Exploitation Interlude: ROLLING THUNDER

Couple days ago, I caught Rolling Thunder On Demand. This 1977 revenge thriller has a rep longer than my Johnson: William Devane stars as this burnt-fucking-out Vietnam vet who makes it home after seven years in a POW camp and finds a welcome wagon consisting of a wife who no longer loves him, a kid who doesn't know him, and a bar floozy who'd fuck a fence post to get her rocks off. Not that Devane seems to mind--he spends most of his time quietly wishing to be back in country, and he gets the next best thing when a gang of thieves cuts off his right hand and murders his family.

Everything happens pretty much exactly the way you'd imagine from then on out.

The Internet loves this movie. Quentin Tarantino loves this movie. I thought it was pretty much the epitome of all '70s exploitation fare: underwhelming. The action fills maybe fifteen minutes of screentime, and it's brutal as all get-out when it goes down, but you do the math, and you'll find a lot of aimless downtime.

Paul Schrader co-wrote the script; it's a clear spiritual sister to Taxi Driver. Burnt-out vet, alienated from society, uses violence to find meaning, comes up short after climactic bloodbath. Problem is, John Flynn directed this, not Martin Scorsese. Scorsese would slow burn the fuck out of this one--the loneliness, the rage--and make the build-up just as chilling as the actual violence. Flynn is no Scorsese. The movie meanders, briefly livened by moments of graphic violence.

It's a shame, really. I wanted to like this more than I did, and I see why it's well regarded. William Devane is a fucking bear here. I've always thought him one of the great cinematic non-entities, but he is just chilling as Major Charles Rane. In many ways, this is one of the seminal unsung performances of the 1970s. His work is easily the equal of DeNiro's in Taxi Driver; there's a gentle understanding of his own situation. Nothing bothers him--his family's indifference, their deaths, his own handicap--even his revenge comes off as more mandatory than desired.

The standout scene? Rane is talking to his wife's lover (his old best friend, natch) about how he made it out alive. Tells him the Gooks would bind his arms with rope behind his back, then pull his arms up until "the bones start to crackle." Makes the lover treat him like his Vietnamese captors did. Then tells him that you survive such a degradation when you "learn to love the rope."

Learn to love the rope.

At that point, we realize even suicide isn't going to cut it; you can't kill what died a long time ago. The film never lives up to Devane's frighteningly empty performance, but it's more than these films usually offer.

Well, maybe it does provide a little extra. Tommy Lee Jones co-stars as Rane's POW buddy, a younger guy who's twice as damaged and half as comprehending of his psychic state as Rane is. This is a guy so fucked that when Rane tells him he's found the guys who murdered his family, Jones simply says, "I'll get my gear," grabs a duffel pre-filled with a shotgun and shells, and deserts his whole family to join the hunt.

They get to the brothel where the bad guys are holing up, and Rane tells Jones to get inside, go upstairs with a hooker, and wait for the shooting to start. Jones does (and if you've ever wanted to see Tommy Lee Jones getting the least enthusiastic hand-job known to man, this is your film). Rane comes in, starts firing, and Jones calmly assembles his gun. The hooker asks what he's doing, and Jones replies, like a man declaring his preference for butter over margarine, "I'm gonna kill a whole lot of people."

And then he beams with joy and does just that.