White Lightning

A few weeks ago TCM ran a night of movies on running moonshine. I hadn't seen White Lightning before, so I recorded it to watch and do a blog post on here.

The movie starts off with a prologue of two boats out on an isolated lake. One of the boats has two guys who are bound and gagged, and when the boat gets out far enough, somebody in the other boat shoots the first one, letting it sink with the two bound guys sinking along with it and drowning to their deaths.

Cut to a federal prison in Arkansas, where Gator McKlusky (Burt Reynolds) is one of the prisoners. He has a visitor, who informs him that one of those two people killed on the boat was his brother, and that the local sheriff of Bogan County, AR, was behind it. Gator wants to avenge his brother's death, but how can he do that when he's in prison?

Apparently, it's an open secret that the sheriff is behind all the moonshine business in Bogan County, but the feds have been unable to get any evidence. Gator offers to get that direct evidence that can be used in a court of law, in exchange for being paroled. The feds ultimately agree, setting up a mechanic named Dude Watson (Matt Clark) as his contact. Dude is facing the possiblity of going back to federal prison on tax charges, so of course he'll cooperate.

Gator quickly finds out that the local sheriff, J.C. Connors (Ned Beatty), is definitely behind the moonshine business here in exchange for kickbacks. To this point he's been very good about keeping his hands clean, but there's a slight problem in that he's hearing rumblings from one of Arkansas' US Senators that the feds may be sending somebody to Bogan County to investigate. Meanwhile, Gator is working his way into the local business, serving as a blocker for Roy Boone (Bo Hopkins).

Roy and Gator become friends, but Roy has a girlfriend in Lou (Jennifer Billingsley) who sees Gator and takes a liking to him, something that's definitely going to come between the two eventually. More worrisome for Gator is that Connors has figured out that Dude is in cahoot with the feds, so the sheriff is going to turn the screws on Dud, with force if necessary. It also implies that the noose will be tightening around Gator soon.

White Lightning is an entertaining little movie that I don't think was really intended as any sort of prestige movie. I thought it would be a bit more of a comedy, but it's pretty much a drama at least as far as action movies are concerned. What I really liked about the movie, though, was its depiction of the early 1970s south. With the slow demise of the studio system and movies moving away from the studio back lots, regular films (not just westerns) were going out on location a lot more, given them a rather more realistic feel. I've commented on several occasions about movies that were filmed in New York City around this time (referring to the era as the time just before Gerald Ford told the city to drop dead) and how I alwys find the look at the city interesting. The same holds true for White Lightning, just about a completely different region and culture. This was made only a dozen years after the recently blogged-about Ada, but to me the depiction of the South in the movies came a long way in those dozen years thanks to the location shooting and a more authentic script.

Both the TCM Shop and Amazon list White Lightning as being available on DVD, but some of the reviewers claim it's an edited version. I only saw the print TCM ran, which wasn't edited as far as I could tell, so I can't judge the DVD.