Movie Mahal

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William Devane is one of those dependable character actors who got around but never quite broke through as a main lead. Clearly, Rolling Thunder was an exception. Maybe it was Devane’s nose; weaselly and needle like that made him somewhat unlikable. Devane had that finely tuned yet somewhat irritating softly spoken art of delivering dialogue which rubbed me up the wrong way. Rolling Thunder is arguably one of the first modern home invasion films and was written by Paul Schrader in is his characteristically Calvinist style complete with a cleansing bloodbath expiation.

This is a scuzzy film with a noirish Deep South temperament (Phil Karlson’s 1973 Walking Tall comes to mind) in which everyone and everything seems to be floating in the same reservoir of misery. Stallone’s Rambo (1982) must have been taking notes from Schrader & co expressly the ways in which the Vietnam flashback inserts jolt us out of the contemporary milieu of San Antonio. Unsurprisingly, the Vietnamese are imagined as faceless entities; just one more racist smear from Hollywood’s imperialist apparatus.

Rolling Thunder is often bracketed as part of a cycle of films made in the late 1970s that tried to detail the impact of the Vietnam War on the psyche of those returning home to an America that had moved on. However, sitting beneath the overarching revenge narrative is a recurring Freudian symbolism of male impotency and dismemberment that points to an unconscious anxiety which is far more critical of a wounded primal masculinity than anything else.