Clint Eastwood gave Michael Cimino his first chance to direct on this 1974 heist film, with Eastwood as a demolition expert and Jeff Bridges as his drifter sidekick. It looked awful then and it probably still does, though Cimino’s personal mark seems clear in retrospect: it has The Deer Hunter‘s worshipful pupil-mentor relationship, with its cryptic gay overtones (Bridges plays one scene in drag), as well as Heaven’s Gate‘s fatal preference for lyrical interlude over plot. Cimino was already making an aesthetic of inarticulateness, and the film is by turns surly, incoherent, and provocatively mysterious. With George Kennedy and Geoffrey Lewis.