Capital Celluloid 2015 - Day 54: Mon Feb 23

Rolling Thunder (Flynn, 1977): Prince Charles Cinema, 8.45pm


This film is part of the Taste of Revenge season at the Prince Charles. More details here.

Guardian review:
Rolling Thunder was written by Paul Schrader and – like Sydney Pollack's The Yakuza, written by Schrader and his brother Leonard – it signposts themes and imagery that would obsess Schrader in his own movies: Vietnam veterans, samurai ethics, and orgasmic explosions of cathartically violent revenge. Oh, and horribly mutilated hands. POWs Rane (William Devane) and Voden (Tommy Lee Jones) return to Texas after years of torture in a Hanoi prison. Rane's wife leaves him and his young son barely knows him. Rewarded by his hometown with a silver dollar for every day of his captivity, Rane is soon robbed of it by four men who kill his family and torture him (severing his hand in the kitchen-sink Dispose-All) to learn the money's whereabouts. Rane – now hook-handed, seething, armed to the teeth and partnered by Jones – spends the rest of the movie exacting his bloody revenge, and it's no less savage today than it seemed 30-odd years ago, climaxing with a pile of corpses in a Juárez whorehouse, as all movies should. Would it surprise you to learn that Tarantino loves it?
John Patterson

Here (and above) is the trailer.

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