The 1970s road movie's cowboy-wanderer side and repressed-queer side in full flower, Michael Cimino holds the astonishingly sustained game of footsie. His method's tension is revealed upfront, images are composed beautifully and readily jangled -- the lonely church in a vast vista by the edge of a wheat field is a Bierstadt panel, a car pulls into it and George Kennedy steps out with a gun, Clint Eastwood at the pulpit finishes the sermon and dodges the bullets. The faux preacher is Thunderbolt, Lightfoot (Jeff Bridges) is the rambling joker who crosses his path in a freshly filched auto; they are joined by another "couple" (Kennedy and Geoffrey Lewis) and, in between mocking the absurdity of domesticity and contemplating the horizons of Montana, set up a heist. Cimino's spacious canvas is filled with curious gags (Bill McKinney speeding merrily with a trunk full of bunnies), sneaky symbolism (the old classroom is a tourist's site, the loot is behind a blackboard), and the distance between Eastwood's utterances of "history" and "progress." In this hunk of modern mythology, women take a hammer to the catcaller's truck and, en homage to the Kennedy of Cool Hand Luke, offer workers by the window a full-frontal show. Family life is skewered as a matter of coming home after a long day of selling ice-cream and getting smooched by the buck with wooly appetites ("Kids, they don't believe in anything anymore"). "The leopard shall lie down with the kid," Thunderbolt quotes, though romance with Lightfoot can only be consummated via editing, so Cimino cuts back and forth between the latter's pantyhose-wrapped ass under girlish disguise and the former's erect canon mid-robbery. The risky subtext, noticed by Robin Wood (approvingly) and Peter Biskind (censoriously) in overlapping analyses, is smuggled underneath the skin of a leisurely Eastwood vehicle, played as a rehearsal for the mammoth subversions of The Deer Hunter and Heaven's Gate. Cinematography by Frank Stanley. With Catherine Bach, Gary Busey, and Dub Taylor.
--- Fernando F. Croce
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