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This is not a police procedural. This is not a crime drama. This is not even really a thriller. This is a brisk, deliberately paced revenge flick fueled entirely by Reynold’s retina scorching charisma and laconic charm. White Lightning had a director, and his name was Joseph Sargent. He’s best known The Taking of Pelham One Two Three, which is a great film. But who cares? White Lightning also had a screenwriter, but again, who cares? I’m not even convinced this film really had a script. It feels as though they just turned on the cameras, and let Burt walk around borrowing things from some people, punching others, and having sex with the rest.

Gator more or less charms his way through the entire story, and even the people he crosses seem half-hearted in their retribution. Like Reynolds himself, Gator McKlusky seems like the kind of guy who’s got such a surplus of charisma, even when he steals from you or beats you up, you’d still kind of like to have a beer with him. At one point in his quest for vengeance, Gator takes an undercover job with a local moonshiner, in an attempt to get close to the Sheriff. Almost immediately, Gator (literally) eats the man’s breakfast, (totally) sleeps with his wife, and when confronted, basically says:

“Well, maybe you should have put a ring on her finger.”

And the guy reluctantly tolerates this. I don’t blame him; if someone did that to me, I’d probably stab them. Unless it was Burt Reynolds, and then I’d probably thank him for his advice. Hell, when Gator is badly injured later in the film, even his wounds don’t seem all that serious about doing him in. Gator lives in a universe where everyone and everything is in awe of him, down to the atomic level.

Of course, it’s a little different with Connors. Once the Sheriff senses someone on his trail, things get pretty real pretty fast. And while he’s largely absent for the first half of the story, Beatty makes the most of his time onscreen, actually delivering some of the film’s more entertaining dialogue. That’s not to overlook the racist, misogynistic, xenophobic nature of his character OR of the municipality he is sworn to defend. But this was obviously a different time, and such degenerate behavior (sarcasm = ON) out of an elected official would seem peculiar and out of place in today’s world.

But if you can suspend your disbelief for long enough to believe in Gator McKlusky, you’ll probably notice Ned Beatty working on a slightly different level than the rest of the cast. Connors is a soft spoken Southern gentleman who rarely raises his voice, even when he’s blithely torturing elderly men for information on Gator. Take off his badge, and he could be any other paunchy, middle aged bus driver or hardware shop owner. Beatty didn’t have to work as hard as he did to infuse this character with genuine hubris but he does, while inexplicably remaining as underrated as he is.

It’s for all these reasons that White Lightning is such an easy, undemanding watch. This is really the first of the iconic Guy Films that Reynolds would make throughout the 1970s, and they were essentially what you’d get if you could successfully translate testosterone into English. All of them would feature some variation of Reynolds wearing tight jeans, flexing his pecs, smoking cigarettes, drinking whisky, driving fast cars, snirking and punching his way to (and sometimes through) justice.

And as I said before, even when he didn’t have the Stache, you could still...SENSE it.

There isn’t anything remarkable about White Lightning on paper. It’s the kind of stuff you couldn’t do on television in 1973, but now appears daily in video games marketed to children. What makes it work though, is the unrelenting vortex of animal magnetism that is Burt Reynolds, and Ned Beatty’s lifelong tendency to turn in quality work at Second Fiddle. And...probably the Stache. I assume when Reynolds finally passes from this world, his moustache will live on, rejoining the fabric of the very universe it helped to create.

I’m hard pressed to think of an actor today who could carry a dumb action movie entirely on his shoulders, willing it to greatness the way great quarterbacks can win regardless of the dopes you surround them with. Reynolds was one of those people, and White Lightning - while by no means a great film, still stands a testament to his greatness.

All hail the Stache.

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