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.

Midlife Crisis Month: Best of the Beards #1: Kristofferson

Do they still do that thing of growing mustached for prostate cancer awareness in November? My sober anniversary month, November 17th, is always stained with the rainy teardrops of shaking and quaking; it's the usual marker between my manic and depressive phases, such as they are. Rough times, man. October is my favorite month, November my least. But what is Heaven if not Hell finally accepted? The flaming beard of the sage is as a nest for the bird of wisdom. Rant against cigarettes and condomless sex still the cows come home, o Safety-First Clydes. Gives a flying fuck doth the sage? No sir. He accepts his pile of Hell fully it so it morphs into a slice of heaven. Or as Kristofferson put it:

"I ain't sayin' I beat the devil, but I drank his beer for nothing.Then I stole his song." 

In November all I do is sit around and watch World War Two documentaries and Vin Diesel (he's our century's John Wayne and don't make me prove it), Tennessee Williams movies, James Coburn, John Huston, Voight, Reynolds and the man with the best beard of all, Kris Kristofferson. (1) See, the man Kristofferson is from a different time. His beard is a different breed from the quirky hipster's. It's all there in the movies of the 70s when country songwriters could still be men. In the movies today the good old boys can only play extremes of the type, so they're either twitchy meth dealers who abuse their wives and children or serious, hard working sober Christians in flannel who just want to teach the son of the hot single mom how to fish, whittle, and tune a guitar before he has to ride into the sunset or take one last shady job to pay for the boy's operation. There is no middle ground today. There is no man who is both reveler and decent guy, spiritual seeker and hedonist, not a cliche'd everyman but a dude who's genuinely free, able to drink and smoke without the score or subtext condemning him. That's why LEBOWSKI would be nowhere without Sam Elliot to supply the narration and Saspirilla drinkin'. The sanctification of the country hombre, old Sam's the link we need. We'd never see the straight line woven along from Bogart's Marlowe to Gould's Marlowe to Bridges' dude to Phoenix's Doc. All we got now is Adam goddamn Sandler and his saintly manchild contingents.

Back before that manchild thing, back in the 70s, if you wanted to tell a story about a raunchy team in the flyovers you could make them hard drinking, brawling, smoking ten year-olds or coaches who'd just as soon call the game off and pass out than snatch victory from the jaws of defeat. Those were real men! Even the twelve year-olds. I blame insurance companies, nanny state hyper-parenting, and academic overreach. It takes longer than ever to grow up.

And so it makes sense, it being November, to honor the facial hair not of the co-op hipsters that haunt the coffee houses of Williamsburg, for they'll never be a step away from dyin', or as Kristofferson says in the great and underseen Alan Rudolph film SONGWRITER:

"Do you suppose a man has to be a miserable son of a bitch all the time just to write a good song now and then?"

The hipsters today don't need to be miserable anymore, they got antidepressants and Cialis. They'd never be sons of bitches for the hell of it and they'll never get the nicotine and cyprine stained beards of the 70s dads and groovy football-when-it-was-cool older brothers, the beard that cares without being a pussy about it, the beard of a man had 'passed' his acid test and who was no longer that into looking young and gorgeous. He's above all, too lazy to shave.

So who gives a fuck about that little pisher Jesse Eisenberg throwing his lot in with the UWS bourgeoisie and their smug piddly ass New Yorker subscriptions and their tired tweed jacket self-importance and knowing chortles? Soon my kind will drop 'em down before we too drop, and the new generation of ten thousand talkin' and nobody listenin' will swallow them like the tide swallows the drunken bather. Kristofferson is still the coolest man on TV. And all you have to do is watch THE VOICE and how regularly lanky Blake Shelton wins against the crushingly insecure and narcissistic manchild Adam Levine. I'm no country music fan in general but between who I'd both pick to drink with and have as an AA sponosr, it's old Shelton. You just know he'd be able to talk about more than how you like his hair and what people are tweeting about him.
---
(From SEMI-TOUGH): 

"The "loving fight" concept was huge in the 1970s, especially, as I've noted before, in Burt Reynolds movies like SEMI-TOUGH. This was the age of bloodless bar fights, where chairs break easy over heads, and people fly through storefront windows with the carefree abandon of a kid jumping into a summer lake. Everyone makes up outside in the parking lot, their macho fury soothed with some good old fisticuffs in the grand drunken John Ford tradition. And SEMI-TOUGH has the coolest two guys and a girl group bond since DESIGN FOR LIVING. It's a trick that we've forgotten in the manchild 80s thanks to George Lucas, who's jedi Luke refuses to fight his father, even though fighting with fathers is a great way to train and get in shape. Didn't Lucas ever see SWORD OF DOOM? Killing can be an art devoid of passion or hate. John Ford knew it, and Reynolds and Kristofferson know it. Because they're perfect.

The 1970s dad was peaceful enough to understand the need for these sorts of outlets for his children and friends. In our more "enlightened" times no one is allowed to fight or have raunchy sex without consensual agreement in writing beforehand, and gloves on all contacting parts, or even the compulsive need to boast, overthink, drain the spontaneous joy out of it, and feel guilty afterwards, second-guessing and self sabotage all because we drank the nonsmoking manchild/perfect man dichotomy rom-com Kool Aid, which is exactly how European men describe the American woman's attitude towards sex. For all it's tossed-off clumsiness and Burt's intentionally shocking freedom with vulgarity and the N-word, SEMI-TOUGH is a rare document revealing that if only for a decade, we had sex like the French and fought like Americans instead of the sad reverse." (MORE)

COOLEST COUPLES: DINA SHORE and BURT REYNOLDS

We can see dim shades of it in Demi Moore and Ashton, but that's far more about, or seems about, two insecure narcissists desperate to connect. Modern Ashton and Burt in 1974 share a certain immature rawness, where you could understand an older woman going for it, because she knows she has something worthwhile to give them in return for suckling on their youth, more than money or maternal support they offer a kind of knowing sexual and professional wisdom. But there's no comparison beyond that because unlike Ashton, Burt was/is a real man. And here on Larry King he's being more emotional than Shore was, and that's why it's so brave, why it brings me almost to my knees to read that interview above because it reminds me of something our 21st century man has yet to find. Male sensitivity now is inescapable, and therefore worthless. What once was manly grace is now just passive-aggressive snickering boy nonsense wrapped in high-voiced ectomorphic pretentiousness. Dinah would bitch slap the lot of them, while Burt cracked up in the background, and because she's not here to do it, we all mourn. (more)

--- NOTES
1. I should add I'm very unnerved by Kristofferson when he's clean shaven. I know laudable critics from Kim Morgan to David Thomson love the naked faced KK in films like PAT GARRETT AND BILLY THE KID and CISCO PIKE... maybe I will too, one day.

Semi-Great Dads of the 1970s #2: Kris Kristofferson in SEMI-TOUGH (1977)

Dad in this case can loosely encompass older brother and Cool Drunken Friend of Your Father (CDFYF) figures... for Kris Kristofferson is not exactly in responsible father mode as Burt Reynold's football teammate, recently EST-enlightened quarterback and DESIGN FOR LIVING-style menage-a-trois member in SEMI-TOUGH. But, he's still warm, tough and dependable.

I recently re-watched the film (after 20 years) and was shocked at how badly its blocked and paced. Sloppy stuff these redneckish Reynolds vehicles, the 1970s equivalent of our Adam Sandler/Judd Apatow "crank 'em while they're hot" sports/sex satires. The cool thing about SEMI-TOUGH is that it's made in 1977, so unlike the Apatow/Sandler age of Puritan inhibitions masked by potty talk bravado, people do actually have sex, lots of it, with no guilt or pregnancies. Hell, we even see Reynolds--then "the world's sexiest man"-- resign himself to the "large fan," (Mary Jo Catlett), by virtue of default. Burt's characters horny, used to bedding a random fan at hotel bars after games, and she's the only one left. Hell, he still gives her the full measure of his charm, and even some warmth.

Most dudes would just call it quits; Burt's ability to even want to keep the lights on while getting busy with her in his hotel room shows he's no diva; his sexual appetites have turned him more into a European style swinger, where they enjoy having sex more than bragging about it. Imagine if Adam Sandler ever shagged a girl less attractive than he was! Horrifying, but deserved; yet even as a monosyllabic glassy-eyed idiot manchild he scores off babes like Winona Ryder and Christina Applegate.

But mainly, sloppy sex comedy chaos or no, Kristofferson shines, allowed to radiate all his Christlike calm and country rock mellow. A beacon of 1970s suave, his character's been converted to a new age path shortly before the film begins; one of the largely forgotten 'encounter group' weekend intensive workshop fads of the 1970s-- EST. As a result, everything he does is... "perfect."

Which brings me to the key scene that gets Kristofferson the Semi-Great Dad #2 nomination: The party scene where T.J. Lambert (Brian Dennehy), the misogynistic creep linebacker has gone nuts and is holding some bikini-clad chick from the party over the second story balcony, threatening to drop her on the concrete below, no doubt for rebuffing his date rape advances. No one knows how to talk him down and get him to pull the girl back up, but Kristofferson does; he calmly climbs up onto the roof and goes to stand next to Dennehy and just looks at him with love shining in his Kristofferson-blue eyes. "If you want to drop her, if that's right for you, go ahead," he tells Dennehy. "Because you're perfect." Dennehy's oaf--so used to abuse and ugliness--is so moved, realizing someone finally thinks he's perfect, he pulls the girl up and is all friendly and apologetic to her --his first step free of the trap of misogyny/self-hatred, all just because of Kristofferson's perfect faith.

I can't imagine any actor of the era pulling this hat trick off as well as Kristofferson. In fact, I've talked more than one person off a ledge of one sort or another (in my LSD guru days) by imitating Kristofferson in this scene. He's just mellow and laconic enough to be able to say that sort of stuff without having to put hipster italics on it to keep from sounding corny or square.

But how can we condone a man who condones violence in others just because it's "their trip?" Well, see, a great dad has faith in his kid, and in his own ability as a father. He assumes the role of a benevolent authority figure, which is such a rarity these days we may even have forgotten what that means. It means "through me, thou art good." This is, ultimately, the true meaning of non-violent resistance, or "turning the other cheek." Even in the sense of actively engaging in combat this can still be practiced. One can bestow blessings on one's enemy even as one twists the knife into their heart (i.e. the German killing Adam Goldberg with a gentle shhhh in SAVING PRIVATE RYAN).

The "loving" violence concept was huge in the 1970s, especially, as I've noted before, in Burt Reynolds movies like SEMI-TOUGH, SMOKEY AND THE BANDIT, HOOPER, great shit like SLAPSHOT, BAD NEWS BEARS, etc. This was the age when Monday Night Football became bigger than any televised sport ever and the media was shocked by its Roman barbarity. The screens were alight with bloodless bar fights, where chairs break easy over heads, and people fly through storefront windows with the carefree abandon of a kid jumping into a summer lake. Everyone makes up outside in the parking lot, their macho fury soothed by the high only a mix of alcohol and sharp hits to the head can provide.

The 1970s dad was peaceful enough to understand the need for these sorts of outlets for his children and friends. In our more "enlightened" times kids aren't allowed to have realistic looking toy guns; no one is allowed to fight or have raunchy sex without the compulsive need to boast, overthink, drain the spontaneous joy out of it, and feel guilty afterwards. For all it's tossed-off clumsiness, SEMI-TOUGH is a rare document revealing that if only for a decade, Americans lived like Europeans do now.

So here's to Kristofferson, the mighty. Hell, he is such the man that he even manages to make his biker rapist character in BRING ME THE HEAD OF ALFREDO GARCIA sympathetic. God DAMN. His is the mix of charisma and humility that tempers all judgment against him. Here's the kind of a man that you could get in a knockdown fight with but then you'd go get a beer together afterwards and know he was your friend for life. Kristofferson, in short, is the ideal 1970s older brother, which is why he's only a "Semi-Great" 70s dad, but still...by any stretch of the cinematic imagination... perfect.