Anti-Authority Nowhere Land: CONVOY (1978)

America needs a hero again, c'mon back Rubber Ducky 10-4 and remember that song "Convoy" by ole Cash McCall? Sure, now that the trucker craze is decades gone, and rap is here to stay, McCall just sounds like some grizzled old Marlboro man babbling into his CB receiver while a Curtis Mayfield instrumental plays behind him on the FM dial, but in 1975-6, his "Convoy" was haulin' ass up the charts until it became the hood ornament on a full-on cross-country trucker fad going no place at 80 mph, downhill. It was the kind of thing we all heard on the radio in the car nonstop and either loved or ignored. We didn't really 'hate' things in the 70s, there weren't enough options. We had to listen to what the DJ played, so we just figured it was 'new' and we'd get used to it, all passive-like.

Well, now, Convoy's been gone, but now it's back - on Blu-ray no less, so c'mon, good buddy, put the hammer down all the way through, and join the CONVOY at long last.

Why? Because Pauline Kael liked it. And cuz Kristofferson is in it.

But why? Why was it ever made?

It's hard to fathom nowadays, because songs are too scattered along generational formats but, back in the 70s, a single could get so big across so many demographics that movie versions of goddamn songs were commissioned. We loved some songs so much we needed, some producers guessed (wrongly), to see a film version the same way we needed the novelization of a movie (but that's different since --don't forget--this was the time before videotape, so the only way to 'own' a film was via the paperback).

But the more we pull a song to us the harder we push it away later, so the movie inevitably comes out too late to catch the wave. It bombs and quietly sneaks off the marquee never to be seen again. Ttday only a few of us remember it even existed. Let me give you an example: a 'softie' radio obsession crept upon us, tugging our heartstrings mightily: Debbie Boone's 1977 hit "You Light Up My Life." Whole families (including mine) would pull over when "Light" came on the car radio, and cry in unison. It was such a hit, such an obsession, that a Light up my Life movie was immediately commissioned. Its producers ill-advisedly presumed America wouldn't be long sick of the emotional hit by the time the film came out later that same year.

We were, mighty sick of it. And to this day no one has ever seen the movie version of You Light Up My Life.

But Convoy (1978) had more than a feelin', by which I mean Peckinpah directing, which meant slow-mo bar fights, so maybe it'd be all right. It came out three years after the song had been forgotten and besides, truckers ain't as fickle as the sedan types. For the hard riders, emotion didn't enter into it, not the sappy kind anyway, rather a comforting feeling of strength and solidarity. The trucker as an icon sat in our minds next to Burt Reynolds' middle finger. Truckers were the friends of all children, bored in back seats on long drives. We all had the ability to get truckers to honk real loud if we turned around and made a 'toot-toot' gesture as we passed them. We loved that!

The real appeal for those of us too young to drive, though, was the novelty of the CB radio and all its crazy code words: You could get on there and DJ to maybe millions, maybe no one; you could tip off the reverse going traffic if you spotted a 'bear in the woods'. We didn't have Twitter or cell phones. CBs were 'it'- but you needed cool parents to get one and install it and teach you how to use it, usually in conjunction with a 'fuzz buster.'

Car culture was huge, still. Once in awhile we got rides in the older kids' cool Trans-Ams or Firebirds and it hooked us. The automotive store became a kind of secondary Spencer Gifts. We eyed the Playboy bunny mud flaps and bought novelty rearview ornaments to hang over our beds like dreamcatchers. We'd sit in our sixth grade class wearing black driving gloves. Meanwhile at the movies, the masses clamored in love of the motorized outlaw. Sugarland Express (1974) and Vanishing Point (1971) paved the way for the whole "mass of Americans rallying 'round one outlaw car'" cause thing, so big at (of course), the drive-in. By the time Convoy rolled off the line that moonshine running high-balling racist sheriff-baiting thing was quite overdone. There was High-Ballin' and Every Which Way But Loose, Smokey and the Bandit, Handle with Care, Breaker Breaker, White Line Fever, Truck Stop Women, and Bobbie Jo and the Outlaw. On TV, the genre devolved into Nielsen scavengers like BJ and the Bear, Dukes of Hazzard and TV movies like The Great Smokey Road Block and Flatbed Annie and Sweetie Pie. I could go on and on,

If you're curious, the junkyard in the back of Amazon Prime streaming is laden with them. Most look like shit but some still got the gleam in their grille. (Ed note: recommended: 1974's Truck Stop Women!)

I never really had more than a fleeting yen for the trucker life back, myself. And even as a grade schooler in the 70s, catching the stray commercial for Convoy during Saturday morning cartoons, I was horrified by that cropped afro look rocked by Ali McGraw. The commercials seemed almost apologetic for being so post-curve, like that straggler who shows up at your party at dawn after it's already over and your parents are in bed, but you're up watching Captain Kangaroo or Hong Kong Phooey, and he's drunk and snoring /laughing to himself on the couch as you sit on the floor in front of the TV, keeping the volume low to not wake your hungover parents.

That cropped afro, man, what a bad bad bad decision.

Still, Pauline Kael defended it, and 38 odd years later, that was enough for me to get the Blu-ray:

"Peckinpah uses the big rigs anthropomorphically, and while watching this picture, you recover the feelings you had as a child about the power and size and noise of trucks, and their bright, distinctive colors. Graeme Clifford's editing provides fast, hypnotic rhythms, and sequences with the trucks low in the frame and most of the image given over to skies with brilliant white clouds are poetic gestures, like passages in Dovzhenko. As a horny trucker, Kris Kristofferson lacks the common touch that might have given the movie some centrifugal force, though he's as majestic-looking as the big trucks. 

Hell, forget it. As Kristofferson might say, "Dovzhenko, my ass!" But I am a Pauline Kael disciple and thanks her odd associations and my mancrush on Kristofferson, for better or worse, I have joined the Convoy. Wanna ride with the Duck, come on back?

Burt Young - the king of country

Yep - Kristofferson's handle is 'the Duck' and despite the name--and Kael's opinion-- he, alone in the film, looks, talks and acts like real live trucker might, and is the only member of the main cast who does. Peckinpah clearly didn't know much about the trucker red state mystique because for the rest of the cast he apparently didn't look farther than the NY Actor's Studio: Queens-born Burt Young (handle: "Love Machine") is about as cowboy as a Nathan's egg cream. When he delivers lines like "Long highways sure grind the souls off us cowfolks," you wonder if it's supposed to be a joke. If it is, it sucks. Couldn't Peckinpah find real country boys to ride these rigs instead of a bunch of uber-ethnic NYC character actors? Brooklyn's own Franklin Ajaye is the black trucker (handle: "Spider Mike") and Brooklyn's own Ernest Borgnine ("Cottonmouth") plays such a foul, greedy Southwestern cop he entraps Duck, Spider and Machine on an off-road, shakes them down for $50 each, then follows them to a crowded diner where he tries shake down Spider Mike a second time, with everyone watching, which is beyond idiotic, like getting away with stealing someone's wallet, then following him into a crowd and shooting him in broad daylight for not having a second wallet.

In sum, Peckinpah ain't thinking things through. Is he even reading his own rewrites? Maybe he can't see straight. Maybe it's the booze. Hell yeah, it's the booze. But the truckers need a reason to be chased by the law, because Burt Reynolds was chased by Jackie Gleason in Smokey and the Bandit, and Gleason had such a grand time that he birthed a whole archetype: the fat and sassy Southern sheriff, a comic foil for every subsequent picture ever made that has a fast car in it. The Fat Sheriff archetype even made his way into Bond films, a mere four years earlier. (1)

But Borgnine sucks the fun out of it. Convoy aint a fun picture. Cathartic at times (the big trucks smashing the jail scene), but not fun.

But hey - fights happen, truckers all become outlaws and then folk heroes without ever bothering to question any weird plot device that happens along. Duck picks up this close-cropped perm-fro'd Ali McGraw on the way out of the diner fracas (she jumps ship from her previous ride) and she becomes his chronicler with her fancy camera.

And that's the final outrage: McGraw may be still gorgeous, but  her close cropped permed hair is continually depressing. In the annals of 'bad hair' decisions it makes Orson's cropping Rita's long tresses for a short blonde flip in Lady from Shanghai seem inspired instead of merely churlish.

Together, in fact, Rita's and Ali's hair crops make a great collective illustration of how a petulant male auteur unwittingly reveals his misogyny. As Vincent Canby wrote at the time: "to transform a naturally beautiful woman into a figure of such androgyny seems, at best, short-sighted; at worst, it's mean-spirited."

Don't mean to shit on this otherwise interesting flick but considering the amount of shitting on our collective hats Peckinpah does during the movie, well, we need plenty of venthillation.

On the plus side, there are some stretches of Peckinpah brilliance vis-a-vis his signature rapid editing through tight shots of crazy locals in various states of intoxication. A series of old faces, drinking and smoking in the proximity of flags, feels authentic enough - and all done without Easy Rider's redneck-demonizing, Altman's tacky judgmental mummery, or Smokey and the Bandit's lecherous bouncing and guileless harmonica score.

No

Then again, it also lacks Easy Rider's truly revolutionary spirit, Nashville's sense of moveable feast community, and Smokey and the Bandit's star chemistry. In the latter, especially, Jerry Reed, Burt Reynolds, and Sally Field bring out a special something in each other hard to duplicate.

Yes

See, Burt Reynolds might come off macho for the press, but he genuinely loves (and is not threatened by) strong female co-stars like Fields, and it's clear that goes. vice versa. A deep love and respect is apparent from the get-go in their bankable chemistry; and Jerry Reed well, he loves Fred, his hound dawg. All four of them look authentic, like they could have driven straight up from Florida or Texas, and all of them got charisma to burn. Even Gleason's sheriff and Reynold's Bandit kind of love each other. Fights end in handshakes and laughs; CB radio conversations post-chase between Smokey and Bandit confess admiration for each other's driving skills, their feeling of emptiness once the chase stops, their willingness to keep it going just for the hell of it. See, that's the part of the red state mentality whiny blue state liberals don't get. To them boxing is brutality. To the red states, it's a sport. In the end which attitude generates the most negativity?

CONVOY clearly is a leftist blue state product. The only authentic looking 'red state American' main character in Convoy is Kristofferson, and even he feels out of place. He's too cool to behave logically, too pointlessly iconoclastic to even try to save himself from 20 years in the pen, even if it's the easier, righter thing to do. There's no love anywhere in the film except between Duck and 'America' as faceless adoring mass. The sheriff isn't fun but unaccountably vile. Yet it's hard to root for Duck either - the whole mess of issues this "ain't so good at stringin' words together as you are" folk hero creates for his self, his stubborn insistence on not being this and not being that, begins to feel less like working class heroism and more like of Munchausen-by-proxy stupidity. He's like the idiot kid who's too dumb to hide his weed going through customs, and who then bitches and moans about violations of human rights when it gets taken away. (If you let the officer see it, he has to take it, idiot! Just make the effort).

And Duck's hypocrisy is glaring. He likes to drink "Everclear" and listens to "we don't smoke marijuana and we don't take LSD" like there's no hypocrisy there. Again--a joke? The alcoholic Peckinpah has no right to get anti-anti-establishment.

That said, Duck's not afraid to have a few big rigs get together to smash open a police station where Spider Mike's been violated, rights-wise. Shit gets smashed up for real (it's pre-CGI) and that's why films like Convoy will endure. If you see a cop car go flying off the interstate and through a billboard, better believe some stunt man did just that. And it just feels real good.

Alas, when not crashing cars or eye-fishing roadshow funerals, the Peckinpah signature over-editing thing does not always work: that truck stop cafe brawl with Cottonmouth, for example, isn't quite the same ode to violence as the opening or closing of The Wild Bunch (1969). With all its slow motion and quick cuts it becomes abstract and unseemly: cutting back and forth to about eight different characters in various states of falling, rolling, punching, ducking or running - all in a very close quarters diner environment--is numbing and dumb rather than riveting. It's a fight that would have blown our minds in the hands of a tight-editing Walter Hill (as in the bathroom fight in The Warriors) but Peckinpah infamously wasted weeks filming and it's clear that about 100 different takes are all used for one single movement to create a bewildering sense of time and relative space (a character might start falling off a stool at one end of the counter and land behind a table on the other, his eyes indicating he somehow has aged 20 years in frustration with his director in between the two angles). Then there's the big events and demonstrations as the rebel convoy gets longer and longer, word spreading analog viral through the CB network of all the 'little' people from Flyover USA who are tired of getting pushed around. Yawn. It works at times, in others, it's just a lot of nowhere shorthand for 'everyday' America. I guess it's inspiring, but man, that food in the back of them trucks crawling along is gonna spoil. And what about them poor live pigs being hauled by Love Machine? What about their freedom? The sooner I can stop associating Burt Young's harsh face with actual pigs and the tang of sulphur, methane, diesel and asphalt, the better. Son, dump them pigs loose upon the plain! Set the pigs free and you'll prove you really do like freedom. If not, get thee to a ROCKY pinball machine, stat! Gaze in drunken brother-in-law rage at what a real hero looks like, and make sure that pint bottle of whiskey you're about to throw at his picture is empty! There are sober children in India who could really use that last sweet swig.

Young in Rocky II - made the following year (1979)

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NOTES:
1. J.W. Pepper in Live and Let Die (1971) and Man with the Golden Gun (1974)
2. This coming weekend I'll be one-year quit -- not being able to absorb any oxygen in your burnt lungs - that'll do 'er.