Trivia
The film was originally produced and scheduled for release by Twentieth Century-Fox; it was prominently featured in their 1977 exhibitors' guide. However, the studio brass were greatly disturbed by the violence in the finished film, and the decision was made to sell it off to American International Pictures.
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Quentin Tarantino named his distributing company, Rolling Thunder Pictures, after this film. Rolling Thunder Pictures released B-movies, cult classics, independent films, exploitation movies, and foreign films. The company went under due to poor sales.
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In his 1982 book 'Adventures in the Screen Trade,' William Goldman called an advance screening of this movie "the most violent sneak reaction of recent years... the audience actually got up and tried to physically abuse the studio personnel present among them."
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Luke Askew contracted food poisoning during the shooting of the movie and was seriously ill on the day the famous scene in which William Devane rips into Askew's crotch with his hook hand was shot.
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In the book "Schrader On Schrader" Paul Schrader who co-wrote the movie complains how the studio completely twisted his original version of the story. He wrote it as a critique of US involvement in Vietnam War and fascistic and racist attitudes in America. Rane was originally written as white trash racist with many similarities to Schrader's more famous character Travis Bickle (the main character of Martin Scorsese's Taxi Driver). In this version, Rane becomes a war hero without ever having fired a gun, and comes home to confront the Texas Mexican community. Rane's racist upbringing and hatred that grew in him in Vietnam slowly come out. This version ends with Rane's indiscriminate slaughter of Mexicans which was meant as a metaphor for Vietnam. Schrader concludes with a claim that he basically wrote a film about fascism and the studio made a fascist film.
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