Thunder Road
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| Thunder Road | |
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| Directed by | Arthur Ripley |
| Produced by | Robert Mitchum |
| Written by | Robert Mitchum James Atlee Phillips Walter Wise |
| Starring | Robert Mitchum Gene Barry |
| Music by | Jack Marshall Robert Mitchum Don Raye |
| Distributed by | United Artists |
| Release date(s) | May 10, 1958 |
| Running time | 93 min |
| Language | English |
| Budget | low |
| IMDb profile | |
Thunder Road is the title of a 1958 movie about running moonshine in the mountains of Kentucky and Tennessee in the early 1950s. It was directed by Arthur Ripley and starred Robert Mitchum, who also produced the film and co-wrote the screenplay, and is rumored to have directed much of the film himself, uncredited. The film became a cult classic and continued to play at drive-in movie theaters in some Southeastern markets through the 1970s and 1980s. Mitchum played an anti-hero and rebel against the government, which may have contributed to the film's popularity. In the film, he drove a hot-rodded 1950 Ford coupe with a custom tank in the back for moonshine. Suave Gene Barry appeared as a federal agent devoted to catching Mitchum's character, and Mitchum's son James Mitchum played his younger brother, which worked extremely well due to the close physical resemblance. Some of the scenes were filmed in Lake Lure, North Carolina.
The film was based loosely on an incident in which a driver transporting moonshine was said to have crashed to his death on Kingston Pike in Knoxville, Tennessee somewhere between Bearden Hill and Morrell Road.
The movie's theme song, "The Ballad of Thunder Road", was later recorded by Mitchum and became a popular single record, although Mitchum's rendition does not appear in the film itself.
Thunder Road certainly remains Mitchum's most popular cult film by a country mile, but toward the end of his life he often admitted to interviewers that his one real career regret was that he hadn't taken the effort as producer to make it into a better film than it was.
The film's legacy has grown over time, in part due to Bruce Springsteen's classic 1975 song "Thunder Road", which was inspired by Springsteen seeing the original theatrical poster if not the film itself. Various other things have been given the same name since then, including a roller coaster at the Carowinds theme park in Charlotte, North Carolina, which was originally themed after the film.
