Once Again Ain’t Got No Time For Corner Boys-With Clint Eastwood And Jeff Bridges’ Thunderbolt And Lightfoot (1974) In Mind-Yet Again A Film Review Of Sorts
By Zack James
Thunderbolt and Lightfoot, starring Clint Eastwood, Jeff Bridges, George Kennedy, 1974
Yeah, I know it has been a while since you have seen my by-line running in this publication but let me explain. Or try to since our site manager Greg Green has asked me to ask for your indulgences. This whole mess really goes back to 2017, the year of the 50th anniversary of the Summer of Love which if you do not know by now let me tell you got practically 24/7/365 coverage in American Left History. The saturation coverage ordered by previous site manager Allan Jackson (and one of those “present as the creation” as they like to say when this publication started out in hard copy form back in 1974, I think) for young and old writers alike. This ordered madness started a rebellion among the younger writers, which included me, who did not give a rat’s ass about the Summer of Love or had to ask the older writers or their parents what it was all about.
What is not well known is that my oldest brother, Alex, just Alex not Alexander, was the catalyst for that wall to wall coverage after he went out to San Francisco that year and was inundated with stuff commemorating the event including a multimedia exhibition at the de Young Museum in Golden Gate Park the site of much of the music madness. Once Alex talked to Allan the gold rush was on. See Alex, Allan and the key person driving the action that year the late Pete Markin had been, at Markin’s urging knee- deep in the Summer of Love craziness that stalked the land then. Moreover, as a result of all that nostalgia. Alex, Allan and whoever was left standing from the old Acre neighborhood of North Adamsville located south of Boston, the Tonio’s Pizza Parlor (which is still there just with long gone Tonio) “corner boys” got together to contribute to a memorial book of their experiences, including 1967 in honor of their fallen comrade Markin. Markin, the “idea” guy for a million legal and illegal things they did back in the day, their expression not mine. (Being a decade younger than Alex I did not know or remember much about Markin, except the stories, although he and Alex were best friends and he had come over to our house many times).
Guess who they wanted to iron out the contributions, the personal remembrances, edit and see that the thing was produced. Yes, yours truly. Which leads us to the reason for my prolonged absence from my by-line. Another Acre corner boy, Jimmy Higgins, the “muscle” of the group, of the corner boys, passed away in 2018 and Alex, Allan and the others tagged me with doing the same things for a memorial book in Jimmy’s honor (a guy I did not know at all and who as far as I know never came to the house).
This work on the combination of books and the extraordinary, hell, maybe weird is better exploits of this generation of corner boys is what I immediately started thinking about when Greg assigned me my first film review back Clint Eastwood (Thunderbolt) and Jeff Bridges’ (Lightfoot) Thunderbolt and Lightfoot from 1974. Not that either of them were corner boys, or at least I don’t think so since Clint’s character was several years older than the brash Bridges’ but that throughout the film the bonds of buddy-hood grew until the tragic end of Lightfoot succumbing to the vicious injuries sustained when one of their comrades in crime Red, played by George Kennedy, went crazy after the heist they pulled off. Those bonds and that age difference, experience difference is what is driving this final part of the review.
The contribution from several corner boys that overlapped both memorial books was the role that one “Trigger” Burke played as a model for the Acre corner boys. Burke was about ten years older than my brother and his crowd but as they came to high school age they would see Trigger around, would see him coming out of the Dublin Grille (no longer there), mostly, which was a few doors down from Tonio’s and he would stop and talk to them. Burke was something of a local legend among corner boys from all the corners, a guy who had done a few bank robberies, done a little time and had plenty of money (and girls, women not all of them his age either usually younger and according to Alex foxy) and respect among the eager corner boys.
Markin, and Jimmy Higgins who lived across the street from the rooming house where Burke lived, were the real devotees of what he had to say. As it turned out half of Markin’s ideas, his plans for grabbing dough, fast and smooth, had been hatched by one Trigger Burke. As Alex kept painfully reminding me the ideas might have been Markin’s via Burke but the operation chief was always after a first close call with the coppers when Markin led the operation had been one Frankie Riley, the acknowledged leader of the Tonio’s corner boys.
Given the plotline of this film, basically after various crazed and random wild boy escapades in the hills of Montana Thunderbolt and Lightfoot, now bonded for life, a heist film it was no wonder why I thought about those Burke stories. In the end although the second heist was botched by Red’s crazed response to Lightfoot and the pair found the original heist money, they got away clean. Well as I telegraphed above not real clean since Lightfoot passed away from his injuries from that bastard Red. A cause for thought. I was glad in a way as much as I admired my distance oldest brother Alex that I was ten years younger than him and never had to go the midnight creep route by the time I got to highs school.
Oh yeah, I almost forgot, that Trigger Burke who lived across the street from the late Jimmy Higgins when he was growing up was none other than one of the famous Brink’s armored truck robbery guys in the early 1950s. No wonder the Acre corner boys worshiped at his shrine.
No comments:
Post a Comment