Easygoing Arkansas good ol' boy Gator McKlusky (Burt Reynolds) is serving his second federal prison sentence for running moonshine when he learns his straight-arrow college graduate brother and his girlfriend have been murdered. Eager to take down corrupt county sheriff J.C. Connors (Ned Beatty), whom he suspects is behind his brother's death, Gator agrees to a federal attorney's deal that releases him from prison to infiltrate Connors' underground booze-running business.

This 1973 action film starring  a young Burt Reynolds, with Reynolds as a convicted moonshiner recruited as an undercover agent to go after other bootleggers, was nearly directed by Steven Spielberg. Reynolds, of course, is secretly trying to get revenge on the corrupt sheriff who killed his younger brother.

Filmed and set in Central Arkansas, primarily  Benton but also including Little Rock, White Lightning is  macho 1970 drive-in fare, chock-full of fast cars, corrupt cops, car chases, and fistfights. The film was a huge box-office hit at the time and proved that a film could be made that appealed to southern drive-in audiences. As Reynolds noted, no one cared if “the picture was ever distributed north of the Mason-Dixon line  because you could make back the cost of the negative just in Memphis alone.” Still, even to Reynolds “It was a well-done film. Joe Sargent is an excellent director. He's very, very good with actors. And it had some marvelous people in it whom nobody had seen before.”

The film’s success was a turning point in Reynolds’ career  and birthed a huge spate of films and TV shows featuring southern good-old boys, often involved in moonshining or the like, driving fast and evading the law or corrupt local officials. Reynold’s own Smokey and the Bandit is a later example, as is The Dukes of Hazzard.

This, however is the original that gave birth to a thousand imitations, less campy, leaner and meaner, though not without humor, and with violence aplenty. With Ned Beatty , here as the fat, villainous sheriff, Bo Hopkins, Diane Ladd, and a brief cameo by an uncredited Laura Dern (Ladd’s daughter) in her first role!