Needham’s cinematic style is undeniably crude-the stunt sequences are well-rendered, but he’s all thumbs when characters are just supposed to talk-he finds the right approach to the material, which is to essentially treat it as a live-action cartoon.
ABOUT SMOKEY AND THE BANDIT MOVIES MOVIE
They threaten to turn the movie into little more than a demolition derby (and this is coming from someone who worships The Blues Brothers).Īnd yet, despite the junky nature of the whole enterprise, I liked Smokey and the Bandit a lot when I first saw it as a kid back in the day, and it still has a soft spot in my heart.
The various car stunts and crashes that punctuate practically every scene are well-staged, I suppose, but there are so many of them they get wearying after a while. The jokes are dumb, the attitudes are worse (including jokes about wife-beating and lynching) and the characters are so paper-thin that you can practically see through them. Like the “hicksploitation” films of the 1970s with which Needham’s work shares some provenance, Smokey is about as unsophisticated as can be and unapologetically redneck to boot. He, along with his son, Junior (Mike Henry), takes off in high-speed pursuit of Bandit all the way back to Georgia, leading to scrapes and crack-ups that reduce his car to little more than four wheels and a floor by the end. Unfortunately for Bandit, she was supposed to marry the dim-witted son of blustery Texas lawman Sheriff Buford T. The two get to Texarkana and pick up the beer easily enough, but as they begin heading back, Bandit is stopped by Carrie ( Sally Field), who jumps into his car in order to escape her own wedding. Get them back to Atlanta in 28 hours, and he gets an $80,000 payoff.īandit recruits Cledus “Snowman” Snow ( Jerry Reed) to help out-Snowman will drive the truck carrying the beer while Bandit, behind the wheel of a slick Pontiac Trans-Am, will serve as an advance scout to keep an eye out for cops and to distract them from the truck and its bootleg cargo, keeping in contact via the then-modern miracle of CB radio. Bandit is engaged by a pair of obscenely wealthy Texas dipshits, Big Enos Burdette (Pat McCormick) and his son, Little Enos (Paul Williams), to drive out to Texarkana to pick up 400 cases of Coors (which at the time was unavailable east of Oklahoma, because the lack of preservatives and stabilizers meant that it would spoil in about a week without refrigeration).
ABOUT SMOKEY AND THE BANDIT MOVIES DRIVER
Reynolds plays Bo “Bandit” Darville, an Atlanta-based driver who has become semi-legendary in the south for his savvy behind the wheel of a car. Their confidence didn’t last too long, however, as just a couple of days before production was to commence, the studio informed Needham that they were cutting the budget by $1 million, necessitating a last-second overhaul of the production schedule. Nevertheless, he agreed to sign on in order to help his friend, and Universal Pictures agreed to make it at a budget of $5.3 million on the assumption that with Reynolds (who would be paid $1 million for his participation) in the lead, it would most likely make a decent profit. After having trouble getting anyone in the industry to take it (or him) seriously, Needham reportedly passed his first-draft screenplay, allegedly written on memo pads, to his longtime friend Burt Reynolds, who deemed it to be the worst script that he had ever read. The film was the brainchild of Hal Needham, a top film stuntman who conceived of the project as a way to make his directorial debut. That’s simply not true-as dumb as it is, it does have a certain charm that helps move it along while (mostly) overlooking its shortcomings. That said, I would never refer to Smokey and the Bandit as a “guilty pleasure,” because that would suggest that I feel some degree of embarrassment over my admiration for it. On the other, it’s a film that’s entertained me mightily over the years and still does. On the one hand, the film is an undeniably puerile conglomeration of noisy car crashes and jokes that were on the retrograde side even back in the day. I have spent the last hour or so trying to figure out a way into this piece commemorating the 45th anniversary of Smokey and the Bandit, a goofy exercise in hicksploitation that exceeded all expectations to become one of the biggest hits of 1977. Hal Needham’s good-old-boy romp is still as silly and dumb and charming as it was nearly a half-century ago.
0 kommentar(er)
