One of the fun things about being over 40 (and there are many) in the 21st Century is the ability to reassess the pop culture that shaped yr impressionable teenage mind via yr wizened, cynical adult perspective.
Take, for example, that masterpiece of Southern Gothic cinema,
Smokey And The Bandit, which was playing on a Japanese satellite TV channel last night. I haven’t seen it since high school. So I watched. And remembered.
This movie holds a special place in my adolescence. For a start, it was the first PG movie I ever saw in a theatre. As such, it was also my full introduction to the wonderful world of cussing and kissing girls with yr tongue – two activities I enjoy to this day. And of course, there’s the black Pontiac Trans Am tearing around Georgia being chased by Jackie Gleason.
Oh, and Jerry Reed’s in it. That’s a bonus right there for me. I had “Amos Moses” on 45 and wore out both sides from constant play. I still have it somewhere. “Westbound and Down” is a great song to have in a movie. The SATB soundtrack was also the first soundtrack I bought that did what I thought all soundtracks should do: include dialogue from the movie.
Watching it now, it’s easy to see how people looked down on it at the time. It’s basically a one-dimensional excuse for car stunts, and Burt Reynolds and his mustache just mug their way through the whole thing. It’s also noticeably sexist even by 1977 standards.
But then it IS set in the Southern US. Which I think is why it resonated with me as a 12-year-old growing up in the Nashville suburbs – it was familiar territory. It was a glossed-over Hollywood interpretation, mind, but not so you wouldn't recognize it. Cars, 18-wheelers, cowboy hats, baseball caps, girls in tight jeans, henpecked husbands, sideburns, gratuitous bar fights, county fairs, country music, CB radios, high school football, beer runs, and a complete lack of respect for the law (at least when it came to driving): that’s more or less the South I remember. If Hal Needham could only have worked pro wrestling and guns into the story, he’d have been batting close to 1.000.
Not that I was really into any of those (except for the part about the girls, wrestling and the law). Southern culture in itself had very little appeal to me, fueled in part by my inability to fit in anywhere, but also because of the regional patriotism it required. In mid-70s Tennessee, people commonly saw the world as being sorted into two camps: Yankees and Rebels. In middle school, I sat next to kids drawing Confederate flags on their notebook covers with slogans like “Lee surrendered; I didn’t”. This made no sense to me. My best friend was from New Jersey. What to do?
Even so, I think it was SATB’s cultural familiarity that drew me into it. That said, I liked the movie mostly for Jerry Reed, the swearing, Sally Field's jeans and the car stunts. And they’re
good car stunts. SATB is probably one of the best car chase movies ever made – not better than
Vanishing Point or
Bullitt, but it’s up there. I think it was also the first film I ever saw outside of the Three Stooges where the cops were portrayed as bumbling fools and blustery hayseed idiots. Buford T Justice represented everything that was wrong with law enforcement in the South at the time, and my future run-ins with the Nashville Metro Police would only reinforce that image.
The other notable thing that SATB brought to my awareness was the silliness and futility of TV censorship. By some accounts, this movie was one of the first to have the actors overdub their lines for a TV-safe version. They also had to invent really stupid imaginary swear words like “scum bum” that sort of matched the lip movements without being too obvious. They never fooled anyone, not even children. But they did it anyway.
Imagine that.
Anyway, it was good fun then, and it’s good fun now, though maybe not for everyone. It’s very much a product of the 70s. Quite possibly you probably had to be there to get the appeal.
DISCLAIMER: None of this applies to any of the sequels. Those were unspeakable rubbish. Come to think of it, this was as good as it got for Hal Needham. Okay,
Cannonball Run was goofy fun, and credit for trying to introduce Jackie Chan and, um, Michael Hui to America (albeit by trying to pass them off as Japanese, even though they spoke Cantonese the whole time, but like us dumb Americans would know the difference, right?). But Needham followed that up with
Megaforce. Need I say more?
Okay, I’m done now. Carry on.
10-4,
This is dF
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