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: "Charade" (1963)

"Charade" has sometimes been described as "the best Hitchcock movie Hitchcock didn't direct," but I'm not sure if that's really fair. Hitch often included bits of puckish and morbid humor in his films, but when it came time for scaring people, he was deadly serious about his craft.

This 1963 romantic thriller, by contrast, is fizzy and fun. Though there are a few moments where Audrey Hepburn, as wan heroine Regina Lampert, aka "Reggie," is imperiled, they are fleeting and frightening only in that sort of way you know everything is going to be alright. After all, she's the star of the picture, and if anything really dire happened to her, the show would be over.

When I say Hepburn is the star, I mean truly that: she far outshines co-star Carey Grant, but she's meant to. He is the moon who basks in her reflected light; he reacts to her rather than the other way around. Romantically, she is clearly the pursuer and he the pursued prey, wielding the shield of propriety to fend off her advances: 'Come into your room? Alone? At this time of night? Heavens!'

In this way director Stanley Donen and screenwriter Peter Stone essentially made a proto-feminist feature film. In some sense Hollywood has backpedaled since then -- nowadays it's almost unthinkable to have a star of Grant's stature in a movie in which he plays second fiddle to an actress.

The basic plot is that she's a widow whose husband was murdered, and now three strangers are chasing her around Paris, claiming she has $250,000 that belongs to them. (That's about $2 million in today's dollars.) Grant shows up as Peter Joshua, a dashing stranger who gets embroiled in the intrigue. She falls for him hard, even when it turns out he's in cahoots with the criminals... sort of. It gets more complicated from there.

The film has an interesting progeny and legacy. Stone and Marc Behm wrote the spec screenplay, but no studio was interested. So Stone turned it into a book, and suddenly everyone in Hollywood wanted it. Thus he turned it back into a screenplay. (Behm got a story credit.)

When they released the film, Universal Pictures improperly copyrighted the movie, so "Charade" became part of the public domain immediately. The fact that anyone could release their own version of it on video, or play it on television, probably helped the film remain popular over the years. It didn't even get an "official" video release by Universal until the awful, unnecessary remake starring Mark Whalberg came out in 2002, when the original was tacked on to the DVD as a bonus feature.

There was also a brouhaha over Hepburn's utterance of the word "assassinated," which was changed to "eliminated" in the wake of JFK's murder.

The movie is a total lark, more comedy than anything else. But I adored the cartoonish villains, the Parisian locales and the genuine romantic chemistry between Hepburn and Grant.

"Do you know what's wrong with you?" she asks as they part at the end of their night. "No, what?" he responds, setting up endless possibilities of Hollywood riffs. Instead, she looks at him pensively and exhales, "...nothing!" A beautiful line, and again usually the sort of thing the guy says to the dame, not vice-versa.

Grant was 59 when the movie was made to Hepburn's 33, though as I've noted before he seemed to stop aging at 38, looking much the same until he was deep into his 60s. Still, he felt self-conscious about the age difference and had the filmmakers add in several self-deprecating references by his character.

Unlike most older stars who fade away or segue into crotchety grampa roles, Grant had a daughter, his only child, at the age of 62 and decided to retire from acting to become a full-time daddy. Apparently he was just as magical in his final role as all his onscreen ones; Jennifer Grant wrote a loving tribute.

The bad guys are:

• James Coburn as Tex, a tall, preening showboat with a Southern drawl and a mean disposition.
• George Kennedy as Scobie, who's even bigger and even meaner than Tex, plus he has hook/weapon prosthetic hand.
• Ned Glass as Neopold Gideon, an older intellectual type, a turncoat who tends to have sneezing fits when he's nervous or endangered.
• Walter Matthau as Hamilton Bartholomew, a shady CIA man who claims to be helping out Reggie but is actually after the money himself. I'm not really giving anything away here, since Matthau practically smokes with suspicion from his very first scene. Not to mention, despite ostensibly being the Paris bureau chief of a federal government division, he's never able to muster up any actual resources to assist her.

The trio of chase men are introduced in a terrific scene: they each show up to Reggie's husband's funeral, and make close inspections of the body to ensure he's really dead. Scobie even sticks a pin in it -- literally.

In another rarity of mainstream Hollywood films, it's actually Tex, rather than Peter or Reggie, who has a flash of insight and figures out what her husband did with the money.  

But then the bad guys start showing up dead one by one, so suspicion falls on Peter, whose real name turns out to be Alex Dyle... or is it Adam Canfield ... or maybe Brian Cruikshank. One of the cleverest lines of dialogue is the very end, when Reggie and ... her man have gotten engaged, and she proposes they have lots of boys, "so we can name them all after you."

"Charade" also marked the first collaboration between Henry Mancini and Johnny Mercer, earning an Oscar nomination for original song.

Part screwball comedy, part spy thriller, and a whole lot romantic, "Charade" is what nowadays we would call the perfect date movie. A lot of these movies are forgettable, but not this one.

Reeling Backward: "The Eiger Sanction" (1975)

Watching "The Eiger Sanction," I haven't been this embarassed for Clint Eastwood since the chair speech at last year's GOP convention.

This 1975 spy thriller is like a time capsule of every misogynistic, racist and fascist impulse going around the country at the time, an ego buffer for a big movie star. It's the sort of picture where every single female the protagonist encounters wants to sleep with him, and all the male characters are opponents who must be defeated and/or sexually humiliated.

It's like two hours and nine minutes of gooey testosterone slathered across the screen.

In 1975, Eastwood was already 45 years old. He was an established star who didn't break out until his mid- to late 30s -- a pretty common phenomenon in Hollywood. (See Harrison Ford, Kevin Costner, Russell Crowe, etc.) He'd already been an iconic Western gunman and brutal cop Dirty Harry, and was starting to direct his own pictures. I wasn't very familiar with this section of his oeuvre, and thought I'd take a peek.

"The Eiger Sanction" was his fourth stint behind the camera and, I hope, his worst.

The screenplay by Hal Dresner, Warren Murphy and Rod Whitaker was based on the novel by Trevanian, Whitaker's pen name. It involves a college professor/art collector/mountain climber/assassin by the name of Jonathan Hemlock -- which must represent some sort of pinnacle (or nadir) for Ridiculously Conceived Fiction Characters With Even More Ridiculous Names.

It seems that, at the ripe old age of 35, Hemlock has retired from a storied career climbing mountains to teach art at the local university, where he's hit on by an endless stream of co-eds who are willing to trade favors for better grades or whatnot. On the side he buys up famous paintings by Matisse and Pissarro off the black market for $10,000 a pop, which is a pretty good discount even nigh on 40 years ago.

It also seems Dr. Hemlock is a dual retiree, having hung up his wetboy credentials for C-2, a mysterious quasi-government agency headed by a man named Dragon (Thayer David), who is a "pure" albino who can't abide any light whatsoever and must have his entire bodily supply of blood replaced every six months. His number two is Pope (Gregory Walcott), a clownish creep who's always smiling at the wrong things and spouting hateful insults, preferably against blacks and women.

Hemlock is arm-twisted into performing two last "sanctions," or assassinations. He's convinced to do so because these men killed an old spy friend of his, plus the $20,000 he's getting paid. (I guess spies, like paintings, went for a lot cheaper back then -- even adjusted for inflation, that's only about 85 grand.)

The first hit is carried out relatively painlessly, a standard fight scene in a European hotel that ends with some guy taking a short walk out a tall window. What's interesting about it is that Hemlock pretends to be a swishy deliveryman -- if you ever wanted to hear Eastwood do a coquettish accent, here it is -- to scope out the place. Then he goes outside, daringly climbs a drain pipe to an apartment window next door, so that he can then ... walk through the exact same door he just knocked on.

Somewhere in here, Hemlock gets seduced by another C-2 agent named Jemima Brown, which immediately knocks Jonathan Hemlock down a peg on the Ridiculously Named Characters list. Vonetta McGee as Jemima is one of the film's few high points, drawing some real sparks in her scenes with Eastwood. Jemima beds him and then betrays him, but reappears in the final act to cheer him on.

Also showing up is Jack Cassidy as Miles Mellough, an old Hemlock chum-turned-traitor who helped sell out the dead spy friend. Even for 1975 Miles is an egregious homosexual caricature, right down to wearing a reflective shirt unbottoned down to his navel, and carrying around a little frou-frou dog named, I am not making this up, Faggot. Hemlock seems to take a special delight in taking Miles out.

This brings us to the finale of "The Eiger Sanction," the inspiration for its title and the only reason I'm not giving this giant turd one star.

It seems that C-2 can't pinpoint the other killer, other than he's a member of an international team of mountain climbers set to tackle the north face of the Eiger -- one of the most notoriously hard climbs in the world. The idea is to slip Hemlock onto the team, let him figure out who the killer is, and then take him out, making it look like an accident.

Now, think about that for a second. How could a spy agency know the killer was a member of the climbing team, but not know which one? There's only three other guys besides Hemlock, so it's not like they have to investigate an entire troop of suspects. One of the story's many problems is that the spooks, from Dragon on down to Hemlock, seem to be absurdly ineffective at their spycraft.

The mountain climbing scenes are pretty spectacular, featuring some gorgeous cinematography and a few harrowing sequences. "The Eiger Sanction" was one of few Hollywood films before 1980 to depict mountain climbing -- 1956's "The Mountain" with Robert Wagner and Spencer Tracy being one of the rare exceptions. It became something of a fad in the late 1980s and '90s, mostly in awful thrillers just like "Eiger."

I'm just glad Clint Eastwood survived the early, tawdry portion of his career behind the camera long enough to learn better.

1.5 stars out of four