[Dean Speir]

From time-to-time I will announce in this thread an upcoming broadcast or cablecast of a film or program deemed to be TGZ Forum-worthy of Member's attentions.

For the inaugural such alert, I commend to all's attention this evening's cablecast of 1977's Rolling Thunder on Showtime "SHOWX" (a/k/a "Showtime Extreme.")

Dates and times, EST:

• March 17: 2020[/*:1r84k1lc]
• March 23: 0315[/*:1r84k1lc]
• March 27: 2335[/*:1r84k1lc]

Written by one of Hollywood's darker writers, Paul Schrader (Cat People, Raging Bull, Taxi Driver, etc.), the film is a tough-as-Tenifer chronicle of a post-Vietnam POW (the "anti-John McCain," so to speak) whose interrupted and seriously disrupted family life is irrevokably shattered by some v-e-r-y bad people in an act of unspeakable savagery.

Oddly, this violence gives our protagonist-with-a-major-case-of-anomie, Major Charles Rane (William Devane), a new sense of purpose, revenge! And in the grand finale in a South-of-the-Border brothel, he is joined by an old Army buddy in the person of Tommy Lee Jones, who utters the film's best line to that '70s flicks consummate "floozie," Cassie Yates, in what I believe is her only topless appearance… and I tend to pay attention to those sort of things!

Good gun action, and, remember this was a product of the mid-'70s, look for Luke Askins Askew (then late of Easy Rider) in a major supporting role as "Automatic Slim," so unusual for that period was his choice of sidearm that he it became his colloquial identity.

 

[MBaneACP]

Cassie Yates...yikes, I feel old!

I saw ROLLING THUNDER when it opened in a 42nd Street grind house in NYC with my pals John Morthland and, if memory serves, Lester Bangs and Robert Duncan, who later wrote the definitive book on KISS. We were on some crazed Paul Schrader-Is-God jag, the cleansing revelations of violence, blah blah.

That was about the time of Wes Craven's legendary THE HILLS HAVE EYES and that Warren Oates/Peter Fonda movie where two families in a Winnebago were chased down by Satanists. Think about it...there are so few movies in which recreational vehicles play a substantial role.

Michael B

 

[LIProgun]

Good gun action, and, remember this was a product of the mid-'70s, look for Luke Askins (then late of Easy Rider) in a major supporting role as "Automatic Slim," so unusual for that period was his choice of sidearm that he it became his colloquial identity.

Luke Askins or Luke Askew?

 

[Dean Speir]

Thanks, Rob…

That was about the time of Wes Craven's legendary THE HILLS HAVE EYES and that Warren Oates/Peter Fonda movie where two families in a Winnebago were chased down by Satanists. Think about it...there are so few movies in which recreational vehicles play a substantial role.

Ah, yes… Warren Oates, one of the greats, untimely wrenched from our view by a heart attack. That particular film would be Race with the Devil, directed by another no longer with us, Actor/Director Jack Starrett, who also took a bit part in that one on-screen. Co-starring Loretta Swit who was just getting some traction thanks to her "Hot Lips" persona.

Funny you should mention RVs… one of the most realistic gun fights ever depicted on-screen took place between two characters stalking one another around an RV in another '70s flick, the little-remembered Slither (no!, not about snakes!). What a cast! James Caan, Peter Boyle, Sally Kellerman (the original "Hot Lips"), Louise Lasser, Allen Goorwitz (during one of his "Garfield" periods), Richard B. Shull, the great Alex Rocco and that poor man's Don Calfa, Garry Goodrow.

(Steve Buscemi made his career getting most of the parts which used to go to Calfa, Dudley Moore's cross-canyon hedonist neighbor in 10.)

Other note-worthy (to us refuges of the 42nd Street all-night 90-cent third-run houses) RV flicks would have to include 1975's Three for the Road (also with Rocco) and the impressively cast Truth or Consequences, N.M., directed by the Sutherland kid in the late '90s.