Vitals

William Devane as Major Charles Rane, twice-traumatized Vietnam War veteran and “one macho motherfucker”

Texas and Mexico, Summer 1973

Film: Rolling Thunder
Release Date: October 7, 1977
Director: John Flynn
Wardrobe Credit: Nancy McArdle

WARNING! Spoilers ahead!

Background

You learn to love the rope. That’s how you beat ’em. That’s how you beat people who torture you. You learn to love ’em. Then they don’t know you’re beatin’ ’em.

Today is the 85th birthday of William Devane, the talented Albany-born actor who appeared in the rare starring role in the 1977 revenge-centered action thriller Rolling Thunder.

Written by Paul Schrader and Heywood Gould as an intended expansion of the Travis Bickle Cinematic Universe that began in Schrader’s script for Taxi Driver, Rolling Thunder centers around Major Charles Rane, a United States Air Force pilot returning home to San Antonio after seven years of imprisonment and torture in a Hanoi hellhole.

“He’s unemotional, unresponsive, and stoic to the point of not being among the living,” writes Quentin Tarantino in Cinema Speculation, the volume that introduced me to Rolling Thunder. Continue reading →