Thunderbolt and Lightfoot (1974)

Michael Cimino's 1974 debut arrives with a premise that modern focus groups would shred on sight. Two drifters, one weathered and one grinning, steal cars, patronize prostitutes, and reassemble a gang of surly criminals to rob a bank with an antiaircraft cannon. It is a buddy picture, a road picture, and a heist picture at once. It has no interest in instructing anyone about anything. The camera simply watches Eastwood's Thunderbolt endure and Bridges's Lightfoot charm, and the film asks nothing more of us than to enjoy the company.

The lone moment that might raise a contemporary eyebrow is Lightfoot's cross-dressing, deployed as a distraction during the Western Union sequence. The film treats the disguise as a gag, winks, and moves on. No identity is examined, no interiority is granted. Elsewhere the screen is overwhelmingly white and male, and the picture never pauses to comment on the arrangement. The men rob a bank because banks contain money. That is the whole of the economic argument. No racial reckoning, no environmental sermon, no body-image discourse, no diagnosis of the mind's varied weather. The villains are villains, the women are decoration, and nobody in Montana is asked to check a privilege.

The final act plays its hand with a restraint that now looks nearly extinct. Red pistol-whips his partners, kicks Lightfoot in the head, and is subsequently torn apart by a guard dog. Lightfoot's slow neurological decline is never named as a condition to be understood and accommodated. It is simply a young man dying, and his friend noticing. Thunderbolt snaps his cigar in half, and the Cadillac drifts down the Interstate toward nothing in particular. It is a clean, unfashionable piece of work. We grade it at the floor, not as an insult, but as a matter of record. A dry vintage, unfortified, no additives. Served without apology.