Burl reviews Thunderbolt and Lightfoot! (1974)

 

Wacka-doo, snakecharmers, it’s Burl, here to review a picture I’ve long wanted to see but somehow never got around to until now! It’s a Malpaso picture from the 1970s, and you know what that means: Clint! And most of those movies, whether Eastwood directed them or not, have that Malpaso feeling: you watch them and just know that each take is the first or at most the second, and that whether it was directed by Don Siegel, who was Clint’s directing mentor, or James Fargo, whom Clint mentored in turn, or by Clint himself, in each case the same philosophies and work methods were employed! So there’s a sameness to these films, which isn’t unwelcome – in fact it’s comforting! Nevertheless, when you see one that’s clearly operating on its own principals, it’s pretty refreshing, and Thunderbolt and Lightfoot is just such a film!

Of course we know Eastwood from such pictures as Blood Work and Tarantula, and here he plays a laconic vault cracker-turned-fake-priest known as Thunderbolt, and we meet him at the pulpit just as an angry George Kennedy from Creepshow 2 and Earthquake arrives at the church and tries to shoot him dead! In his frantic escape he hooks up with a young Jeff Bridges, not yet of Starman and King Kong fame, who has just stolen a roadster from a used-car salesman played by none other than Gregory Walcott from Plan 9 from Outer Space! Bridges, of course, is Lightfoot, and soon this pair of sillynames are bombing around picturesque Montana, being buddies and, in their masculine, mid-70s manner, falling in love!

Their first adventure together involves catching a ride from a completely insane driver played by Bill McKinney from Cannonball! Ha ha, this demento keeps a caged badger in the front seat and tears it up on and off the road, and after he’s barrel-rolled the auto it turns out he’s got a trunk full of live bunny rabbits, which he starts blasting at with a shotgun! Soon we get a taste of George Kennedy again, and it turns out that Kennedy is playing Red, an old partner of Thunderbolt’s who believes the craggy longuebönes to have stolen some ill-gotten loot! Red and his confrere Goody, played by Eastwood buddy Geoffrey Lewis, whom we’ll recall from Smile and ‘Salem’s Lot, first do some fisticuffs with and then enter into a foursquare partnership with Thunderbolt and Lightfoot in order to once again take out the vault Thunderbolt et al. had robbed the previous time!

So the gang is assembled and the plan is made, but first they all have to get jobs to buy the equipment they need to do the heist! Ha ha, we get all sorts of amusing vignettes featuring famous faces like Gary Busey from Silver Bullet, looking young and handsome; Burton Gilliam from Fletch, playing the sort of grinning good old boy he made his stock-in-trade; Dub Taylor from Creature from Black Lake just being Dub; and Luanne Roberts from Simon, King of the Witches as a stark naked housewife! Lightfoot has an encounter with a motorcycle rider who’s handy with a hammer, played by Karen Lamm from Ants!; and before the heist can be pulled off, the fellow monitoring the security alarms must be taken care of by a drag Lightfoot, and the security fellow turns out to be a chubby, girlie magazine-reading individual played by Cliff Emmich, who played another chubby security officer who gets hit on the head later on in Halloween II!

The picture dwells less on the robbery details than most heist pictures do – perhaps because it’s not centrally a heist story but is organized more around buddy themes! Still, there is the unique aspect that the vault is broken into by means of a 20mm cannon, ha ha, and the use of this tool is what earned Thunderbolt his name! And then of course after the heist it all goes pear-shaped, and the tensions within the group are expressed physically (and boy-arr-dee, how great an actor is George Kennedy!), and we come to realize that a line delivered earlier in the picture (“Ate ‘im?”) was a case of Dramatic Foreshadowing!

Now, this is the first picture from Mr. Michael Cimino, who vaulted into the prestige picture business with his follow-up, The Deer Hunter! This one isn’t a prestige picture though – it’s a genre film with a higher-toned style and an almost defiant insistence on theme and subtext! The idea of Thunderbolt and Lightfoot as unconsummated lovers is not very subtle (although I’m not sure Clint was cognizant of it, Bridges was, definitely), and what it really is, once you factor in the other couple, Red and Goody, is a study in how well an all-male machine, each component having a few teeth missing from their gears, can operate; and the answer is, ha ha, not very well! I found the movie a splendid entertainment, wonderfully photographed and impeccably cast: an unsung gem of the 70s! I give Thunderbolt and Lightfoot three broken cigars!

Burl reviews Un Flic! (1972)

 

Eh bonjour, est bonne année, c’est Burl! Today I have a review of the last feature made by the great Jean-Pierre Melville! Now, he’s best known for his crime pictures, of course, but he worked in other genres too, like the French Resistance genre! But this picture, Un Flic, or, in English, A Cop, is most certainly a crime picture! Ha ha, with a dirty street Santa popping up at one point, it’s also in part a holiday picture!

But it’s a slightly oddball one! For starters, although the movie is called Un Flic, and although the big star Alain Delon, known from his appearance as a pilot/stickman in The Concorde… Airport ’79, plays the titular taciturn flatfoot, it’s the criminals who get more screen time! And Delon’s cop character, Edouard, is a pretty robotic and unpersonable fellow, driving around, forever receiving calls on his police radio, being handed the phone by his partner, and intoning the exact same little phrase every time! I guess the idea is that being a police detective is not the glamorous world the earlier films of Jean-Pierre Melville had led us to believe it might be! Ha ha!

Richard Crenna from First Blood and Summer Rental plays the main thief, Simon, and things kick off with a bank heist set in a stormy off-season beach city, and though the thieves get some of the boodle they sought, they don’t get it all, and not only that but one of their number catches a bullet! By garr! However, the purpose of this heist was merely to finance another heist, and on this point it is successful enough!

We spend time alternately with Edouard and with Simon, and occasionally with both of them, because it turns out that they’re pals! Not only that, but the share the same sweetie pie, a radiant blonde played by Catherine Deneuve, that classy hemogobbler from The Hunger! Then we get the picture’s showpiece, which is Simon’s second heist! Ha ha, he climbs from a miniature helicopter to a miniature train, changes from his boiler suit into a debonair housecoat, then bonks a drug courier about the head and takes his narcotic-filled suitcase before shinnying back up to the miniature helicopter! Ha ha, it’s a terrific sequence!

The whole picture is shot in the sort of steel-blue patina we may recall from Playtime, and indeed the bank building at the beginning looks like a leftover set from that Tati classic! The picture is consistently engaging, with well-managed suspense and drama scenes, all leading up to the sort of ending popular in French crime pictures since Breathless, or for that matter since Pépé Le Moko! It’s pretty thin gruel so far as characterizations go, however, and the sense of doomy inevitability it’s trying to foster never really takes hold! But it’s a fine crime feature, and, even if not up to Melville’s finest work, a decent capstone to his career! I give Un Flic three curly-cord carphones!

Burl reviews The Silent Partner! (1978)

Ha ha, it’s Burl, please give me all the money! No, just kidding, I’m not here to rob you! I’m here to review one of my own Yuletide standards, the great Canadian thriller The Silent Partner!

Yes, where some people have Die Hard or Cobra, my own favourite non-Christmasy Christmas picture is this jolly tale! But many people forget – I myself had forgotten before re-watching the movie, in fact – that it’s only a Christmas picture for the first half, after which it switches to a summery milieu! Nevertheless, the images of a cold-eyed Christopher “Dreamscape” Plummer in a Santa suit are what linger from the movie, so file it under Xmas, say I! Ha ha!

The plot unfolds like the chess game so frequently and unsubtly referred to through the picture! Miles Cullen, played by Elliot Gould from M*A*S*H and S*P*Y*S and W*H*I*F*F*S, is a milquetoast bank teller in Toronto’s then-new Eaton Centre mall! It’s nearly Christmas, and the observant Miles notices clues which lead him to believe one of the many mall Santas is going to mount a bank heist! So he prepares by setting aside most of the money for himself, and Plummer, the bad Santa, gets away with only a small amount!

Well, this does not sit well with Santa, and he sets about trying to von Trapp the teller into giving him the money! Back and forth goes the see-saw, and soon Miles has cleverly led the police to Santa’s very workshop itself! This is where the time jump occurs, with Miles sitting on his money – which he keeps in a safe deposit box at the curiously low-security bank – while Santa sits in the cooler!

Of course the battle continues once Santa is released, and then we have more threats, some shouting, a gruesome fishtank murder and a scene in which John Candy, years before he was Armed & Dangerous, gets married to a vacuum-headed blonde! Finally Santa, who has reinvented himself as a woman, makes another assault on the bank, and Johnny Smith’s dad from The Dead Zone gives him serious what-for!

Anyone who is curious about what Canadian money looks like should watch this picture! They’ll find not just many scenes of Gould counting out bills, but attractive photography from Billy “Billion Dollar Brain” Williams and solid suspense direction from Daryl Duke, who’d made Payday a couple of years earlier! Little remarked upon, other than for its existence, is the score by jazz great Oscar Peterson! Ha ha, it turns out that Peterson was not just a great pianist and composer, but a dab hand at suspense music as well!

Here is a fine genre exercise, dated in only the best ways! (Candy, for example, is quite svelte!) There could stand to be a little less of the relationship between Gould and banking colleague Susannah York, but it pays off in the end, and makes the picture richer! The young and lovely Francophone who makes sweet love to Gould later in the picture is not the greatest performer ever, but she does okay! In sum, this is a movie worth your while, especially at this time of year! I give The Silent Partner three deceased angelfish!