The quote “Deep vengeance is the daughter of deep silence” could have been written about the lead character in Rolling Thunder, an extremely violent 1977 action revenge thriller. It stars William Devane as Charles Rane, an Air Force Major and Vietnam veteran who was a prisoner of war for seven years in Hanoi. He and three other soldiers come home to San Antonio in 1973 and are greeted by hundreds of people welcoming them. They are weary of the hoopla but put on a nice front. Rane even has a self-proclaimed groupie in pretty blonde barmaid Linda (Linda Haynes), who wore his POW bracelet while he was held captive.
At their welcoming home ceremony, Rane is given a brand-new red convertible Cadillac and 2,555 silver dollars, one for every day he was held captive and one more for luck. He says goodbye to his fellow soldiers (including Army sergeant Johnny, played by Tommy Lee Jones) and returns home to his wife Janet (Dark Shadows alum Lisa Richards) and son Mark (Jordan Gerler), who was a baby when he left. That’s where Charles’s troubles begin. The world has changed; women don’t wear bras and miniskirts are in fashion, and his wife tells him she’s been with another man. That man is local cop Cliff (Lawrason Driscoll), whom she wants to marry. Rane takes all this in stoically but retreats to sleeping in a small outside shed that resembles his POW confines. He also must cope with flashbacks of being tortured while in captivity.
Coming home one day he encounters four guys who want the silver dollars he was given. Rane refuses to tell them where they are and their brutal attack on him culminates in their sticking his right hand in the garbage disposal and mangling it. When Janet and Mark arrive home and the boy tells the robbers where the coin are, they retrieve them and then shoot the whole family. Charles is the only one to survive. Welcome home, Major.
Convalescing in the hospital, Charles is given a prosthetic hook to replace his right hand. He tells Cliff he can’t remember anything about his attackers, but he is lying. Linda visits Charles and flirts with him, but he doesn’t really react. He sets out to avenge his wife and son’s deaths and convinces Linda to come along to Mexico, not telling her the real intention of the trip.Once there, he uses her to get information for him in dangerous settings, which upsets her, but she eventually goes along with it.
Meanwhile, Cliff realizes what Rane is up to and goes down to Mexico to find him. He gets a lead, but that results in gunfire and his demise. Apparently, in Mexico gun battles are just a normal day. Rane finds the killers at a Mexican bordello, leaves Linda at a motel, and heads to El Paso to conscript Johnny into helping him. Johnny is also having trouble adjusting to life at home and jumps at the chance to help his friend. Wearing their uniforms they go to the bordello. This results in Rane’s retribution against the killers and a savage, bloody showdown.
Written by Paul Schrader (Taxi Driver) and Heywood Gould, the film takes its time in the beginning, slowly showing what makes Ranes tick. The feel of small-town life is portrayed accurately, and Devane capably conveys what’s important to Ranes after having had his life stolen. Haynes also has some nice moments as Rane’s love interest, and Dabney Coleman shows up as an Air Force colleague.
Before Rolling Thunder’s release there had been a trend of “one-man revenge” films, with Walking Tall (1973) and Death Wish (1974) making a splash at the box office. The thriller also explored the “Vietnam veteran adjusting to civilian life” element ahead of 1978’s The Deer Hunter and Coming Home and 1982’s First Blood. And it happens to be a favorite of director Quentin Tarantino, so much so that he even named one of his companies Rolling Thunder Pictures.