Part of it's that big brown beast of a car he's driving - actually the same make and model as most of the police cars - but you'd see better wheel work in any episode of "The Dukes of Hazzard" TV show, which surely seems to have inherited much of its DNA from "White Lightning." Gator is supposed to be a first-class driver, but he slaloms and fishtails all over the road like a drunken teenager. I have to say the car stunts aren't particularly expert. Though there's hardly any black people in the movie, other than on one of Gator and Roy's whiskey dropoffs to the colored part of town. There's also a theme about college kids invading Bogan County and bringing all their freethinking hippie ideas with them, such as racial equality and ending the war. Party hyena's caw, part rebel yell, it always seemed genuine no matter how many takes he might have to do. It's here we hear the first notes of Reynold's signature high-pitched trilling laugh that would become part of his iconography. Most of his spare time, though, seems to be spent canoodling on the sly with Lou (Jennifer Billingsley), Roy's girlfriend.Īt one point they skinny dip and get it on right under Roy's nose while he's eating breakfast. Armstrong) running the big distillery.Įverybody pays Connors protection money to look the other way, and Gator tries fitfully to put together some evidence to prove this. After a successful tryout as a blockade runner, getting in front of the cops while Roy makes his getaway, Gator is brought fully into the local trade, with Big Bear (R. Through him he's hooked up to Rebel Roy Boone (Bo Hopkins), a glad-hander and one of the top haulers. He's assigned to coerce help from Dude Watson (Matt Clark), a local mechanic and stock car racer who also does a little moonshine running. I can't imagine that even in 1973 federal authorities would release a prisoner on spec to go hunt up evidence against an elected lawman, rather than testifying to crimes that had already occurred. He's given a year off his sentence, a few contacts and a car with a hot engine - a 1971 Ford Custom 500, according to the indispensable Internet Movie Cars Database - and very little oversight from the federal officers, who only show up once to check up on him during the course of the film. He vows revenge and earns an early release by promising the feds to bring down Connors by implicating him in the ubiquitous whiskey trade. Connors (Beatty), the powerful sheriff in nearby Bogan County, Ark. The story is that Gator is serving hard time after his third bust for moonshining - the first came at age 13 - when his younger brother is murdered by J.C. Reynolds' persona as moonshine hauler "Gator" McKlusky is thoroughly sardonic, though the mood is more tuned to tragedy and revenge themes than side-splitters. Norton was known for doing cheapie exploitative flicks, and director Joseph Sargent worked mostly in TV with a few similar-strata features like "Jaws: The Revenge." It's a little unclear how funny they actually intended the movie to be. It's currently sitting at 0 percent on the Tomatometer. The film did well enough that Reynolds was voted a top 10 box office star at the end of 1973, and would go on to star in a disastrous sequel, "Gator," which was also his directorial debut. He had already scouted locations and cast much of the film when he decided he wanted to do something more personal, and so the somewhat similar "The Sugarland Express" became his debut instead. (Alas, she gets her name misspelled as "Lad" in the credits.īelieve it or not, "White Lightning" was nearly the first feature film directed by Steven Spielberg. The movie was also a big break for Ned Beatty, who had played with Reynolds in the previous year's "Deliverance." Beatty helped set the stereotype of the fat, corrupt, red-faced Southern lawman that would become ubiquitous in subsequent popular film such as Reynolds' own "Smokey and the Bandit" series.īeatty was only in his mid-30s when these two films came out, one of those actors who seemed to be in perpetual middle age.ĭiane Ladd also has a small part as a wife who gets harassed and threatened with sexual assault for protecting her man. Reynolds boasted it was made so cheaply that they didn't care if it played in any theaters north of the Mason-Dixon line. It's not a particularly great movie, landing more toward the trash end of the action/comedy spectrum with lots of poor car chases and ill-staged fistfights. "White Lightning" is the film that made Burt Reynolds a breakout star - the biggest in the land, for a not-inconsiderable amount of time - and also firmly established his niche of fast cars, bad cops, frisky women and smoldering machismo.
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