Thunder Road has a kind of raw vitality that overcomes its indifferent direction and uneven performances. Mitchum is wonderful as always, and this film must have meant a lot to him -- he wrote the story and starred, as well as co-writing and singing the radio hit that came out of it. A major drive-in film -- it was more or less in continuous release from 1958 to the early 70s -- Thunder Road embodied an attitude that prevailed in the little Texas towns I grew up in, and that is still a part of America's strange outlaw subcultures. Lucas Doolin and his kin are folks being oppressed on all sides by the forces of conformity that characterize so much of America's culture in the Eisenhower era. On one side, the emotionless forces of the government, on the other, the institutionalized criminals of "the big city," two poles remarkably alike in their indifference to the traditional regional values of the Harlan County shine runners. Despite Pa Doolin's talk of changing ways to meet changing times, the independent diversity of these folks cannot exist among the increasingly limited world of modern America. Ironically, the trappings of outlaw culture most visible in this film, fast cars, jukeboxes, even the drive-in screens the film was projected onto, are a part of the forces of conformity that transformed regional lifestyles into today's homogenous pop culture. Like Doolin says in one of the film's best scenes, the ghosts of the old backwoods are out on the highways now.
Review of Thunder Road
