78/100
Having seen and moderately enjoyed but not exactly laughed a whole lot at The Deer Hunter and Heaven's Gate, I was not expecting to nearly fall out of my chair watching Cimino's feature debut. Which is not to say that Thunderbolt and Lightfoot is a buddy comedy, though it definitely careers in and out of that subgenre. But the absurdist streak that Cimino intermittently exhibits here didn't make it to any of his subsequent films. First such detail I noticed—not funny ha-ha, but funny unusual, and welcome—was the boys stealing a couple's car that for no narrative reason whatsoever has its back seat fitted out with a car-length clothes rack on which hang dozens of colorful shirts and dresses and blouses and whatnot. "Look, they got a whole department store back here," marvels Lightfoot. Has nothing to do with anything. Quickly gets discarded and forgotten. Just flavor.
What nearly killed me, though, was Thunderbolt and Lightfoot being picked up a hitchhiker in a jacked-up black Plymouth who (a) has a caged raccoon in his passenger seat; (b) generally speaks in an unintelligible deranged mumble; (c) keeps driving off the road for no reason; (d) turns out to have the car's exhaust pipe belching into the back seat, spewing carbon monoxide into the boys' faces; and finally (e) flips the car, gets out holding a shotgun, and pops open the trunk...which is full to the brim with cute little white rabbits, immediately employed for target practice.
Rabbits being shot isn't funny (you don't see much carnage, thankfully—certainly far less than in, say, Rules of the Game), but the trunk reveal had me gleefully cackling at its sheer random nuttiness. Thunderbolt and Lightfoot takes its cue from young Jeff Bridges much more than from middle-aged Clint Eastwood, though the latter's game; there's a devil-may-care quality to the storytelling and the vibe that I found immensely appealing. It's the sort of movie that builds to a big fistfight between old-friends-turned-enemies, settles it by giving one of the men an asthma attack, then a few minutes later cuts out of the scene by having him sneeze and say "I got hay fever, too." There's nothing especially innovative or even cool about the quest to find hidden loot (I correctly guessed where it was a good hour in advance, though I failed to think of a reason why the building would've been relocated; Cimino came up with a good one), nor about the re-heist that they all plan and execute (some elements of which were unclear to me, e.g. why does Lightfoot need to hole up in that bathroom for hours? Couldn't he just sit in a car dressed as a girl until it's time?), and I can easily imagine an alternate version of the film that'd be downright mediocre. "How can I make it more interesting?" was clearly Cimino's watchword. Which can result in arbitrary-quirk overload if you're not careful, but he mostly was careful, just giving us small offbeat moments like Red finding the vault manager's daughter and her boyfriend having sex and briefly lifting up his stocking mask to get a clearer look at her naked. This film also boasts one of the all-time great stupid reasons for getting caught in the aftermath a crime, reminiscent of Oswald sneaking into the Texas Theatre.
One aspect that almost entirely escaped me, which gets its own Wikipedia subsection, is Homoeroticism. As a terminally straight guy, I often miss that sort of thing, and Lightfoot "kissing" Red (with his hand over Red's mouth, so their lips don't actually touch) struck me as an ironic response to macho hostility rather than as any sort of indication that Lightfoot may be Light in the loafers oh maybe I was being dim. I dunno. It certainly didn't escape my attention that this film's ending [SPOILERS FOLLOW] echoes that of Midnight Cowboy (a bit too hard for my taste, though Lightfoot's final words expressing pride at their accomplishment are quite poignant). Fantastic slow build to his demise, that gradual physical disintegration—first losing concentration, then control over the left side of his body, then consciousness, over the course of what might well be hours—second only to Tom Hanks' Captain Phillips shock for unexpectedly precise realism in a genre context. Bracing to see someone die of internal injuries sustained from simple (vicious) kicks to the stomach and head that movie characters generally shrug off seconds later as if they never happened. I don't feel as if we ever quite got another movie from the same man who wrote and directed this one. Cimino quickly took another road and stayed on it.