Taxi Driver author Paul Schrader pens a messed-up action movie about ’Nam
With A History Of Violence, Tom Breihan picks the most important action movie of every year, starting with the genre’s birth and moving right up to whatever Vin Diesel’s doing this very minute.
Rolling Thunder (1977)
For most of the ’70s, there was something fundamentally conservative about American action movies—or, anyway, about non-blaxploitation American action movies. Films like Dirty Harry and Death Wish celebrated rebellious types like maverick cops and outside-the-law vigilantes. But all of them were, on a more basic level, fighting for law and order. Harry Callahan and Paul Kersey were heroes for the part of the population confused and angry over the way things were changing—the way kids were dressing and getting high and disrespecting authority. These heroes might’ve been flawed. In the case of a mass murderer like Paul Kersey, they were more than flawed. But they were doing everything they could to keep us from descending into chaos.
Around the time the U.S. pulled its forces out of Vietnam in 1975, something changed. Everybody figured out that chaos was already here. Americans weren’t necessarily heroes anymore. Moviegoers were getting used to the idea that people were lying to them, that the people coming home from Vietnam weren’t the square-jawed heroes that they might’ve imagined. Rolling Thunder, from 1977, is a great fucking movie, and that’s partly why it’s the subject of this month’s column. But it’s also here because it’s important in the history of action movies. It’s the first time an American studio action movie really tried to wrestle with the idea of Vietnam, with the idea that some of the people coming home were, on a deep level, damaged.
American studios had been making movies about Vietnam almost since the war started. The most famous early one is probably The Green Berets, the 1968 John Wayne vehicle about wartime heroism. And there were B-movies, too, like 1970’s The Losers, about an American biker gang recruited for a Cambodian mission. But some of our smarter directors were already figuring that things were fucked up over there. Plenty of people look at Sam Peckinpah’s The Wild Bunch as an extended Vietnam allegory. And Peter Bogdanovich’s first movie, the 1968 Roger Corman thriller Targets, is about a vet who goes crazy and starts sniping random American civilians.
But Martin Scorsese’s Taxi Driver, from 1976, was probably the most fully realized Vietnam-vet movie. Robert De Niro’s Travis Bickle character can’t get used to the idea of civilian life; he’s too broken. And eventually, he turns himself into an avenging-hero type. Taxi Driver isn’t an action movie. As loathsome as Harvey Keitel’s pimp character might be, he’s not the movie’s real villain. Instead, Bickle is both the hero and the villain, and as far as I’m concerned, that makes Taxi Driver a character study, not an action movie. But a year later, Taxi Driver screenwriter Paul Schrader would apply his fucked-up worldview to a straight-up revenge movie, and that movie was Rolling Thunder.
Rolling Thunder, which Schrader co-wrote with Heywood Gould, starts out looking like heartwarming Americana. After seven years in a Vietnam prison camp, an American pilot, Major Charles Rane, is coming home to San Antonio. (It’s the John McCain story, more or less. McCain had come home in ’73, and I have to imagine that his story was a key influence on the movie. Rolling Thunder takes its title from the Air Force’s bombing campaign in Vietnam, and that’s what got McCain shot down.) Crowds of fresh-faced little-leaguers come out to clap for Rane, and a cheesy ’70s folk-pop song plays over the opening credits.
Rane is cool and passive—eyes hidden behind aviator sunglasses, expression never changing. Everyone seems ecstatic to have him back, but his home situation is a mess. His wife, thinking she’d never see him again, has moved onto another man, and they’re planning on getting married. His son doesn’t know him. Nobody understands him. He finds himself missing the daily torture. In an unnerving conversation with the man who’s already replaced him, Rane explains, “You learn to love the rope. That’s how you beat them.”
For nearly half its running time, Rolling Thunder is a fascinating domestic drama about this guy trying and failing to adjust to his new life. As Rane, the great character actor William Devane underplays everything, never letting anyone in, whether it be the viewer or his family. But then things suddenly and abruptly get very, very bad. A local car dealership has given Rane a suitcase full of silver dollars, one for every day he was in the prison camp. A few local miscreants see the news on TV, so they break into Rane’s house and demand the suitcase. He immediately goes into torture-flashback mode, freezing up and saying nothing even as the thieves jam his hand into his own garbage disposal. When Rane’s wife and son come home, the invaders kill the two of them, taking the money and leaving Rane for dead.
The criminals are a nasty and dumb bunch, and they don’t seem to have much of a plan, committing multiple murders for a few thousand dollars’ worth of cash. One of them, the awesomely named Automatic Slim, is another Vietnam vet, and he makes sure to tell Rane that he had to be “face-down in the muck” while Rane was flying planes above him. He doesn’t give a fuck about Rane’s time as a POW. He’s damaged, too, to the point where he’s lost his humanity.
