Review: John Flynn’s Rolling Thunder on Shout! Factory 4K UHD Blu-ray

John Flynn’s Rolling Thunder is a lean, mean revenge thriller that could have only been made in the 1970s. It’s 1973, to be exact, and Major Charles Rane (William Devane) has recently returned to San Antonio after several years in a Viet Cong prison camp. Greeted with a hero’s welcome, Rane has little use for his neighbors’ praise, which he appears to regard (correctly) as an almost poignantly inadequate expression of collective survivor’s guilt.

Rane, along with his friend and fellow veteran Johnny Vohden (Tommy Lee Jones), inhabits the film with a calm pragmatism that might be disconcerting for viewers accustomed to cinema’s more overheated depictions of soldiers coming home. The men don’t appear to resent the friends and family who’re blessedly ignorant of the atrocities they experienced abroad, but the soldiers no longer possess the facilities necessary to uphold basic social conventions such as feigning gratitude or excitement either. And so we watch these men, for a long while, as they quietly invest every superficially calm moment with a foreboding undertow of unreleased violence.

On paper, Rolling Thunder is a conventionally macho potboiler that, in the vein of many ’70s films, dresses up a Death Wish scenario with token nods to the politically charged despair that followed in the wake of the Vietnam War, and even people who only casually attend movies will probably assume early on that Rane is going to kill several people before the credits roll on the film. But Devane and Jones’s performances, under Flynn’s skilled, understated direction, display a refreshing empathy for the soldiers’ torment.

Co-writer Paul Schrader was disappointed with the final film, which he claims is characterized by “wispy 1970s sentimentality.” True, but Flynn and co-writer Heywood Gould’s sentimentality coaxes out a human dimension that lends the violence an element of spontaneity that’s upsetting. Schrader is a brilliant film critic, but many of his own films, either as screenwriter or director (and with the exception of his collaborations with Martin Scorsese) are mechanically theoretical essays on depravity that judge their characters while milking them for most of their sensationalistic possibilities. Rolling Thunder liberates Schrader from his worst tendencies.

Still, Rolling Thunder is primarily a genre movie in which a man with a hook for an arm must commence in balancing the existential ledger of whoop-ass in his favor. There are the expected bits (a baddie gets hooked in the nuts, another baddie gets his hand pinned to a table), as well as a well staged but obligatory shootout, which resembles a scaled-down version of The Wild Bunch’s climax—an homage that Schrader acknowledges. There’s also a vastly unconvincing suggestion of emotional closure at the end, a beat that Flynn thankfully refuses to emphasize too much. Essentially a liberal vigilante film that’s rife with all the contradictions that description implies, Rolling Thunder has a pared, weirdly principled grace that still packs a punch.

Image/Sound

Shout! Factory’s new 4K transfer from the 35mm original camera negative looks stellar, thanks in large part to the high contrast and brightness made possible by Dolby Vision. Vibrant blues, greens, and yellows really pop in daytime exterior scenes, while the much darker interior sequences highlight the chiaroscuro lighting employed by DP Jordan Cronenworth, especially in an early scene where Rane’s wife informs him that she wants a divorce. The level of detail in the image is also quite impressive, with each of the many beads of sweat pouring down character actors’ faces and grimy texture of every rundown Mexican locale presented with vivid clarity. The audio is a bit less impressive, as the overall sound is on the hollow side, and there’s a slight echoey quality to the dialogue, though not to the point of distraction.

Extras

Shout!’s 4K release offers several new and substantial extras that weren’t included on their 2013 Blu-ray release of the film. On the first of two recently recorded audio commentaries, screenwriter Heywood Gould and film historian C. Courtney Joyner discuss Gould’s various contributions to the script, which included a nearly complete rewrite of Paul Schrader’s original draft. The two also touch on character psychology, the decision to not show gore during the infamous garbage disposal scene, and the differences between distribution practices in the 1970s and the 2020s. (The second commentary, with filmmakers Jackson Stewart and Francis Galluppi, is less informative, but the pair’s enthusiasm for the film is infectious.)

In a new featurette, Joyner returns to talk about John Flynn’s early works, finding much to praise in their sheer efficiency, which he honed as assistant to both Robert Wise and J. Lee Thompson. The last of the new extras, focused on Rolling Thunder’s music, includes an interview with composer Barry De Vorzon, who remains grateful for the total freedom that he was afforded in creating his score for the film. The disc is rounded out with a short making-of documentary with William Devane, Tommy Lee Jones, and both screenwriters; some trailers, stills and TV/radio spots; and a two-minute “Trailers from Hell” with director Eli Roth.

Overall

With a beautiful new transfer and an array of additional extras, Shout! Factory’s 4K UHD Blu-ray release of Rolling Thunder is so good that you’ll have to get your hooks into it.