Thunder and Lightning

I guess I've always known about Thunder Road, because my dad always used to sing the theme song: "It was thunder, thunder over thunder road/Thunder was his engine and white lightning was his load/And it was moonshine, moonshine to quench the devil's thirst/The law they thought they'd catch him but the Devil caught him first!" Now I've seen the movie, and it pretty much matches the song.

Makes sense, since Robert Mitchum stars in it, co-wrote the script and the song, and produced. Oh, and his son was in it, as his kid brother.

Mitchum plays a Korean war vet back in the hills around Harlan, running shine the way his daddy and grand-daddy did. He is wild on wheels, so reckless the other runners are afraid that they'll get killed trying to compete. There's a girl who loves him, but he treats her pretty cool. He has seen the world outside the holler, outside Memphis even. He has a girl in Memphis, a nightclub singer played by Keeley Smith. He tells her that he doesn't belong in the backwoods now that he has been to Korea, knows how to order from a menu and "what a mobile is" (not a fancy Calder mobile, but a little paper one Keeley has hanging in her living room). He really doesn't fit in anywhere.

Actually, we get a couple of speeches like this from Mitchum, all awesome ode to existential angst in hillybilly hepster argot. They don't actually make a lot of sense, but they sound cool when Mitchum lays them down.

Where he really lives is on the road. This film is loaded with realistic (or almost) car rides and chases through the Appalachian hills (mostly around Asheville NC). This isn't Transporter, or even Vanishing Point. But the cars are all real, bought from bootleggers, who used the money to upgrade.

Keeley Smith, Mitchum's big city girlfriend. She had a slow, dragging delivery on a song, an emaciated face and a deep calm. I figured she was supposed to be a junkie. Then I found out she was Keeley Smith, who sang with Louis Prima, one of the biggest jazz band leaders of the 50s. I guess she was just supposed to be Keeley Smith.