Classics from the vault: 'Thunder Road'

Thunder Road is one of those kinds of movies that you stumble upon on TV in the middle of the night when you can’t sleep and it just blows you away.  Although no one could mistake it for a masterpiece, there’s something uniquely real about its story of moonshine runners that turned what could have been just another forgotten B-movie into a cult classic.

Robert Mitchum stars as Luke Doolin, a Korean War vet who returns home to the family business which has become threatened on a daily basis by both the Feds and a gangster who’s trying to muscle in on the local moonshiners.  It’s a classic Mitchum role – laconic, hard-nosed, cool as an icebox.

Thunder Road was a singly personal movie for Mitchum, who wrote the story and produced the film, casting his son Jim as his kid brother.  In one scene, which plays like a Mitchum family dinner, the younger Mitchum, when prompted to say grace, dutifully folds his hands, reciting, “Good food.  Good meat.  It’s getting late, let’s eat,” to which his ma promptly slaps him off his chair to the ground.

For gearheads, the film is a particular treat, with Mitchum bombing around the Tennessee countryside in a souped-up roadster with two gas tanks – one for the gas, one for the whiskey – complete with an oil slick valve that predated James Bond’s Aston Martin by a solid half decade.

Thunder Road is the kind of movie that sticks in the minds of its viewers for years after seeing it.  It’s the first film maverick director Jim Jarmusch ever recalls seeing, at the age of six at a drive-in theater.  As he related in a 1992 interview in Film Comment, despite being a huge Mitchum fan he never saw the film again, so indelible was the childhood memory in his mind.  Bruce Springsteen named the opening track of his 1975 Born to Run album after the movie, although he never even saw it – he only saw the film’s poster in the lobby of a theater.

During a recent trans-Canada road trip I stopped for the night at a hotel in Thunder Bay, Ontario and went down to the hotel bar for dinner.  At the bar I struck up a conversation with a grizzled commercial fisherman.  He asked what I did for a living, and I told him I had a couple of jobs, one of which was as a film critic.  I asked what kind of movies he liked, but he said he didn’t really like movies, nor did he have the time to go to the movies.  After about a half hour of talking about fishing, the Red Wings/Penguins series, and trying to guess the age of our lady bartender, he suddenly commented that there was one movie he really liked.  He couldn’t remember the name of it, but it had Robert Mitchum in it and it was about a bunch of moonshiners down South.  When I informed him of the title, he perked up, and with a childish glint in his tired eyes said, "Yeah. Thunder Road. That was really a good movie.”

Thunder Road airs Tuesday, July 21 at 6:00 PM ET on Turner Classic Movies.

 The "Ballad of Thunder Road," as performed by Robert Mitchum: