Ebullient Heist

By JAY COCKS

THUNDERBOLT AND LIGHTFOOT

Directed and Written by MICHAEL CIMINO

The star is Clint Eastwood, and this looks, at first glance, like his usual action feature. He plays a professional heist artist nicknamed Thunderbolt, who is hiding out after a big job and falls in with a fast-talking kid (Jeff Bridges). They bump around Montana, pursued by two of Eastwood's cronies (George Kennedy, Geoffrey Lewis) who had a hand in the Montana Armored robbery a couple years back and are looking for their share of the take. The take, however, has vanished, along with the one-room pioneer schoolhouse in which it was stashed.

The kid, Lightfoot, gets the idea first. They all need the money, and they could use the fun. Why not pull another job? Hit Montana Armored (a depository for banks) one more time, duplicating the previous plan to the letter. No one would ever expect it.

The best thing, likewise, about Thunderbolt and Lightfoot is its quality of going over familiar territory and coming up with things never quite expected. This is Director-Writer Michael Cimino's first film, and he demonstrates a scrupulously controlled style that lends sinew even to such usually dreary scenes as the preparations for the robbery and strategies of escape.

In his feeling for the almost reflexive defenses of masculine camaraderie and for its excesses, with his eye and grudging affection for Western lowlife, Cimino has an obvious affinity for the work of Sam Peckinpah. What really animates Thunderbolt and Lightfoot, though, and makes it distinctive is its shellbursts of lunatic comedy. Thunderbolt and the kid hitch a ride with a crazy who has the exhaust pipe of the car channeled up into the back seat, a caged raccoon riding in the front seat, and a couple dozen rabbits stashed in the trunk. "What am I going to do with all these rabbits?" he bellows, opening up the trunk and blasting away at them with his shotgun, which he also commences to turn on Thunderbolt and Lightfoot. This movie adeptly creates the sort of antic cartoon world where crooks case the getaway route in ice-cream carts, disarm a security guard by dressing in drag, and break into a bank vault by the simple expedient of blasting it with an enormous antitank gun.

The movie is shaky when the friendship between Thunderbolt and Lightfoot is sentimentalized, and at the end, when invention gives in to a mawkish resolution. But all the performers are excellent, and Eastwood unwinds a little from his customary characterization of a terse, razor-eyed stranger, breaking through to a kind of boyish affability. Cimino himself renders most of the movie with enough cunning to make it one of the most ebullient and eccentric diversions around.

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