The Jericho Mile (1979)

          Michael Mann didn’t just introduce himself to viewers with his first feature-length directing job. He dazzled them. Arresting, emotional, and smart from its first frame to its last, this made-for-TV drama delivers an unusual story with meticulous realism, showcasing Mann’s signature tropes of a hip visual style, deeply felt character work, and ingeniously integrated music. The picture also demonstrates why Mann is virtually peerless in his depiction of the criminal mind, because he doesn’t portray crooks as monsters—rather, he portrays them as self-aware professionals ruled by strict codes.

          Set inside a maximum-security prison, The Jericho Mile revolves around Larry Murphy (Peter Strauss), a lifer who obsessively runs “fast miles” every day in the prison courtyard. Isolated from all but a few fellow inmates, Larry lives inside himself; the exhilaration of athletic challenge give his existence meaning and structure. One afternoon, humanistic prison shrink Dr. Bill Janowski (Geoffrey Lewis) clocks Murphy and realizes how fast the man is moving, so he confers with Warden Earl Gulliver (Billy Green Bush). An innovative penologist, Gulliver realizes that nurturing Murphy’s talent might inspire other inmates to break the cycle of jailhouse profiteering and post-incarceration recidivism. Gulliver invites a nationally ranked running coach, Jerry Beloit (Ed Lauter), to observe and possibly train Murphy. After staging a race between Murphy and several professional runners, Beloit declares that Murphy has Olympic potential. Yet that’s only the surface of the story. Unfolding concurrent with Murphy’s surprising odyssey is a grim drama involving powerful inmate Dr. D (Brian Dennehy), who runs a jailhouse drug ring and gets into a hassle with Murphy, which inadvertently sparks a prison-wide racial conflict.

          Laced into all of this is a potent revelation of Murphy’s layers. We don’t learn about the nature of his original crime until we’ve already become invested in his journey, so Murphy emerges as a profoundly sympathetic character—we’re able to root for him with full awareness of what he’s done, and full awareness of his capacity for future violence. Presenting Murphy without apologies might, in fact, be the greatest accomplishment of this fine film, so it’s no surprise that Strauss took home an Emmy for his dimensional performance, or that Mann and co-writer Patrick J. Nolan shared an Emmy for the picture’s outstanding teleplay. Yet on many levels, The Jericho Mile is most impressive as a compendium of all the skills Mann had developed thus far as a writer-producer on episodic TV shows, and that he would continue to embellish in his extraordinary feature career. He uses editing and music to create vivacious rhythms; he shoots real locations and sets equally well to conjure an engrossing sense of place; and he guides actors toward naturalistic performances.

          Character players including Bush, Lauter, Lewis, and Roger E. Mosley do some of their career-best work here, imbuing their roles with lively individuality. Dennehy, still very early in his screen career, is animalistic and frightening, and Strauss achieves several moving moments by channeling a volatile combination of compassion and rage. (Strauss totally nails Mann’s trademark device of having criminals speak without contractions to avoid misunderstanding, so he seethes when delivering such lines as, “Man, I am into nothing! That is how I do my time!”) Plus, as he so often does, Mann pulls the whole movie together with an ingenious musical flourish, turning a Latin-ized version of the Rolling Stones’ “Sympathy for the Devil” into Murphy’s searing theme song.

The Jericho Mile: RIGHT ON

Thunderbolt and Lightfoot (1974)

          Clint Eastwood’s tough-guy screen persona had solidified by the mid-’70s, as had his stringent control over projects—even when he wasn’t also directing, Eastwood ensured that his films were brand-consistent and supremely efficient. Given this closely held authority, it’s interesting to look at the handful of ’70s pictures for which Eastwood gave other filmmakers more latitude than usual. A good case in point is Thunderbolt and Lightfoot, the directorial debut of Michael Cimino, whose subsequent films—notably The Deer Hunter (1978) and Heaven’s Gate (1980)—are known for their epic scale. Obviously, “epic” wasn’t going to fly with Eastwood, so Cimino, who also write Thunderbolt and Lightfoot, confined his ambitions to a tight storyline, although Cimino’s taste for big-canvas cinema is evident in the John Ford-style panoramic shots of various Montana locations.

          A straightforward crime picture with an undercurrent of fatalism, Thunderbolt and Lightfoot begins when exuberant young car thief Lightfoot (Jeff Bridges) encounters a country preacher (Eastwood) who is inexplicably running from a maniac with a machine pistol. After helping the preacher escape, Lightfoot learns his new pal is actually the infamous bank robber known as “Thunderbolt” because he once used a cannon to bust into a vault. The man trying to kill Thunderbolt is a former accomplice, Leary (George Kennedy), who mistakenly believes Thunderbolt stole the haul from a heist they committed together. Eventually, Leary catches up with Thunderbolt and Lightfoot and accepts Thunderbolt’s story that the money was lost, so the three men—together with Leary’s nervous wingman, Goody (Geoffrey Lewis), conspire to rob another bank and replace the missing cash. Thunderbolt and Lightfoot isn’t precisely a buddy movie or a heist picture, nor is it merely a car-chase flick or a thriller. Rather, it’s an ingenious amalgam of all of those genres, a sampler plate of manly-man tropes.

          Individualization is generally kept to a minimum so characters can function as archetypes, although Brudges’ buoyant performance distinguishes Lightfoot from everyone else—he’s brash and irresponsible, yet so full of life he makes even the worst situations feel like exciting adventures. Cimino avoids romanticizing the lifestyles of his characters, accentuating the collateral damage criminals inflict and illustrating the cost criminals pay for making dangerous choices. Thunderbolt and Lightfoot is so offbeat and so well made, from the atmospheric production values to the painterly cinematography, that it’s tempting to read deeper meanings into the material, especially when Bridges’ vibrant acting raises Eastwood’s game in their shared scenes. Alas, this is really just an elevated brand of escapism, which means its virtues are, on close inspection, quite modest. That said, the picture is highly rewarding for viewers with appropriately calibrated expectations.

Thunderbolt and Lightfoot: GROOVY

High Plains Drifter (1973)

          After making a strong directorial debut with 1971’s Play Misty for Me, Clint Eastwood decided to put his stamp on the genre that originally made him famous as an actor: the Western. Yet instead of simply churning out a moralistic shoot-’em-up in the John Wayne mold, Eastwood made High Plains Drifter, a creepy revenge tale so heavily allegorical it might actually be a ghost story. Considering this was only his second directing job, Eastwood’s artistic ambition is impressive. Yet while the movie is brisk, nasty, and stylish, it has major narrative weaknesses. One big problem is that the protagonist is a cipher—we never learn the character’s background, name, or true motivation—and another is the way the movie fails to clarify whether onscreen events are happening in “reality” or taking place in a supernatural netherworld. Eastwood gets points for attacking heavy themes, but his inability to bring everything together is disappointing.

          The story begins when a character referred to as the Stranger (Eastwood) rides into the lakeside frontier town of Lago. He gets into a hassle with a group of thugs, and then kills all of them with his frightening gunplay. Impressed, the townspeople ask the Stranger to plan an ambush: Three murderers who have just been released from prison are pledged to ravage Lago, so the townspeople are terrified. Courtesy of (confusing) exposition and flashbacks, we learn that some time ago, the murderers slaughtered Lago’s do-gooder sheriff while the townspeople watched—and that the tragedy stemmed from a conspiracy related to the mine from which the town derives its livelihood. Furthermore, Eastwood’s character may or may not actually be the sheriff’s reincarnation and/or spirit—never mind the fact that no one recognizes him.

          Anyway, the Stranger is given carte-blanche throughout Lago, so he installs a local dwarf (Billy Curtis) as the new mayor/sheriff, seizes a local tramp (Marianna Hill) as his personal concubine, and makes the townspeople paint all of Lago’s buildings red so the town looks like a vision of hell. This sets the stage for a showdown with the murderers, although the townspeople start to wonder if their “savior” is worse than the killers he’s been hired to fight.

          The gist of the piece is painfully obvious right from the beginning—the people of Lago are being punished for their sins—but the script, by Ernest Tidyman, muddies the narrative waters. The Stranger is a bloodthirsty, crude, sarcastic outlaw capable of violent sexual assaults, so it’s not as if he’s the personification of justice. Therefore, the movie has virtually no morality on display, making it difficult to care what happens to any of the film’s characters. And since the movie doesn’t compensate for this deficit by providing a tidy parable, what’s the point? Still, High Plains Drifter looks great, especially during the moody nighttime scenes, and Eastwood surrounds himself with interesting faces. Curtis stands out as the town’s perverse voice of conscience, and Eastwood favorite Geoffrey Lewis is effectively odious as the leader of the murderers.

High Plains Drifter: FUNKY