A revenge film can promise release and end up leaving a void. Tarantino’s documented choices include stories with very different ways of turning harm into action.
Rolling Thunder: a choice that does have a date
Rolling Thunder, directed by John Flynn in 1977, is among the films Quentin Tarantino chose for the 2012Sight and Sound poll. That choice lets us recommend it with precise attribution: it was among his selected titles for that survey. It does not prove that it always ranks as his favourite revenge film, nor does it authorise us to attribute any interpretation of its scenes to him.
The film follows Charles Rane, a veteran who returns from Vietnam and finds a society ready to celebrate his homecoming, but poorly equipped to understand him. William Devane creates a character whose restraint makes it hard to separate discipline, emotional detachment and suffering. Before the story turns into a pursuit, the return home is already a crisis. The later violence does not create a wounded man from nothing: it meets a prior experience of captivity and loss.
What is interesting about that construction is that revenge does not retrospectively resolve everything that came before. The protagonist may identify those responsible for a specific attack, but that does not turn the domestic world into the place he had hoped to recover. Seen from that angle, the film is harsher than a simple fantasy of payback. Its progression offers recognisable targets and actions while remaining guarded about what that activity can repair.
Tommy Lee Jones plays Johnny Vohden, another veteran whose relationship with Rane adds a dry form of camaraderie. The two of them work together without needing lengthy speeches to make their bond legible. Familiarity with danger replaces part of ordinary communication. That economy of words makes it possible to observe something especially valuable within the genre: characters acting together without their agreement amounting to emotional recovery or to a clearly imaginable future life.
Three acts of revenge brought together by the programmer
Another verifiable recommendation appears in the New Beverly’s March 2011 schedule, programmed by Tarantino. On the 8th he brought togetherThe No Mercy Man,Johnny Firecloud and Summertime Killer in a triple bill of revenge. The selection is more concrete than a list circulated without provenance: it brings together titles, a date and a screening context. Its value lies in showing which films he wanted to place in conversation before audiences.
Johnny Firecloud, by William Allen Castleman, places its conflict in the racist violence suffered by an Indigenous veteran on returning to his community. For anyone choosing to watch it, it is worth paying attention to the difference between depicting the brutality of an environment and turning that brutality into an automatic justification for every device in the spectacle. The film works with a deliberately unpleasant accumulation of assaults before giving the protagonist the means to respond.
That mechanism makes it possible to compare two scales of violence: personal harm and the collective permissiveness that makes it possible. The enemy is not exhausted by a single opponent. Power relations within the community determine who can be protected and who is listened to. The film belongs to exploitation cinema, with its excesses and questionable choices, but its inclusion in a themed screening does not require reducing it to the amount of punishment it delivers.
Summertime Killer, directed by Antonio Isasi-Isasmendi, organises another variation: revenge as a project that extends from a childhood experience into adult action. The passage of time introduces preparation, identity and a distance between memory and present objectives. The idea of an enforcer advancing through a list may seem familiar to Tarantino viewers, though that resemblance is not enough to claim that every decision in his scripts derives from this film.
The No Mercy Man, directed by Daniel Vance, adds another veteran figure and another conflict with the violence of the surrounding world. In a triple bill, the repetition of certain motifs stops being a flaw that must be hidden: it lets us perceive how tone, protagonist and type of aggression change. The programming records that comparative opportunity. It is not a statement that all three films have the same merit or produce the same satisfaction.
What should not be confused with a recommendation
Thriller: A Cruel Picture and Lady Snowblood often enter these conversations because of their relationship toKill Bill. A visual influence, a reused piece of music and a favourable review are evidence of different kinds. A character’s eye patch or a similar path of events does not on its own allow us to reconstruct a ranking of preferences. That is why the route proposed here relies on a dated vote and programme, rather than assigning a supposedly definitive list.
It is also worth distinguishing revenge from vigilantism. The avenger responds to an identifiable harm; the vigilante may take on a general mission to punish crime. The boundaries overlap, but they alter the relationship with the law and with victims. The stories ofwomen in prison linked to his recommendations offer another combination of abuse, survival and rebellion, without every escape needing to be classified as revenge.
Back to Tarantino recommendations by genre.