White Lightning and its better-known (but not better) 1976 sequel, Gator, were written by William W. All goes according to plan-until a Fed mole tells Connors what Gator’s up to. Armstrong), the biggest supplier of the area. “Only two things in the world I’m afraid of,” Gator tells Connors, with a smirk that would soon become world-famous: “Women and the po-lice.” Gator quickly gets his shot as a “blocker” for Roy, and obviously acquits himself like a true “good ol’ boy,” which lands him an introduction to the unhinged Big Bear (R.G. Dude sits between them in the passenger’s seat, scared to death. One of the best scenes in the film has Gator, early on, pull up to Connors in the street, revving his engine, provoking him, but also trying to earn the Sheriff’s trust as a runner. Soon we meet probation-vulnerable Dude (Matt Clark), yet another “white lightning” runner and fast car fixer-upper, who leads Gator to Rebel Roy (Bo Hopkins) and his flirtatious wife Lou (Jennifer Billingsley). Connors, racist and murdering shit that he is, understands the justice behind moonshine: none of his men “make enough off a taxpayer to buy their seven dollars a fifth for government liquor…”-but “shine is six bits a pint.” Moonshine and bootlegging are not just a community glue where he’s from they’re acts of resistance against the larger Union, and now he has to choose between ratting out his own people and revenging his brother, who belonged to an upstart, big city movement that disdains just about everything about the South. His “daddy” (Dabbs Greer), a former moonshiner turned farmer, walks out on him for even contemplating “takin’ down names of liquor people,” and the conflict in Gator is obvious. When Gator comes home, he has to explain to his aging parents what he’s about to do. A couple of Treasury agents show up and give him what he wants. Gator tells the warden that he wants to make a deal with the Feds (“Federal law got me in here, didn’t it?”): he’ll get them Connors, who takes a cut of all the bootlegging in Bogan County, if the Feds set Gator loose. Marine Corps insignia on his right arm, and, though it’s not stated in the film, the implication is that Gator is a veteran of the war his brother was killed for protesting. We see him for the second time without a shirt, as he seethes at his helplessness and gets a talking-to from the warden but it’s not exactly a gratuitous shot of Reynolds’ sweaty physique: he’s got a tattoo of the U.S. All them damn hippies.” Gator tries to escape a few days later, but is caught and given hard time digging trenches.
It’s “on account o’ the kids he hung out with,” she explains, weeping. The prison warden (Lincoln Demyan), himself a well-known moonshiner, sends Gator along to a visiting cousin, who breaks the news about Donny. Gator, shirtless, is joking around and doing easy time in the prison garage when we first see him. And we find out in the next scene that one of the murdered boys, Donny, is the younger brother of Gator McKlusky (Burt Reynolds), currently doing time for bootlegging-a pursuit he’s been at since at least the age of 13. Connors (Ned Beatty), the Sheriff of Bogan County. The other two men start rowing back where they came from they don’t look back. The boys struggle manically, pulling and clawing at their ropes as they disappear beneath the water. The man in the glasses stops rowing and calmly picks up a shotgun, putting one round into the back of the boys’ boat. As the second canoe passes, we see two young men gagged and bound to cinder blocks they are terrified, desperately trying to get loose. As the leading canoe crosses the camera, we see what is clearly a police officer, as well as a portly man wearing a straw fedora, glasses, and a pocket protector-he might be a used car salesman, or a math teacher. These films are anti-establishment but also anti-counterculture, sort of an ideological counterpoint to 1969’s Easy Rider, a cribbing of the heroics of 1967’s Cool Hand Luke, whose Southern protagonist was sentenced to a chain gang for a universally admirable crime: destroying parking meters.Īs the film opens, two canoes, one of them towing the other, move quietly through the swamps of fictional Bogan County, Arkansas.
#WHITE LIGHTNING CAST SERIES#
White Lightning is the first in a long line of films and TV series about righteous lawbreakers in the post-Vietnam American South, where corrupt cops chase hot-rodding bootleggers and paid-by-the-mile truckers through the meager towns and backwoods scorned by “the people in Washington.” It’s a mythical land whose isolated, protective communities both resent and revel in their perceived marginalization.
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