Cinema Speculation

Rolling Thunder

(1977)

John Flynn’s Rolling Thunder tells the story of Air Force Major Charles Rane (William Devane), who during the Vietnam war was shot down over Hanoi. He was held prisoner in what one character describes as a “Hanoi hellhole” for seven years. The film starts in 1973 when the POW’s are finally being released. When Maj. Rane steps off the plane in San Antonio, Texas, alongside his fellow captives, including his buddy Sgt. Johnny Vohden (Tommy Lee Jones), he’s greeted to a hero’s welcome, including cheering fans, dress uniform military brass, and even the local high school marching band (one of the first images in the film). Also, among that cheering crowd is the wife he left behind seven years ago, Janet (Lisa Richards), and his nine-year-old son Mark (Jordan Gerler).

Charlie Rane enters the picture not dissimilar to Martin Scorsese’s description of John Wayne’s Ethan Edwards in The Searchers. Returning home from a war he fought and lost, which left unhealable wounds to his humanity. As Scorsese described, “he has a great love within him that’s been stamped out.”

The way Ethan Edwards in his mind probably romanticized his brother’s wife Martha during his bloody conflicts is no doubt similar to how Charlie Rane romanticized his own wife during his captivity.

It’s humorous comparing the two characters, because in The Searchers Ethan Edwards is far more self-aware than Charlie. Ethan may covet his brother’s wife (when he arrives at the massacre aftermath, it’s her name, “Martha!” he calls out in frightened panic, not his own brother), but he would never claim her as his own. It’s doubtful he would do that to any other man, especially his brother (or should I say another white man. It seems Debbie has been married to Scar for several years). But far more important to Ethan’s discipline is he knows he’s no good for her. He’s well aware he’s incapable of the love and strength it would require to be a loving husband and father.

When Charlie Rane comes home to pick up where he left off, he’s not self-aware enough to know that would be impossible. After seven years of captivity, Charlie is not the same man his wife and two-year-old son said goodbye to on a military airfield.

He’s unemotional, unresponsive, and stoic to the point of not being among the living. He can’t sleep with his wife in their bedroom, instead moving into a toolshed in the backyard that duplicates his prison camp cell. His son doesn’t remember him—and though Charlie tries to make an effort—the boy finds it awkward and rejects the advances.

Once the family arrive home on Charlie’s first night back, he and his wife settle down in the front room to share their first time alone together in seven years.

Janet confesses, “I’ve been with another man.”

Charlie’s actually nonjudgmental, telling her calmly, “We [meaning his fellow POW comrades] all knew. Couldn’t a been any other way.”

But Janet isn’t through with the devastating revelations. She reveals that she’s fallen in love with a local Highway Patrolman named Cliff (Lawrason Driscoll), who’s asked her to marry him and she’s accepted.

Charlie turns cold, “I don’t think I’m up for any more of this,” freezing her to death long before her ultimate fate.

But if Charlie could get past the homecoming daydream he’s carried in his head for seven years, he’d see clearly that—like Ethan Edwards—he’s physically and emotionally incapable of being the loving husband and father that Cliff would be.

Another comparison between the John Flynn film and the John Ford film is both pictures’ sense of community ritual on display. Charlie may be a stranger to his family, but to the townspeople of San Antonio he’s a hero. The residents of San Antonio don’t seem to be conflicted about the Vietnam War at all. Nor did they forget him while he was away. For seven years a sign sat in the local park that read “Send a letter to Hanoi Release Maj. Charles Rane.” As a hometown act of symbolic solidarity, a local Texas belle, bar waitress Linda Forchet (played by the magnificent Linda Haynes), wore his ID bracelet the entire time he was in captivity. In honor of Charlie’s service to his country and community a local car dealership gives Maj. Rane a brand spanking new, big ass, candy apple red Cadillac convertible. And in an act of symbolic reimbursement for his sacrifice, a local department store offers him a gift of two thousand five hundred fifty-five silver dollars, one for every day of his captivity (including one for good luck).

To the locals of San Antonio he’s not only a hero, but a local celebrity. Charlie can’t walk into a bar without the bartender buying him a drink. Linda Forchet describes herself as a Charlie Rane “groupie,” a term she has to explain to Charlie.

The bitter irony is while his community accepts and even reveres him, his own family rejects him. At home he can’t elicit a smile from his son, and his wife is so guilty she can’t even look at him without bursting into tears.

This opening thirty minutes is a grippingly detailed character study, and by the time it’s over the audience doesn’t just sympathize with Charlie Rane, we really do understand him. Apparently better than anybody else in the film. It’s a much deeper depiction of the casualties of war than the contrite Coming Home, with its paraplegic hippie Jesus figure telling it like it is.

Then one late afternoon, Charlie drives his big ass Cadillac into his driveway. And just as soon as he steps across his threshold, the barrel of a gun is jammed against the side of his head, and he’s yanked inside.

Enter the Acuna Boys.

The Acuna Boys are four Texas scumbags (two white and two Mexican, though only the white ones have any real dialogue) that have broken into Maj. Rane’s house to swipe his two thousand five hundred and fifty-six silver dollars. Not being able to find it when the house was empty, they wait for the Major to come home so they can force him to hand them over. The ringleader of the Acuna Boys is a puffy-sweaty-disgusting-no-name cowboy with fancy boots, played to a fare-thee-well by Rosco Coltrane himself, James Best.

Best demands the silver dollars and informs Charlie that they’re prepared to torture him to get them. What they’re not prepared for—after seven years of practice—is Charlie’s ability to withstand torture.

The Vietnamese knew if they could make Maj. Rane disavow his own country, it would only be a matter of time before the other prisoners followed suit. But despite their best efforts, they never could break Charlie. So after seven years of torture at the hands of his communist captors, when these Texas shitbirds suddenly show up demanding information, Charlie ain’t talking.

The only difference, while the communists might have been more skilled at torture than these scumbags, the VC didn’t want to kill Charlie Rane, they wanted to break him.

If they killed him, in a way, Charlie won.

If they killed the Americans’ commanding officer, none of the other soldiers would break. It was a propaganda victory that was important to the enemy. But the Acuna Boys not only don’t care if Charlie dies, it’s pretty apparent that killing him once they get their hands on those silver dollars was the plan from the start. So out of frustration to the stoic defiance that Charlie shows their amateur-night violence, they shove his hand down the kitchen sink garbage disposal and grind it off.

Then his wife and son come home, and in an effort to save his father (a meaningful moment for both Charlie and us), Mark tells the bastards where the money is.

Then, in their own sign of symbolic Acuna Boy gratitude, they shoot—execution style—both Janet and Mark dead, then shoot Charlie dead . . . or so they think.

From here on end, what follows is Maj. Charles Rane, now armed with a sharp pointy hook where his ground-off hand used to be, in his big ass red Cadillac convertible, with a boot full of weapons, accompanied by dishwater blond barfly Linda Forchet, driving through Mexico, tracking down the Acuna Boys, in what my character The Bride would call “a roaring rampage of revenge.”

When I first saw Rolling Thunder with my mother and her boyfriend Marco in 1977 on the film’s opening night in Los Angeles, on a double feature with Enter the Dragon, it blew my fucking mind!

What was it about the movie I dug so much?

Well, at that age—Revengeamatic films—with dynamic blood-all-over-the-walls climaxes—were my idea of a good time at the movies.

I loved Rolling Thunder so much that years before it became available on Vestron Home Video—for a period of ten years—I followed it all over Los Angeles, whenever and wherever it played (before home video, cinephiles used to do things like that). Which would be easy enough once I had a car and knew how to drive. But before I knew how to drive or had a car, I’d travel by bus, hours away from my home, to some really sketchy neighborhoods to see Rolling Thunder unspool in some very unique movie theatres. A few of the more memorable were the beautiful but dilapidated Orpheum Theatre in Downtown Los Angeles, on a 35mm print with Spanish subtitles, on the lower half of a double feature with Burt Reynolds’ Hooper. And at the Palace Theatre in Long Beach (which was hardly a “palace”) on a triple feature with Joe Dante’s The Howling and Chuck Norris’ Good Guys Wear Black.

Initially, when I chased Charlie Rane and his hook for a hand all over L.A., it was to grindhouses and second-run theatres. But later in the eighties, Rolling Thunder started appearing as part of Vietnam programs at many different revival houses. Which led to me taking in screenings of the John Flynn film at the Nuart (in West Los Angeles), the New Beverly (on Beverly and La Brea), the Vista (where Hollywood Boulevard and Sunset meet), and the Rialto (in Pasadena), on double bills with films like Go Tell the Spartans, Who’ll Stop the Rain, and even Apocalypse Now (a rather long night at the movies).

So was it just the spectacle of the powerfully depicted explicit violence that made me love Flynn’s film as much as I did?

Well . . . maybe that initial screening, yeah.

But after I watched it a few times, I began to have a deeper understanding of the film. In fact, a deeper understanding than I had ever had to any film prior.

When I was promoting my first book, the novelization of Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, I appeared on a fun podcast called 3 Books with Neil Pasricha. The idea of the show was for Neil to discuss with an author three books that had a formative influence on them. Not necessarily their three favorite books. But three books that had an influence on them, usually earlier in their life. One of the books I chose was Dan Jenkins’ Semi-Tough (to this day the funniest book I ever read).

I described to Neil one of the things that really grabbed me (I read it at fifteen or sixteen) was Jenkins wrote the whole book as if his lead character, Billy Clyde Puckett, was speaking into a tape recorder. I had read first-person narratives before. But never something so causal, or immediate, or naturalistic, or funny.

I remember thinking, “You can write a book this way? If you can write a book this way, maybe I could write a book?”

Then Neil (bless his heart) said, “Ahhhh, that’s the book that gave you permission to be a writer.”

And he’s right, it was.

Well, Rolling Thunder was the movie that gave me permission to be a critic. The first time I analyzed a movie.

John Flynn’s film and William Devane’s performance was the first time I looked deeper into a film’s character than just what was on screen. There was a depth to Charlie Rane and a three-dimensionality that revealed itself to me the more I saw the film. Charlie Rane was the first movie character that I examined after the movie was over.

What I used to claim about Rolling Thunder was it was the best combination of character study and action film ever made.

And it still is.

The film also made me a champion of its director, John Flynn. At least the three action films he did in a row in the seventies, The Outfit, Rolling Thunder, and Defiance. It seemed all the cool critics had their special filmmaker to champion and Flynn was mine.

So much so that I sought him out at nineteen to interview him.

How did I manage that?

Simple—if not easy—I looked up every John Flynn in the phone book, called them up and asked, “Is this John Flynn?” If they said yes, then I asked them, “The John Flynn who directed Rolling Thunder?”

Till eventually one said, “Yes it is, who is this?”

Wow! It’s him, it’s fucking him!

I had never spoken to a movie director before. No less the director of one of my favorite movies. So I introduced myself and told him I was writing a book on film directors, and could we get together and interview him about his career. And he agreed, and we set a time, and he invited me to come over to his house and conduct the interview.

Holy shit, I’m going to see what a movie director’s house looks like!

As we sat down in his living room to conduct the interview, he poured me a glass of red wine, and put on his turntable Morricone’s soundtrack to The Sicilian Clan, and I began asking my questions and testing my theories about Rolling Thunder.*

Flynn explained to me the history of the project as such. Paul Schrader wrote Rolling Thunder after writing his first script, Taxi Driver, and before he wrote The Yakuza, and the three scripts together create an interesting trilogy for the young writer.

Besides the fact that they’re good movies, they also share complex male Schraderesque protagonists at their center, and all three scripts end in Peckinpah-like blood-all-over-the-walls violent catharsis (which in all three motion pictures are spectacularly achieved).

The script for The Yakuza takes the Daiei Japanese yakuza film and plays it pretty straight, just fashions it for Western audience consumption.

But both Taxi Driver and Rolling Thunder take popular subgenres of the day (vigilante movies and Revengeamatics), appear to be offering up another entry, but instead offer a cracked-mirror blistering critique of the genre.

Rolling Thunder was sold to Lawrence Gordon, who was head of production at American-International Pictures, after Schrader’s high-profile sale of The Yakuza screenplay to Warner Bros.

The writer fashioned the script to be his first film as a director. And you can believe that, because especially in the first half of the screenplay, it’s pretty much directed on the page, and directed well, I might add. If I filmed it, I would shoot the first half exactly the way Schrader dictates it in the screenplay. But nobody at AIP was willing to back this high-profile script purchase with Paul behind the camera. John Milius told me Paul wrote it for him to direct. I do believe Paul wrote it for himself, but once that option was off the table, and since Milius had just finished directing his first feature, Dillinger for Lawrence Gordon and AIP, I can see Paul thinking Big John was a good candidate to make the hard-hitting script into a powerhouse film.

And he’s right, seemingly, Milius would have been perfect.

He at least would have shot Schrader’s script, because he loved it, Milius told me. “Boy it was a good script—with wonderful stuff in it.”

But John didn’t want to make it.

I asked “Why not?”

Milius said, “I don’t know. I guess at the time I didn’t want to do something that dark.”

Then at AIP it almost came to pass in a real interesting incarnation. In an interview, George Romero revealed that around 1974 the film was set up as a package with him as director. Romero explained, “Schrader was hot in town because of The Yakuza screenplay sale, and Joe Don Baker was hot because of Walking Tall. And I was hot because of Night of the Living Dead. So a package deal with those three principals was set up at AIP. Then The Yakuza came out and bombed. Then Golden Needles [a Joe Don Baker film with Jim Kelly] bombed, and the deal fell apart.”

It hung around as an unmade hot potato at AIP until Lawrence Gordon left the company to become an independent producer and took the script with him. Because as Flynn said, “That was Larry’s favorite script from his AIP days. He was determined to get it made as one of his first projects as producer.”

Gordon took the project and set it up over at Twentieth Century Fox.

Having made Hard Times with Walter Hill, Gordon offered the film to Hill’s buddy and director of The Outfit, John Flynn.

Flynn agreed and they started looking for their Major Charles Rane. Reading the original Schrader script, it’s pretty fucking obvious that the role of Rane was written for Joe Don Baker. And Baker had of course acted in Flynn’s previous film. So it seems like a natural fit.

And Flynn told me they sent the script to Baker to read. “Baker never slept at night. So we sent it to him and he read it during the night.” But for some reason nobody can remember, in the morning Baker passed.

Then it was sent to David Carradine, who also passed. Though Carradine later said, “At the time I knew I should have done it. But I was trying to get another revenge type movie made. And I kinda knew this [Rolling Thunder] was the better script. But I had spent too much time on the other one and I couldn’t give it up. Then the way it came to pass, we never did get that other revenge movie made.”

At a screening at one of my QT Film Festivals in Austin, Texas, in 2001, Carradine watched Rolling Thunder for the first time with me and he loved it. He told me, “Boy, I was a dummy and turned down a lot of good stuff in my career. But me turning that down has to rank with the dumbest.” And because of the timing he obviously read the Schrader original. As we walked away from the Alamo Drafthouse, David remarked, “The script I read wasn’t as good as the movie we just saw.”

After William Devane gave what many people still consider the best portrayal of John F. Kennedy in the two-part TV event The Missiles of October, his star was on the rise in Hollywood. He was looked at as another potential dynamic actor/could-be star. A so-ugly he’s handsome kind of guy with serious chops who could also be a leading man (George C. Scott, Roy Scheider).

Devane followed up his Kennedy portrayal with lead roles in two big-deal TV movies, Fear on Trial (with George C. Scott) and Red Alert. Then when he moved into movies he entered as a comer. He received a good part with above-title billing in the hit thriller Marathon Man. That ended up being the first of three pictures he did with director John Schlesinger (the other two being Yanks and the underrated Honky Tonk Freeway). Then he was one-quarter of the lead quartet that starred in Alfred Hitchcock’s last film, Family Plot (he replaced Roy Thinnes after Hitchcock fired him).

And the same year as Rolling Thunder he also starred in one of my favorite sequels of all time, The Bad News Bears in Breaking Training.

He was offered the Schrader script by Twentieth Century Fox, who according to Flynn, “were very high on Devane.”

Both Flynn and Devane felt the idea and the structure of Schrader’s script was solid, but the material itself was, in the exact words of John Flynn, “unfilmable.”

Well, I’m here to say, that’s horseshit! It’s a terrific piece of writing. Truly Paul Schrader at his best. It wasn’t that Paul Schrader’s script was “unfilmable,” you just needed the balls to film it.

Why they felt it was “unfilmable” is pretty obvious, but I’ll get into that later. So at Devane’s suggestion, his screenwriter friend Heywood Gould was brought on to do a rewrite. Gould was sort of famous inside Hollywood for writing the screenplay Fort Apache the Bronx, which was a script that got passed around the industry that everybody loved but no one would produce (they eventually produced a really mediocre movie out of it in 1981 starring Paul Newman).

Gould and Flynn and Devane hung out together for weeks fashioning a shooting script and turning it into the movie they wanted to make.

As Gould remembered it, “I was working as a bartender in Soho, living in a residential hotel and generally having a blast. Bill Devane had read a draft of a script I wrote called Fort Apache the Bronx, plus my novel One Dead Debutante. I don’t know what was happening behind the scenes, but I know they were already in prep when they decided they needed a rewrite and Bill suggested me.

“So they flew me to L.A. and I met Larry Gordon, the producer, and the director, John Flynn. I read the script that night and as I remember it was a relentless bloodbath, which I guess they didn’t want.

“At the meeting the next day I said they could keep the structure of the story, but needed more scenes to explain Rane, more emotion in his family life, more realistic bad guys, and they definitely needed a plausible, sympathetic woman [who doesn’t?].

“I did a little writing out of sequence because they wanted scenes for the auditions. I wrote the scene in the bar where Rane meets Linda Haynes first and then the scene in the garage where he relives the torture for Cliff [the line “You learn to love the rope” became the motto for the shoot when the temperatures went over 110]. Then the homecoming scene with Rane and his wife and stuff with his son.

“I pretty much wrote the picture in L.A. and then went home. Then the next week they called and flew me to San Antonio to do a production rewrite based on the locations they had chosen. I stayed about a month and ended up writing new scenes for Rane and Linda and rewriting the fight scenes and the big brothel shootout at the end.

“I wanted to show some unspoken love and communication between the two men [Devane and Jones] because I objected to what I considered to be the original’s heavy-handed snobbery about working people. A picture changes a lot when the reality of the cast, locations, and schedule sinks in. John wanted scenes punched up and new scenes written. I wrote the target practice scene between Rane and Linda after he looked at the dailies and decided the relationship was playing well and he wanted more.”

What’s fascinating about comparing the Gould and Schrader drafts is they tell the same story; the two scripts share basically the same structure, and many of the same scenes. But inside of that, Gould pretty much does a page one rewrite. The dialogue in the original script is some of Schrader’s best. Yet only two nondescript lines make it into the finished film. But Gould writes some pretty terrific dialogue for the characters himself. Paul Schrader has long disowned the film, even recently—when it was brought up in an interview—he said, “It was a movie ruined in the rewrite.” While I understand his feelings (that’s how I feel about Natural Born Killers), I don’t agree it was “ruined,” but, as with Taxi Driver, his thematic conception was jettisoned.

Rolling Thunder is a really rough film. It was a hard R in 1977!

But Schrader’s script was even harder, more violent, more cynical, with a jaw-dropping turn of events at the climax that frankly is so fucking brilliant I’d still love to see it done in a movie.

But since practically none of Schrader’s script made it on to the screen, if you love the movie like I do, then what you love is Heywood Gould’s rewrite, as well as the radical direction that William Devane took the character of Rane.

There’s plenty in Schrader’s script that’s better than Gould’s rewrite, but there’s also plenty in Gould’s screenplay that improves on Schrader’s original (all the movie’s classic scenes are Gould’s).

In Schrader’s original script the Acuna Boys are after Rane’s back pay. It was Gould who created the symbolic silver dollars. In Schrader’s script Linda Forchet is just a Texas tramp who slips her phone number to a married man, in Gould’s she wore Charlie’s ID bracelet while he was in captivity. In Gould’s draft the shotgun that Charlie later does so much damage with during the climax was a homecoming present from his son Mark.

In a nice touch we learn Cliff helped the boy pick it out.

Charlie: “Well, that was very nice of Cliff.”

And the worst scene in Schrader’s script—the dinner at the home of Charlie’s fellow prisoner Johnny Vohden with his annoying family—is the best scene in Gould’s script and Flynn’s movie. As well as being the most cathartic scene in the whole Revengeamatic genre. But even that’s too puny a description of the scene. Of all the scenes in all the movies I’ve ever seen with audiences, no other scene gets quite the bloodlust reaction from a roomful of people quite like the scene in Rolling Thunder when William Devane gets Tommy Lee Jones alone.

RANE

I’ve found the men who killed my son.

JOHNNY

I’ll just get my gear.

That scene and those lines never fail to drive audiences wild wherever and whenever it’s projected. And trust me, I’ve seen Rolling Thunder with every type of audience imaginable.

Despite the film’s sugary theme song,

San Antone it’s really good to see you.

It’s been awhile but you’ve been on my mind.

I’ve been a lotta places, but I think I’ve always known,

one day I’d come back to San Antone,

when Linda asks Charlie while they’re in Mexico if they’re going back to San Antone Charlie says, “I don’t care if I ever see that town again.” One of the biggest differences between Gould’s conception of the character and Schrader’s is Gould’s Rane doesn’t even seem to be from Texas, he’s just stationed in San Antonio due to the Air Force base. While Schrader’s Rane is a Texan through and through, and not even from San Antonio but Corpus Christi. He’s also a Mexican-hating, Jane Fonda–cursing, country music–loving redneck.

But the Charlie Rane that Heywood Gould fashioned for his script rewrite is itself drastically different than the Charlie Rane that finally reached the screen.

William Devane’s Rane is practically monosyllabic. Where Gould’s Rane might be equally damaged, he’s actually quite loquacious. And the first half of the movie is built around scenes where Rane speaks eloquently about himself and his mental state.

The only one that survives is the excellent scene in Charlie’s garage when Cliff—the man the Major’s wife is leaving him for—tries to have a man-to-man talk about their dilemma (“You learn to love the rope”).

But Gould also wrote an earlier scene, when Charlie speaks with his wife, on his first night back home, he tries to explain to her why he’s sleeping in the small sewing room instead of their bedroom.

Gould has Rane delivering an actual monologue.

RANE

Anyhow about the sewing room. You have to think of it like a . . . decompression chamber. You know the deep-sea divers have to take a lot of time coming back up into the real world. Down below, they work under incredible pressures and it compresses the gasses in their system. If they come up too fast, the gas turns into little bubbles instead of being reabsorbed. And the bubbles can kill them or cripple them. You see? That’s the way it’s been with me and the other guys. We were under incredible pressure there. Unbelievable. We were at the bottom of a human sea. Only now we have to come back into the real world. But we have to decompress. The sewing room is my decompression chamber. Does that make sense to you?

If you’ve seen Rolling Thunder as often as I have, to read that is to say out loud, “Who the fuck is this guy? I mean, Jesus Christ, that’s more dialogue than Charlie says in the whole fucking movie!”

Well, it turned out the final author of the character of Charlie Rane was not either one of the two screenwriters, but the actor playing the role.

John Flynn informed me, “Twentieth Century Fox was very high on Devane, and the actor had a lot of leeway to shape the character as he saw fit.” And even though Heywood Gould was brought in at the actor’s request, Devane “saw fit” to slash Rane’s dialogue by half, making the character far more interior and far more damaged. He’s not quite the walking zombie that Tommy Lee Jones’ Johnny Vohden is, but Charlie’s not really alive anymore either. He even refers to himself as dead (“I remember that song from when I was alive.”).

The other characters that Devane’s Charlie deals with, his wife, her lover Cliff, Linda Forchet, even the Acuna Boys, are filled with messy emotions and are vibrantly alive when compared to Charlie.

The emotionless Major spends three-quarters of the movie hiding behind dark aviator sunglasses. Oddly enough, other than his pump-action-shotgun-wielding Acuna Boy–killing sidekick Vohden, the only other character in the film that seems as stoic as Maj. Rane is his nine-year-old son Mark. This is beautifully articulated in a scene that shows Devane’s Rane arriving at a little league game his son is playing in. He watches the boy play baseball behind a chain link fence. Desperately trying to make an unspoken connection with Mark. His son watches him watch, and without a word of dialogue spoken, the boy’s rejection of the man’s attempt is abundantly clear.

Yet the film demonstrates that Mark’s relationship with his mother’s lover Cliff is one of warmth and affection. Emotions Maj. Rane—through no fault of his own—is incapable of.

This is the Charlie Rane I’ve grown up with, and this Charlie Rane was completely William Devane’s conception.

It even extends to the character’s revenge. The movie Rane makes it abundantly clear that his revenge is for his son and his son alone. Once his wife tells him she’s accepted a marriage proposal from Cliff, the Air Force officer closes the iron door on her. Even her execution-style murder doesn’t unthaw his heart. I asked director Flynn about this and he confirmed, “Devane’s thing was he didn’t really care about the wife.”

This whole conception of the character is absolutely essential to Devane’s characterization and the finished film’s subtext.

But it’s not part of Schrader’s manuscript.

Schrader’s Charlie seems to understand his wife’s dilemma in a way that would be unfathomable in the Devane characterization. Cliff even has dinner with the family, and yeah, it’s awkward, but everybody seems to get along. And even though Janet is leaving her husband, she still makes herself available to Charlie emotionally and physically. Schrader’s Janet doesn’t spend the movie weeping, wringing her hands, with a guilty look on her puss. She truly cares about Charlie and tries to help him. She offers herself to him, and not out of sympathy, but because she loves him. But Charlie can’t handle it.

Schrader includes in his original screenplay a scene where Janet tries to have sex with Charlie. He refuses for a myriad of reasons, and leaves the house. He gets into his big red Cadillac and drives to a Texas drive-in that’s showing Deep Throat. As he watches Linda Lovelace in the pornographic film, he looks to the man in the car next to him, it’s Travis Bickle! The two Schrader antiheroes share a stare moment.

As the writer puts it, “two fuses slowly burning down.”

But if you love Rolling Thunder as much as I do, then one of the things you love is William Devane’s performance, because it’s sensational.

But from talking to Flynn, Devane’s power position on the production rubbed the director the wrong way. He didn’t badmouth the actor, but there was a decided lack of affection when he spoke about him (always calling him “Devane,” never “Bill”). Even telling me he tried to get Twentieth Century Fox to dump Devane and replace him with Tommy Lee Jones (“If you want the next Burt Lancaster, it sure as hell ain’t Devane, it’s Tommy”). One of the reasons for Flynn’s frustration was Devane had just finished directing a play, and he kept trying to stick actors from the play in the cast, “which was a problem,” Flynn told me. And in a film just overbrimming with outstanding performances, the two duds are the actors from Devane’s play. Lisa Richards as Charlie’s wife Janet, who’s just a one-note simpering mess. And Lawrason Driscoll as her lover Cliff. Driscoll spends his performance indicating his frustrations rather than feeling them, and in his big scene between Charlie in the garage where Charlie relives the Hanoi Hilton torture with Cliff as the torturer, Devane devours the weak actor. Flynn was especially frustrated about the casting of the wife because at one point Barbara Hershey was interested in the role.

In Rane’s search for the Acuna Boys, he (inexplicably) brings along Texas barfly cocktail waitress Linda—played to perfection by Linda Haynes—who can also be seen in Coffy, The Nickel Ride, and Brubaker. But it’s her performance as Linda in Rolling Thunder that has created a small but devoted cult following for the naturalistic actress. And when it comes to the Linda Haynes Fan Club, consider me a forty-five year member. Ms. Haynes quit performing in the eighties; both Vincent Gallo and I have tried to persuade her back to acting, but unfortunately to no avail.

It’s a superb characterization and one of my favorite female performances in seventies cinema. As Vincent Canby remarked in his New York Times review when the film came out:

“[Haynes] manages simultaneously to look beautiful and slightly ravaged (something it took Ava Gardner years to achieve).”

In John Flynn’s movie (as opposed to Schrader’s script) Linda serves a similar function as Jeffrey Hunter’s Martin Pawley sidekick does in The Searchers and Season Hubley’s bleach-blond astrology aficionado sex worker Niki in Schrader’s self-directed Hardcore. Like Hunter’s Martin and Hubley’s Niki, Haynes’ Forchet is obviously a good and sincere person attached to an emotionless (save for revenge) killing machine. But Hunter’s character Pawley is part Native American, giving him a shared ancestry with the object of Ethan’s bloodlust. While Martin Pawley is an Indian, he’s no savage. And while Linda Forchet is no murdering scumbag, her Texas barstool-warming floozy shares a similar white-trash lineage with the object of Charlie’s bloodlust.

To love Rolling Thunder is to love Linda Haynes’ Linda Forchet. She’s really remarkable, and her dynamic with Devane is one of the main reasons for the film’s success. Just like Charlie can’t get over his homecoming daydream of a loving family welcoming him back from hell with open arms, Linda can’t get over her daydream of Charlie and her running off to Alaska.

Charlie’s not going to fucking Alaska.

He’s never going to leave Mexico alive. Charlie knows that. The audience knows that. Hell, even Linda knows that. But she keeps the pipe dream alive as long as she can. I told director John Flynn that one of my favorite closing shots in cinema history was his shot of Devane walking the wounded Tommy Lee out of the blood-drenched brothel, the floor littered with the dead bodies of their enemies, as the closing credits rise up across the screen and the film’s soft theme song plays.

He told me they originally had an epilogue to that ending. Linda Forchet sitting on a bench waiting for a bus to take her back to San Antone (the lyrics of the film’s theme song). And Charlie parked in his big ass red Cadillac convertible about a half a block away out of her line of sight, silently observing her. Is he contemplating picking her up and taking her with him, or is he just making sure she gets home alright, or is he just taking one last look at the only woman who will ever love him?

That’s up for the audience to decide.

Then the bus arrives, she climbs aboard, and the bus heads for El Paso, while he turns the Cadillac around and drives deeper into Mexico . . . alone. I think he thought about picking her up and wishes he could. I don’t think Charlie loves Linda, because he’s not capable of loving anybody anymore—what’s that line Scorsese says of Ethan Edwards? “He’s a man capable of a great love that’s had it stamped out of him.”

But while Charlie might wish he could love Linda, he respects, admires, and appreciates her sincerity. Yet, he knows taking her with him would be impossible, because Charlie knows he’s going to die. At some point the federales will track him down, and after spending seven years in a Vietnamese prisoner of war camp, the last thing he’s going to do is spend the rest of his life in a Mexican prison (or any other prison). So the day they catch him, will be the day he dies, because he’s going to blast Mexican cops till they blast him back. The only thing Charlie has left to give Linda is keeping her out of the line of fire. The Linda who climbs aboard that bus and goes back to San Antone with her tail between her legs may be a sad Linda, but at least she’ll be alive. Flynn liked that ending, but they ran out of time on the schedule and it had to be abandoned.

Over the years I’ve enjoyed Linda’s character so much, Linda’s performance so much, and Haynes and Devane’s chemistry so much that it rarely occurred to me how contrived it was that Charlie takes Linda with him on his bloody trail of vengeance in the first place.

At least in the movie that exists, it doesn’t make any sense that Charlie takes a tagalong girl he barely knows on such a perilous journey. If he clued her in on what he was up to, and they were conspiring together . . . maybe. But just sending in this blond white girl (as she’s described in the movie, “a real piece of ass”) to these cutthroat Mexican bars to ask some sketchy folks a bunch of suspicious questions doesn’t make any fucking sense. But as per usual when it comes to Schrader writing genre scripts, he cuts corners, and cliche supporting characters always supply the lead protagonist with the information they need to get to the next script plot point.

As opposed to the movie version of the story—where Charlie and Linda don’t really have anything in common—Schrader’s Charlie and Linda are both two Mexican-hating, Texas white-trash peas in a pod. The couple have a lot more in common, they get along better, have a helluva lot more to talk about, and Charlie does seem to genuinely need her. And not just to do Schrader’s illogical plot-lifting, but for her companionship.

When the movie’s Charlie leaves her sleeping in the morning in their motel room, to meet up with Johnny Vohden to kill the Acuna Boys, he sneaks out before she wakes up (in a nice touch he covers her up with the fallen blanket). Instead of saying goodbye, he just leaves a big wad of cash on her bedside table (as John Flynn told me, “Like you would a whore”). But we know he’s not being insensitive, it’s just literally all he has to give her. But Schrader’s Charlie Rane isn’t the burnt-out shell of a man that William Devane essayed. In Schrader’s script, once Charlie’s family is massacred and he goes on his search for their killers, his personality blossoms.

He seems relieved to jettison the pressures of fitting into society. And during Charlie and Linda’s time on the road he gets along better with her than he does anybody since he returned home. They even have a really wonderful scene where the two talk about their favorite country music singers (Loretta Lynn, Kitty Wells, Connie Smith, Conny Van Dyke, Jeanne Pruett, and Miss Tammy), which would be unthinkable coming from Devane’s Rane (in Taxi Driver Betsy tries to talk to Travis about Kris Kristofferson, but Bickle can’t keep up. I wonder if Travis has favorite porn stars?).

The real reason Schrader feels the film was “ruined” in the rewrite, was because, like Taxi Driver, his thematic conception was jettisoned. Like Travis in Taxi Driver is paranoid about black folks, Rane has no use for Mexicans. In Schrader’s script, when Linda asks him when they’re in a motel room, “Don’t you ever clean up behind yourself?” he answers, “That’s why god made Mexicans.” (Obviously a line Schrader heard somewhere along the way.) And like in Taxi Driver, where Travis is paranoid about black males, then goes on a moral imperative quest that allows him to raise arms against black males, all the Acuna Boys who murder Charlie’s family are Mexicans (I believe that’s what Flynn meant when he said Schrader’s screenplay was “unfilmable”). The producers and the studio had Heywood Gould change the killers from all Mexican to half of them Mexican and gave the two white scumbags (James Best and Luke Askew) all the good lines. So once again a societal compromise was forced on another Paul Schrader screenplay. And, like Taxi Driver, they get away with it because of the excellent casting. Rolling Thunder without Luke Askew’s Automatic Slim, or James Best’s no-named, slightly humorous Acuna Boy ringleader is as unimaginable as Taxi Driver without Harvey Keitel.

As is the movie without Jimmy Best’s classic line reading, when Charlie’s wife asks Rane why he let them grind off his hand in the kitchen garbage disposal rather then tell him where the silver dollars were. Best delivers the greatest line reading of his long career, “I’ll tell you why, lady. Because he’s one macho motherfucker.” Which brings down the house in every single screening of Flynn’s film I’ve ever seen.

So, like Travis Bickle, Charlie Rane is a racist son of a bitch who has an excuse to go hunting for the objects of his disdain. Nevertheless, in this instance, these Acuna Boys deserve to die. And we root for Charlie and Johnny to track them down and (in true Schrader fashion) paint the walls with their blood.

But it’s in Schrader’s blood-soaked climax, when Charlie and Johnny track them down to a Mexican whorehouse and go on their killing spree that Schrader flips his genre script.

Because Schrader has Charlie and Johnny wipe out everybody!

Now in Flynn’s film, Charlie and Johnny end up killing many more folks than the four that came to his house, most because they take up arms against them. But not all. When Johnny bursts into a room where a bunch of Mexicans are playing poker and says, “Adios, boys!” and sprays the table with shotgun shells, it’s obvious he’s now just on a killing spree, or as Kevin Thomas wrote, “Charlie is just reaping what America sowed in Vietnam.” The idea seems to be: if they’re Mexican, don’t take any chances—shoot.

But that still is (director) Flynn’s, (producer) Gordon’s, (star) Devane’s, (writer) Gould’s, and (studio) Twentieth Century Fox’s societal compromise.

Because in Schrader’s script—just like the napalm they dropped on villages in Vietnam—Charlie and Johnny blow the fuck outta everybody!

Acuna Boys, whores, customers, every single human being they come across. And in an amazing touch—that I can’t fucking believe they didn’t include in the film—both Charlie and Johnny speak to each other in Vietnamese during the firefight.

By the final page Schrader’s point is made clear.

A point nobody at Fox wanted to make (everybody who talks about the freedom of cinema in the seventies should talk to Paul Schrader).

So Schrader’s savage critique of fascist Revengeamatic flicks was turned by its makers into a savage fascist Revengeamatic.

Yet . . . the greatest savage, fascist, Revengeamatic flick ever made.

Which frustrates Schrader to this day.