Michael Cimino must have impressed Clint Eastwood — the screenplay for this tough guy crime caper was so good, Eastwood didn’t mind interrupting his progress as a director. Also great fun for Jeff Bridges fans, the show is writer-director Cimino’s least problematic picture — its only aim is non-stop action and agreeably vulgar comedy. And does it look good!  All that Montana scenery is dazzling in the upgrade to 4K.

Thunderbolt and Lightfoot 4K
4K Ultra HD + Blu-ray
KL Studio Classics
1974 / Color/ 2:39 widescreen / 115 min. / Street Date September 26, 2023 / available through Kino Lorber / 39.95
Starring: Clint Eastwood, Jeff Bridges, George Kennedy, Geoffrey Lewis, Catherine Bach, Gary Busey, Burton Gilliam, Roy Jenson, Bill McKinney, Vic Tayback, Dub Taylor, Gregory Walcott.
Cinematography: Frank Stanley
Art Director: Tambi Larsen
Film Editor: Ferris Webster
Original Music: Dee Barton
Produced by Robert Daley
Written and Directed by Michael Cimino

’70s mega-star Burt Reynolds never made a good-ol-boy on-the-road thriller as smart and efficient as boxoffice hit from Clint Eastwood’s Malpaso Company. Forget the beer ‘n’ dented fenders epics with Southern boys outrunning fat cat cops: writer-director Michael Cimino stages his action high in the Rockies, under Montana skies of crystal blue. Cimino’s first-directed picture knows exactly what it’s doing, and makes everybody involved look good.

We’re also impressed by Clint Eastwood’s producing partner Robert Daley, who guided all of Malpaso’s pictures from 1971’s Play Misty for Me through 1980’s Any Which Way You Can. Thunderbolt and Lightfoot may be the classiest low-brow buddy picture of the decade. As the majority of the players come from Eastwood’s stock company and old TV friends. The new director emerged as a major talent, with scene blocking better than Eastwood’s own. We can’t imagine Clint indulging Cimino’s later artist-auteur habits, but this is a winning debut feature.

As happens in so many crime pictures, the aftermath of a successful heist has become murderous. A minor screw-up has resulted in the loss of all the loot from their big caper: they hid it in old Montana schoolhouse, which was then demolished. Hotheaded gang member Red Leary (George Kennedy) is now obsessed with killing ‘Thunderbolt’ (Clint Eastwood), with help from fellow thieves Eddie Goody and Dunlop (Geoffrey Lewis & Roy Jenson). Hiding out disguised as a preacher, Thunderbolt joins up with the young drifter Lightfoot (Jeff Bridges), and re-establishes his previous partnership. Red still wants to kill Thunderbolt but puts off that notion when tempted by a new plan: re-do the exact same armored vault robbery, in the exact same way. They hire on for straight jobs to earn the seed money. As before, Red and Thunderbolt will blast their way into a vault with a military artillery piece. But can the gang make it through the heist without killing each other?

Clint Eastwood knew that his name guaranteed any movie a good first-week opening; his main accomplishment in the 1970s was not diluting his appeal with too many box office duds. Thunderbolt and Lightfoot certainly fulfills audience expectations for action and fresh genre twists. High-powered cars and stolen clunkers of every description scream down the country roads under blue Panavision skies, amid scenery as attractive as a western. Entertained as we are, we don’t ask where the highway patrol might be during all the car theft and gun battles on the street. One would think that Montana’s sharp rural cops would be alerted to these distinctive goons the moment they showed their faces. But this is the movies.

Michael Cimino’s script gives extra weight to the Buddy formula. He also pushes the crude jokes and the sex talk, which along with some vulgar situations earn the film an R rating. Young Lightfoot wears leather pants and attracts women like flies. One of the girls he brings home is Catherine Bach, a small part that nevertheless nabs Bach good billing in this woman-challenged crime tale. Bridges also has fun going in drag as part of the heist. As was the drill in the 1970s, there’s little or no sensitivity to cheap jokes about race, ethnicity, women or sex preference.

Jeff Bridges was enjoying a rising career arc, following in the footsteps of his talented father. Bridges is so funny at this dress-up foolery — Lightfoot and panty hose just aren’t compatible — that he earned a Best Supporting Actor nomination. The film’s attention-getting finish didn’t hurt Bridges’ chances either. As the curtain is going down, Cimino gives his movie some weight with a last-minute dose of sentiment. The scene is almost perfectly directed, and Clint Eastwood is particularly good.

The show isn’t perfect — George Kennedy’s cycle of threatening and then backing off repeats itself too many times, and the episode in which the gang members take straight jobs slows things down, even with the diversion of Jeff Bridges’ encounter with an exhibitionist housewife. Cimino compensates with a smart use of gorgeous location scenery. Several scenes are staged on the banks of bodies of water. Lightfoot and Thunderbolt find themselves at the beautiful Snake River, which to us Los Angeles residents might as well be flowing from heaven. In his later The Deer Hunter Cimino has Robert de Niro experience a pre-dawn Thoreau moment by a glacial lake. And Kris Kristofferson & Isabelle Huppert share an idyllic surrey outing adjacent to a mirror-like lake in Heaven’s Gate.

Thunderbolt pitches good character touches alons with its crude jokes. The secondary crooks are sketched a tad too broadly. Geoffrey Lewis’s Goody is too meek to point a gun, while George Kennedy’s Red stews in a perpetual rage, convinced that everybody has betrayed him and therefore has a bullet coming. Some of Cimino’s set pieces are merely clever, like the vicious guard dogs that Red foolishly overlooks. But the key story inventions have substance. The disappearance of the quaint old schoolhouse reminds us that the changing landscape obliterates our past and makes us feel obsolete. The old building’s rediscovery transcends lowest-common-denominator genre hackwork. Eastwood and Bridges enter like humble schoolboys, as if the schoolhouse were Dorothy Gale’s home magically returned from Oz, in one piece. God bless preservationists.

Thunderbolt and Lightfoot is fun for its minor cast members as well. Gary Busey has a nice bit as a landscaping contractor installer. Burton Gilliam is the expected moronic working stiff, a welder who befriends Thunderbolt. Wild man Bill McKinney lets our heroes hitchhike, but his car is packed with raccoons and rabbits, and he drives like a maniac. Dub Taylor does his fast-talking act as a gas station attendant, and Gregory Walcott is a pushy used car salesman. A friend since Clint Eastwood’s since his TV days, Walcott never lived down one résumé item: he starred in Ed Wood’s Plan 9 from Outer Space.

Rambling and raunchy, Thunderbolt and Lightfoot leaves audiences with a positive vibe, not just the usual genre admission that ‘it was good enough.’ It arrived at a time when average audiences were still surprised when a hero-thief gets his pile of stolen money, and doesn’t have to pay his debt to society. The watershed film for that expectation had been Sam Peckinpah’s The Getaway (1972). Even after the abandonment of the Production Code, many moviegoers thought an unwritten movie law was on the books, that decreed that Crime Never Pays.

The KL Studio Classics 4K Ultra HD + Blu-ray of Thunderbolt and Lightfoot will please demanding home theater enthusiasts. With a high-end 4K set or projector that can decode the Dolby Vision, one’s home presentation can rival or better the original theatrical experience . . . and you control the bathroom breaks. For fans of my age ‘home theater’ is the stuff of science fiction . . . in our formative years movies had been a largely ephemeral experience. There was never any guarantee that something you saw would come your way again, in anything like how it was originally shown.

The brand new master is likely derived from the excellent 4K scan seen on Kino’s earlier Blu-ray edition. I took a look at an ancient MGM DVD of this title, just for fun … we are so spoiled by the quality of today’s hard media video.

Kino repeats the fine audio commentary by Nick Pinkerton, from 2019. The track is loaded with facts and context, and also takes time to note Eastwood’s career emphasis on working-class values. This star’s movies never assume that making a living in America is easy. Remember Harry Callahan’s concern to save his store-bought dress slacks?

A new addition is a half-hour French interview piece with Michael Cimino, who covers his work with Eastwood with a sense of accomplishment. Cimino’s first writing credit was on the Sci-fi film Silent Running, and he clearly caught Clint’s attention as screenwriter for Magnum Force, working from a story idea by John Milius. We’re told that Thunderbolt and Lightfoot was originally conceived as taking place in non-contemporary times.

Think before you discard: if you own the old OOP Twilight Time disc of this show, don’t forget that it contains an Isolated Track for Dee Barton’s original music score. And save a positive thought for the memory of producer-preservationist Nick Redman.

Reviewed by Glenn Erickson

Thunderbolt and Lightfoot 4K
4K Ultra HD + Blu-ray rates:
Movie: Very Good ++
Video: Excellent
Sound: Excellent DTS-HD Master Audio 2.0 Mono; DTS-HD Master Audio 5.1
Supplements:
Audio commentary with Nick Pinkerton
For the Love of Characters featurette with director Michael Cimino
TV and radio spots.
Deaf and Hearing-impaired Friendly? YES; Subtitles: English (feature only)
Packaging: One 4K Ultra HD disc and one Blu-ray in Keep case
Reviewed: February 1, 2024
(7073thun)

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