William Devane in Rolling Thunder (1977)
Vitals
William Devane as Major Charles Rane, twice-traumatized Vietnam War veteran and “one macho motherfucker”
Texas and Mexico, Summer 1973
Film: Rolling Thunder
Release Date: October 7, 1977
Director: John Flynn
Wardrobe Credit: Nancy McArdle
WARNING! Spoilers ahead!
Background
You learn to love the rope. That’s how you beat ’em. That’s how you beat people who torture you. You learn to love ’em. Then they don’t know you’re beatin’ ’em.
Today is the 85th birthday of William Devane, the talented Albany-born actor who appeared in the rare starring role in the 1977 revenge-centered action thriller Rolling Thunder.
Written by Paul Schrader and Heywood Gould as an intended expansion of the Travis Bickle Cinematic Universe that began in Schrader’s script for Taxi Driver, Rolling Thunder centers around Major Charles Rane, a United States Air Force pilot returning home to San Antonio after seven years of imprisonment and torture in a Hanoi hellhole.
“He’s unemotional, unresponsive, and stoic to the point of not being among the living,” writes Quentin Tarantino in Cinema Speculation, the volume that introduced me to Rolling Thunder.
Rane reunites with his wife Janet (Lisa Blake Richards) and the young son he barely knew, only to find out that his wife plans to leave him for a well-meaning local patrolman, Cliff Nichols (Lawrason Driscoll). It’s to Cliff that Rane demonstrates the rope torture he was subjected to twice a day in Hanoi and his subsequent lesson about “how you beat people who torture you… you learn to love the rope.”
While Rane battles his inner demons and family woes, he continues to be subjected to a hero’s welcome with public accolades like a cherry-red Cadillac convertible and the presentation of $2,555 in silver dollars, one for each day he spent in captivity plus an extra for luck. Unfortunately, it’s not good luck as the televised ceremony attracts the Acuna Boys: a quartet of murderous thugs led by a sweaty and uncharacteristically profane James Best—far more villainous here than he would be as Sheriff Rosco P. Coltrane years later on The Dukes of Hazzard.
As Tarantino describes it, “after seven years of torture at the hands of his communist captors, when these Texas shitbirds suddenly show up demanding information, Charlie ain’t talking,” even when they feed his right hand to a garbage disposal. Nine-year-old Mark (Jordan Gerler) weighs the pros and cons of the situation and, profoundly seeking to save his father’s life, reveals where the men can find the coins. But obtaining the loot isn’t enough to satiate the tastes of the Acuna Boys, who gun down the Rane family and leave them for dead.
Major Rane remains the only survivor from the attack that killed his wife and son and is discharged from the hospital more than six weeks later. Brushing off offers from Cliff to involve law enforcement, Rane obsessively seeks revenge and enlists the initially unwitting help of his self-described “groupie” Linda Forchet (Linda Haynes), the part-time waitress and “Texas belle” who wore his MIA/POW bracelet during his seven years in Vietnamese captivity and was the one to award him the troublesome silver dollars in the first place.
Linda: Why do I always get stuck with crazy men?
Rane: ‘Cause that’s the only kind that’s left.
Despite Linda’s initial frustration that the “good time” he joined Rane for actually ended up being a quest for violent revenge, she softens and offers her help. Rane tracks the goons down to a brothel across the Mexican border in Juarez and, realizing Linda doesn’t deserve to be collateral in these deadly stakes, he leaves her sleeping in a border town motel and instead seeks decisive assistance from his fellow ex-prisoner MSGT Johnny Vohden (Tommy Lee Jones).
Rane: I found ’em.
Vohden: Who?
Rane: The men who killed my son.
Vohden: (a beat) I’ll just get my gear.
What’d He Wear?
After Major Rane’s discharge from the hospital, he rides home with Lieutenant Colonel Maxwell (Dabney Coleman) while wearing his usual Class B uniform of a light-blue short-sleeved service shirt tucked into the blue wool trousers of his Class A service uniform, debuted here with the lightweight blue jacket prescribed by USAF regulations.
Specified MIL-J-83386, the “Jacket, Man’s, Lightweight” has been issued as practical outerwear since the early days of the Air Force, made from a water-repellent 5.5-oz. poplin blend ranging from 65% polyester and 35% cotton to an even 50/50. Cloth and color vary depending on the contractor who produced each respective jacket, typically dyed either the 1157 or 3356 shade of navy blue.
These waist-length jackets have always featured a straight front zip and two slanted set-in hand pockets, though the button-fastened cuffs and open hem (with button-tab side adjusters) have been replaced by the ’90s with knitted cuffs and waistband. The jacket features a large shirt-style collar with a throat-latch tab that can be unbuttoned from under the left collar leaf to extend across the neck and button closed on the right side. The shoulders are detailed with epaulets that button down against the neck.
Rane introduces the lightweight blue jacket worn appropriately over his service shirt and blue uniform trousers, though he continues wearing his USAF-issued jacket even with his civvies—still following the modern requirement that call for “the zipper [to be] worn no lower than halfway between the collar and the waistband.”
Even when not in his Air Force uniform, Rane maintains a palette of predominantly blue clothing, rooted in hardy workwear. His indigo denim cotton Wrangler shirt has seven white-filled nickel snaps up the front placket, matching the three snaps closing each cuff and the single snap on each pocket flap. Both chest pockets are covered with pointed flaps and detailed with Wrangler’s characteristic “W” stitch in a low-contrasting orange thread, as well as a black branded tag sewn in the upper left corner of the right pocket flap. The shirt features pointed Western-style yokes on the back and over each shoulder.
It’s no surprise that Rane wears blue jeans, though the choice of bell-bottoms is notably trendy for the no-nonsense officer. Above the knees, the style reflects traditional jeans, featuring a pair of patch pockets on the back, two curved front pockets, and an inset coin pocket on the right. He opts to forgo a belt, wisely avoiding the need to fumble with a buckle after having a prosthetic hook fitted in place of his damaged right hand.
Bell-bottoms and shotguns.
Lace-up shoes would also be an uncomfortable obstacle for the hook-handed Ranes. Luckily, he’s a true Texan, so he’s able to set out on his mission for revenge wearing the same russet-brown leather cowboy points with their decoratively stitched shafts that he had been wearing on the day that the Acuna boys attacked him.
Rane continues to wear his gold-framed Type G-2 aviator sunglasses that had been authorized as the MIL-G-6250 for USAF pilots for decades and produced by contractors like Welsh Mfg. Co., though these would be subseded in the late 1950s by the squared Type HGU-4P flight goggles popularized by American Optical and Randolph Engineering.
Rane’s “Glasses, Sun, Type G-2” follow the World War II-era “comfort cable” design with teardrop-shaped lenses, reinforced brow bar, and curved arms that hook (sorry, Major) behind the wearer’s ears under a flight helmet.
As Linda sleeps in the Desert Hills Motel on the border, Rane dresses in his full Class A service uniform prior to visiting Johnny Vohden and recruiting him into one last step on his path to vengeance.
The Car
Major Rane, to help you travel on the road to success in style, Rogers Motors is proud to present to you the keys to that Cadillac convertible…
In recognition of his service, Rane receives a bright “Dynasty Red” 1973 Cadillac Fleetwood Eldorado convertible that he eventually drives down into Mexico with Linda on the first leg of his revenge tour. The Eldorado had received a fresh facelift for ’73 and enjoyed its greatest sales year for the decade with more than 51,000 coupes and convertibles sold.
Built on a massive 126.3-inch wheelbase, the sole engine option for Eldorado convertibles produced from 1971 through 1976 was the massive GM 500 cubic-inch V8 with a Rochester 4-barrel, mated to GM’s three-speed Turbo Hydramatic automatic transmission. In 1973, this generated 235 horsepower and 385 ft-lb of torque to push the approximately 5,000-pound luxury cruiser.
Rane’s convertible, described by Cliff as “a 1973 red Cadillac convertible, Texas license number—temporary—3-8-0-2-William.”
“That there is the last American factory-made convertible,” Johnny’s brother describes it during a conversation about the virtues of purchasing American-made vs. Japanese-made goods. Indeed, General Motors was the last of the “big three” American manufacturers to produce convertibles during the ’70s, as Ford had ceased after the 1973 model year, leaving the Cadillac Eldorado as the last American convertible until the last one rolled off the assembly line in ’76. It would be another six years until U.S. automakers would again regularly produce convertibles, with GM again leading the way with a limited run of Buick Riviera convertibles made for the 1982 model year.
The Guns
Rane converts the Cadillac’s trunk into a small arsenal that includes handguns, rifles, and shotguns. The major’s limited dexterity due to his hook prevent the bolt-, lever-, or pump-action long arms from being his most effective weapons as he instead favors the double-barreled shotgun he had received as a welcome-home gift from his late son Mark.
“Must be planning on some point-blank shootin’,” Linda observes of Rane’s modifications to the weapon. “Sawin’ off the barrels don’t give you must distance.” The side-by-side barrels and receiver are blued, with decorative etching on the sides of the receiver ahead of where the weapon breaks open to load or eject the 12-gauge shells.
Rane’s usual sidearm is a blued steel Smith & Wesson Model 28, a .357 Magnum revolver introduced in 1954 as the “Highway Patrolman”, typically available with a 4″ barrel (like Rane carries) or a 6″ barrel, though a limited run of less than a hundred were also produced with a 8 3⁄8″ barrel. This traditional double-action revolver is loaded with six rounds in the swing-out cylinder.
In response to law enforcement demands, Smith & Wesson developed this model as an affordable alternative to the polished Registered Magnum, a functionally equivalent .357 Magnum revolver also built on their large N-frame. When Smith & Wesson shifted to numeral nomenclature later in the decade, the Registered Magnum and Highway Patrolman were redesignated the Model 27 and Model 28, respectively.
What to Imbibe
Though he is earlier shown preferring the local Texas brew Pearl, Major Rane doesn’t partake in drinking after the incident at his home. Once the setting shifts to Mexico, we see plenty of characters drinking Mexican lagers like Tecate and Carta Blanca, which Johnny Vohden orders from the bar at the Juarez brothel.
Salud!
How to Get the Look
William Devane and Linda Haynes in Rolling Thunder (1977)
Our tortured POW-et literally dresses for revenge when he’s on his vigilante shit again.
- Dark-blue polyester/cotton poplin USAF-issued waist-length jacket with shirt-style collar (with throat-latch tab), straight-zip front, shoulder epaulets, set-in sleeves with button-fastened cuffs, slanted set-in hand pockets, and open waist hem (with button-tab side adjusters)
- Indigo denim cotton Wrangler western-yoked shirt with snap-up front placket, two chest pockets (with single-snap pointed flaps), and triple-snap cuffs
- Blue denim five-pocket bell-bottomed jeans
- Brown leather pointed-toe cowboy boots
- Gold-framed “type G-2” military aviator-style sunglasses with reinforced brow bar and curved arms
Do Yourself a Favor and…
Check out the movie. And don’t forget who Don Visser is.
The Quote
It’s like my eyes are open and I’m lookin’ at you, but I’m dead. They pulled out whatever it was inside of me. Never hurt at all after that, and it never will.
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