Thunder Road (DRM Productions, United Artists, 1958)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2023 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night, after the two Bob Hope movies, Turner Classic Movies showed one of my all-time favorite films, the 1958 drama Thunder Road with Robert Mitchum as star, producer, original story writer and even songwriter, co-writing the film’s theme song, “Ballad of Thunder Road,” as well as “The Whippoorwill,” a vehicle for his co-star, Keely Smith. TCM showed this as part of Eddie Muller’s “Noir Alley” time slot,though I really don’t consider Thunder Road a film noir. It’s too rural, for one thing; it’s set in Harlan County, Kentucky and it deals with moonshiners, the Internal Revenue Service agents who try to catch them (the agency in charge of enforcing the taxes on whiskey and catching illegal distillers is now part of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms, which has always struck me as a weird juxtaposition of products),and the out-of-town gangsters who are trying to force tie illegal distillers either to sell out to them or force them out of business by any means necessary, including murder. Mitchum stars as Lucas “Luke” Doolin, transporter of illegal whiskey which his father Vernon (Trevor Bardette) makes in the nearby hills. He’s determined to keep his younger brother Robin (James Mitchum, Robert’s son) out of the illegal whiskey trade and has even threatened to kill anyone else who tries to recruit him to drive whiskey shipments. (Before casting his son for this part, Mitchum tried to get Elvis Presley to play it, but he ran into the usual roadblock: Col. Tom Parker, Elvis’s manager, demanded Elvis get $1 million per film, and that would have totally blown Mitchum’s budget.)

The Doolins are getting squeezed not only by “Revenooers,” particularly Troy Barnett (Gene Barry from The Atomic City and the 1953 The War of the Worlds), but also with a big-city gangster named CarlKogan (Jacques Aubuchon). Kogan has set up a speed shop – a garage specializing in making cars go faster and boosting their power and handling ability – as a front for his offensive, which is to absorb all the illegal distillers into one company which he can control, and literally kill any who choose to stay independent. There are so many scenes n this film of ordinary passenger cars being souped up and modified to handle better so they can be used as vehicles for bootleg liquor it’s hard to watch this film without recalling the legend that moonshiners started NASCAR (the National Association of Stock Car Racing) as a way of turning their hobby of hopping up standard cars into a prosperous and legal business.

Thunder Road is the kind of movie one can imagine James Dean making if he’d lived a decade longer; behind the wheel of his cars, first a 1950 Ford and then a 1958 Ford he switches out for it when he realizes the old one has been stopped too many times by law enforcement (for some reason, probably a licensing deal Micthum cut with Ford, all the motor vehicles seen in this movie are Fords), Mitchum has the icon-of-cool look Dean shared, dressed in blue jeans and a white T-shirt and with an omnipresent cigarette dangling from his lips. It’s clear Mitchum and his writers, Walter Wise (who started the script) and James Attlee Phillips (who finished it after Mitchum didn’t like what Wise was doing to his story), were creating an existential hero (or anti-hero) whom we realize front he get-go is doomed. It’s only a matter of chance whether the Revenooers or Kogan’s thugs will get him first. Just because Thunder Road isn’t really a film noir (not only is it too rural but Mitchum insisted on shooting it in the actual locations, so the film doesn’t have the claustrophobic studio-bound look typical of film noir) doesn’t mean it isn’t a great movie,

I first heard of it in the 1960’s via an odd article in an alternative magazine with a title something like, “An Ounce of Robert Mitchum Is Worth Five Pounds of Dean Martin,” published just after Martin ad Mitchum starred in a peculiar 1968 Western called 5 Card Stud. This film was about the members of an ongoing poker game who were being killed off, and Mitchum played a visiting minister (a role pretty obviously patterned on his part in the 1955 film The Night of the Hunter, in my view a monumentally overrated movie) who turns out to be the killer at the end. The article’s author went into a lot of detail about Thunder Road and made me curious to see it – and I got my chance to on the old “Dialing for Dollars” movie weekday afternoons on the independent TV station KTVU in the San Francisco Bay Area. I hadn’t seen Thunder Road in decades but it holds up well; my husband Charles had an interesting criticism of it – he didn’t think the car chases were3 exciting enough – but I disagree. The people in Thunder Road drive to make a living, not to take chances; they don’t want to speed and they only do so when they’re being pursued, either by law enforcement or by thugs seeking to put them out of business. The death toll in Thunder Road starts to add up after a while; including a Revenue agent who’s killed in a car crash while in hot pursuit of a whiskey runner and an old friend of Luke’s who insists on buyinghis old 1950 Ford despite Luke’s insistence that he was already stopped in that vehicle and therefore the IRS has a record of it. It turns out that Kogan’s men have planted a bomb in the car, intending to kill Luke, and instead it kills his friend.

Thunder Road also uses the old crime-movie trope of the gangster who says he’s going to retire as soon as he completes the “one last score,” in this case Luke’s final run to his distributor in Memphis, Tennessee, only as always the “one last score” ends catastrophically as Luke’s car’s tires are spiked by Revenue agents and he crashes into a power substation (an ending the author of that article compared to the finale of the 1949 film White Heat, in which James Cagney’s gangster os taken out by a conflagration at te oil refinery he intended to rob). Thunder Road was directed by Arthur Ripley, an eccentric filmmaker who started in the silent era as a gag man and assistant director for Harry Langdon, then a comedy writer and starting in 1942 a director of arty “B”-movies like Prisoner of Japan and Voice in the Wind. Thunder Road was his first feature film in nearly a decade – he’d ended up on a blacklist, not for his politics but for having said that all too many Hollywood movies were bloated and harmed by their high production budgets – and his next-to-last job as a director ever. (His last was an episode of the TV Western series Colt .45.) But Robert Mitchum is easily the auteur of this film, and though the casting of his son as his brother doesn’t really work (it’s nice that they’re related, but the age difference makes it all too obvious they are father and son instead of brothers), it’s a real gem of a movie and a showcase for what you can do on an ultra-low budget. Ironically, Eddie Muller led off the showing by quoting Bruce Springsteen’s song “Thunder Road,” which really has nothing to do with the movie aside from sharing its title; Springsteen used the song as the opening track on his album Born to Run (1975), and for his next album, Darkness on the Edge of Town (1978), he borrowed the title of the opening track from another classic “cult” film, Terrence Malick’s debut, Badlands.