who seemed to be in perpetual middle age.

Diane Ladd also has a small part as a wife who gets harassed and threatened with sexual assault for protecting her man. (Alas, she gets her name misspelled as "Lad" in the credits.

Believe it or not, "White Lightning" was nearly the first feature film directed by Steven Spielberg. He had already scouted locations and cast much of the film when he decided he wanted to do something more personal, and so the somewhat similar "The Sugarland Express" became his debut instead.

The film did well enough that Reynolds was voted a top 10 box office star at the end of 1973, and would go on to star in a disastrous sequel, "Gator," which was also his directorial debut. It's currently sitting at 0 percent on the Tomatometer.

Screenwriter William W. Norton was known for doing cheapie exploitative flicks, and director Joseph Sargent worked mostly in TV with a few similar-strata features like "Jaws: The Revenge." It's a little unclear how funny they actually intended the movie to be. Reynolds' persona as moonshine hauler "Gator" McKlusky is thoroughly sardonic, though the mood is more tuned to tragedy and revenge themes than side-splitters.

The story is that Gator is serving hard time after his third bust for moonshining -- the first came at age 13 -- when his younger brother is murdered by J.C. Connors (Beatty), the powerful sheriff in nearby Bogan County, Ark. He vows revenge and earns an early release by promising the feds to bring down Connors by implicating him in the ubiquitous whiskey trade.

It's a pretty sweet and unlikely deal. He's given a year off his sentence, a few contacts and a car with a hot engine -- a 1971 Ford Custom 500, according to the indispensable Internet Movie Cars Database -- and very little oversight from the federal officers, who only show up once to check up on him during the course of the film. 

I can't imagine that even in 1973 federal authorities would release a prisoner on spec to go hunt up evidence against an elected lawman, rather than testifying to crimes that had already occurred. But hey, otherwise there's no movie.

He's assigned to coerce help from Dude Watson (Matt Clark), a local mechanic and stock car racer who also does a little moonshine running. Through him he's hooked up to Rebel Roy Boone (Bo Hopkins), a glad-hander and one of the top haulers. After a successful tryout as a blockade runner, getting in front of the cops while Roy makes his getaway, Gator is brought fully into the local trade, with Big Bear (R. G. Armstrong) running the big distillery.

Everybody pays Connors protection money to look the other way, and Gator tries fitfully to put together some evidence to prove this. Most of his spare time, though, seems to be spent canoodling on the sly with Lou (Jennifer Billingsley), Roy's girlfriend. 

At one point they skinny dip and get it on right under Roy's nose while he's eating breakfast. It's here we hear the first notes of Reynold's signature high-pitched trilling laugh that would become part of his iconography. Party hyena's caw, part rebel yell, it always seemed genuine no matter how many takes he might have to do.

There's also a theme about college kids invading Bogan County and bringing all their freethinking hippie ideas with them, such as racial equality and ending the war. Though there's hardly any black people in the movie, other than on one of Gator and Roy's whiskey dropoffs to the colored part of town.

I have to say the car stunts aren't particularly expert. Gator is supposed to be a first-class driver, but he slaloms and fishtails all over the road like a drunken teenager. Part of it's that big brown beast of a car he's driving -- actually the same make and model as most of the police cars -- but you'd see better wheel work in any episode of "The Dukes of Hazzard" TV show, which surely seems to have inherited much of its DNA from "White Lightning." 

Roy's car, a '71 Mercury Monterey, even has his name painted in script over the door and a Confederate flag just like the General Lee, though as a hood stripe than across the roof.

Beyond the quality of the driving, the chase scenes just aren't very exciting, quickly becoming repetitive as Gator skids around various dirt and gravel roads. The fistfights aren't much better, as Gator gets into it with Roy, Big Bear and a few others. There's also a few shootouts featuring that DayGlo orange fake blood that was common in 1970s movies.

At one point Roy gets shot up and beat up, and wakes up in a remote home for pregnant girls with a huge bandage covering his eye and most of his face. We think he's suffered some horrible wound that will impair his driving. But then he pulls off the bandage and there's just a mild scratch down his cheek.

Color me disappointed in "White Lightning." The movie doesn't give Burt Reynolds much to do other than glower, flirt and drive. This is one of those films that's more memorable for using actors and ideas that others would emulate in more interesting ways.

Video review: "Rango"

I can't think of a movie I had more fun at so far in 2011 than "Rango," a loopy, occasionally psychedelic animated flick starring Johnny Depp as a bug-eyed lizard. A domesticated pet who lives in a terrarium and invents companions and theatrical productions to amuse himself, he's literally a chameleon, and not just when it comes to the shade of his pebbly skin.

He ends up lost in the Mojave and stumbles into the town of Dirt, populated by every manner of desert critter imaginable. Things are tough in Dirt -- there's a gang of tunneling thieves waiting on the edge of town, a local crime boss looking for newcomers to squish, and the rumor of a slithery gunslinger named Rattlesnake Jake heading back their way.

Through a combination of wild circumstance and his own even more far-fetched boasting, the lizard finds himself appointed sheriff of Dirt, dubbing himself Rango to better suit his new role. Of course, there are all those aforementioned troubles that he's now expected to tackle.

Although kids will surely enjoy it, "Rango" is really a cartoon for adults, stuffed with highbrow humor and sly pop culture references.

Please note, "Rango" hits video outlets on Friday, July 15.

Video features are quite impressive, and you don't have to spring for the top-of-the-line edition to get good stuff.

The DVD version includes both the theatrical version of "Rango" plus an extended cut. To accompany both versions is a feature-length commentary track by director Gore Verbinski and several of his key crew members. There's also a collection of 10 deleted scenes, including an alternate ending, and an educational short about desert animals.

Opt for the Blu-ray/DVD combo pack and you add a number of other goodies, including a digital copy of the film. There's also a virtual tour of Dirt, a doc about this first foray into feature-length animation by Industrial Light & Magic, and a picture-in-picture feature where you can watch the movie in storyboard form.

Movie: 3.5 stars out of four
Extras: 3.5 stars out of four

Review: "Rango"

A neon-colored, sun-baked fantasia that's part Western spoof and part surrealist jag through the desert with Johnny Depp as our theatrically unhinged, reptilian tour guide, "Rango" is anything but your standard kiddie animated flick.

It's hard to believe this is the same team behind those "Pirates of the Caribbean" movies, which by the first sequel had devolved into formulaic schlock without a shred of story structure. But director Gore Verbinski, Depp and screenwriter John Logan have joined forces for one of the daffiest and most original animated features in a long, long time.

Maybe it's because "Rango," the story of a domesticated lizard who stumbles into a spaghetti Western, didn't issue forth from one of the animation giants like Disney/Pixar, DreamWorks or Blue Sky. It's a partnership between Nickelodeon, Verbinski's production company and George Lucas' Industrial Light & Magic, a special effects outfit making its first foray into computer-generated cartoons.

All I can say is, based on everything from the dazzling details on the numerous critters' parched faces to the multihued splendor of the arid landscapes to the crisply-paced action scenes, the ILM gang has announced themselves with authority. The animation in "Rango" -- which doesn't fall back on any cheap 3-D tricks, by the way -- is as good as, or better, than anything Pixar and the gang are doing right now.

Depp voices the lonely lizard passing his days inside his terrarium, imagining himself up some friends for his theatrical productions, in a scene that recalls Jack Sparrow trapped in Davy Jones' Locker in "PotC: At World's End." The film is filled to the brim with references to other movies, including a drive-by homage to "Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas."

After a mishap leaves him by the side of the road in the Mojave, our scaly friend with a penchant for changing identities as easily as he can shift colors winds up in the town of Dirt.

The townsfolk, comprising every manner of reptile, bird, arachnid and mammal native to the desert, are suffering through a horrid drought and an even worse funk. When our lizard friend accidentally sends a local marauder to boot hill, he's given the job of sheriff.

He dubs himself Rango, and quickly creates the persona of a Clint Eastwood-esque Man from Nowhere. Rango is delighted at his new status -- not to mention the attentions of Miss Beans (Isla Fisher), a local rancher who has a tendency to freeze up when flustered.

As he bedecks himself in increasingly flamboyant gunslinger garb and spins outrageous tales about killing the evil Jensen brothers with one bullet -- all seven of them -- we begin to wonder if the attention-craving Rango's noodle wasn't already cooked before he ever set a three-toed foot in the desert.

Of course, bigger challenges await. There's a local bully (Ray Winstone) in need of standing up to, a pack of tunneling varmint thieves on the outskirts of town led by a blind mole (Harry Dean Stanton), and a power-hungry Mayor (Ned Beatty) who appears to have been lifted directly out of "Chinatown," right down to the white 10-gallon hat and watery schemes of John Huston's iconic Noah Cross ... except now he's a turtle.

Even worse is the rumor of a dead-eye outlaw named Rattlesnake Jake (Bill Nighy) slithering back into town with the tumbleweeds.

It's a loopy, fun ride as we follow Rango on his (mis)adventures, including a posse hunt that culminates in an epic chase sequence complete with mounted bats and Wagner's "Ride of the Valkyries" arranged for banjos. Even more unexpected is the hallucinogenic amusement of several dream-slash-vision-quest scenes so bursting with colors and freaky-deaky images, I half expected melting clocks to ooze onto the screen.

A wild mishmash of Sergio Leone and Salvador Dali with an all-critter cast, "Rango" is what happens when animators forget about borders and just ride off into whatever sunset their imaginations take them.

3.5 stars out of four