Critics reviews

The film is suffused with unforced, lyrical atmosphere: humid Southern roadhouses, memories of frost and dogwoods, frogs chirping on summer nights as moonlight slicks the winding mountain roads and kids dance to rockabilly music on the porch of a general store.

Nothing in the workmanlike, sometimes clunky fashioning of Thunder Road suggests the hand of the same Arthur Ripley who produced such stylish items as Voice in the Wind (1944) and The Chase (1946)... Nevertheless, Mitchum's film tapped a deep vein of folkloric yearning – he located the ideal of western self-sufficiency alive and well in the contemporary south-east, playing a larger-than-life outlaw who expresses his ethos in a countrified, poetic patois.

[Director] Ripley never successfully transitioned into features; like Mitchum, he had an independent streak, and after the shoestring noirThe Chase (1946), he retired from Hollywood to teach at UCLA's film school. Mitchum talked him into coming out of retirement, and the result is the director's best work—a movie that works equally well as a character study, a community portrait, and a taut action flick.