cult film freak: BURT REYNOLDS, NED BEATTY & BO HOPKINS IN 'WHITE LIGHTNING'

Burt Reynolds in WHITE LIGHTNING (Reassessment Review) Year: 1973 Rating: ****

For Burt Reynolds, WHITE LIGHTNING was a cross between the previous-years' DELIVERANCE and near-future SMOKEY AND THE BANDIT with creative and gritty 1970's-renaissance-era direction of the first and more mainstream good-old-boy muscle car action of the latter...

Where Burt looks as if his manly DELIVERANCE character had never been injured and, doing a five-year sentence on a scorching work-farm for moonshine, he learns what the audience witnessed in the dusky prologue, ironically set in an extremely familiar rural river setting...

Some DELIVERANCE repose in WHITE LIGHTNING

And with none other than DELIVERANCE rape-victim Ned Beatty as this movie's token lawman heavy... only he's genuinely formidable, sadistically drowning two young male hippies...

One the little brother of Burt's Gator McClusky, who gets sprung with a promise to both investigate the sheriff and, to catch him taking underhanded whiskey money, snitch on the local moonshiners (being a "blocker" like he would as BANDIT), making WHITE LIGHTNING more an undercover revenge-flick than the redneck adventure built into both the promotion and title...

From Joseph Sargent's WHITE LIGHTNING

Featuring a subdued Matt Clark, blackmailed mechanic of kingpin moonshiner R.G. Armstrong... and Bo Hopkins, who Gator helps dropping product off to various customers, and whose talky down-home girlfriend's more important than either he, Clark or Clark's feisty wife Diane Ladd...

And while natural beauty Jennifer Billingsley predictably winds up with Reynolds, it's never distracting or melodramatic since WHITE LIGHTING is more motive than character driven... the random car chases necessary symptoms to Burt's mission at hand that — with a natural performance never too witty or too serious — remains his sole drive and purpose.