Rolling Thunder is the story of Major Charles Ranes, William Devane, who returns from years of imprisonment and torture in a Vietcong POW camp to his home in Texas. He and his prison mate Johnny, Tommy Lee Jones, are greeted by a heroes welcome at the airport and Charles is given a brand new Cadillac and a suitcase of silver dollars in honour of his return. Charles is not the same man that went to war and even comments that when in prison they referred to the time before imprisonment as when they were alive; the implication that he is now dead rings true in the cold performance by William Devane and the hollow and dark life that the character now lives.Charles' wife has moved on and is planning to divorce him and remarry, and his son cannot connect with a man that he cannot even remember. Charles seems unaffected by this though, as when his wife tells him she has been with another man he just sits and listens. Haunted by the memories of the torture of the POW camp, shown in abruptly cut black and white flashbacks, Charles is clearly suffering from post traumatic stress and has retreated inward, appearing almost dead inside.
When a gang invades his home demanding to know where the silver dollars are he refuses to tell them and they put his hand into a garbage disposal in a effort to make him talk. Charles though has been tortured before, previously commenting to his wife's new lover that the only way to beat the torture is to "learn to love the rope". When the gang fail to make him talk they shoot him, his wife and his son. Charles alone recovers and refuses to tell the cops who killed his wife and son and robbed him of his hand. Instead when he gets better he embarks on a journey of revenge with a hook for a hand and a sawn off shotgun.
He forms a new relationship with Linda (Linda Haynes) who says she is his groupie, a worn out blonde bar maid who is reluctant to get caught up in Charles' revenge mission but goes along nevertheless. She comments at one point, "Why do I always end up with crazy men?" to which Charles replies, "'Cause that's the only kind that's left." Charles' view of post-Vietnam America does not have much good in it, America is bleak and morally bankrupt. The pair head South to Mexico in order to find the gang, ending up near the home of Johnny who Charles eventually enlists to help him. Johnny is also living a hollow existence with his family who ramble on whilst Johnny sits coldly waiting, alert and like Charles, armed.Reminiscent of the hoarded food of former POW Dieter Dengler in Herzog's documentary Little Dieter Needs to Fly, Charles fills the trunk of his Cadillac with guns, many more than he could ever use. The guns clearly give him some relief, he feels happier with this stockpile, representing the fact that he is once again in control and not at the mercy of his torturers. Also surprisingly, like Dieter, he is willing to re-enact the torture that he has suffered. Both men agree to have their hands tied behind their back, replicating the torture they suffered. Although still clearly effected by his period of imprisonment, the real life torture victim, Dieter, seems surprisingly balanced unlike the fictional Charles who behaves like a man with nothing left to live for.
When Charles arrives at the house to pick up Johnny to help in the final showdown, Johnny is not surprised, he does not ask questions, he just puts on his uniform, grabs a shotgun and follows orders. Jonny is conditioned for war, in his mind he is still at war, he has not returned to life, he remains the walking dead. When in the whorehouse in the climactic scene and pulling out his shotgun, a prostitute asks him "What the fuck are you doing?" and he just replies simply "I'm gonna kill a bunch of people." This is exactly what Charles and Johnny do exacting vengeance upon those that mistreated Charles and in the process releasing through cathartic violence the rage bottled up in side them.With clear mirrors to Taxi Driver in the dead inside, revenge motivated male protagonist, the explosively violent finale and the doomed romantic relationship, Paul Schrader is revisiting similar material but the two films are actually very different. One distinct difference is the back story; it is hinted that Travis Bickle was in Vietnam and he clearly had a troubled past but unlike Taxi Driver, Rolling Thunder dedicates almost half the film to exploring the main character's past and the adjustments he has to make to a past that no longer applies. The audience of Rolling Thunder gets a chance to understand Charles in a different way to how an audience relates to Travis. It is a different style of storytelling and one that works for each film. In Taxi Driver, Scorsese directs with elegiac style aided by a sweeping Bernard Hermann score. John Flynn direction on Rolling Thunder, however, is economical, gritty and follows in the tradition of directors such as Sam Fuller and Sam Peckinpah with a hard, violent and grimy aesthetic.
Rolling Thunder is often thought of as a exploitation picture, a 70s violent B movie and a nasty revenge piece. It is indeed all of these things but like Taxi Driver it is also a arthouse film. Rolling Thunder says so much about the 'Vietnam Syndrome', about the failure of Vietnam vets to reconnect to the life that has moved on without them and it is a brutal story of two men who no longer feel alive, exacting revenge for the suffering they have felt. A perfect embodiment of the 70s despair following the 60s with a focus on the struggle of many to move past this dark, post Vietnam, period.
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