Convoy

CONVOY                   C+                  

USA  Great Britain  (110 mi)  1978  ‘Scope  d:  Sam Peckinpah 

After a couple of box office failures, Peckinpah was in no position to haggle with the Hollywood executives, taking a barebones script about runaway truckers armed with CB radios, inspired by the 1975 popular hit song by C.W. McCall, Convoy 1978 movie Theme Song YouTube (4:02).  So in effect, Hollywood was attempting to use Peckinpah to cash in on a recent American CB radio craze which was a precursor to the Internet, as anyone within range could listen in on conversations or get the word out in a hurry warning other truckers of speed traps, police sightings, blocked road construction, or cheap places to eat or buy gas.  After the 1973 Arab Oil Embargo where OPEC producing nations effectively boycotted the United States, the price of oil rose substantially from $3 dollars to $12 dollars per barrel, effectively doubling the real price of crude oil at the refinery level, causing massive shortages in the United States while also generating high inflation rates that persisted until the early 1980’s, with oil prices continuing to rise until the mid 80’s.  In response to this, the U.S. government imposed a nationwide 55 mph speed limit to help reduce fuel shortages, which especially had an impact on independent truckers who were often paid by the mile, so their productivity and potential earnings took a hit, where CB radios were crucial in helping alleviate some of the other unforeseen obstacles, like the presence of corrupt police who typically shake down truckers, threatening to impound their trucks unless a fine is paid.  This opened the door for fast car action comedy hits like SMOKEY AND THE BANDIT, the 4th top grossing film of 1977, and The Dukes of Hazzard on TV in 1979, and this film, 12th highest grossing film of the year, making $45 million dollars, contributing to the CB radio craze that took on a life of its own, since it requires no registration fee, where all you need is the equipment to be hooked up.  While there was a small licensing fee, during the height of its popularity in the late 70’s this was routinely ignored, as people used anonymous nicknames called “handles.”  Due to lax enforcement, there was widespread disregard for regulations, allowing people to chat mindlessly with one another, often engaged in tedious exchanges, which also included highly aggressive racist and sexist views, like chat room conversations, often resulting in highly descriptive masturbation fantasies. 

Sure enough, in the opening few minutes of the film, Kris Kristofferson as 18-wheel truck driver “Rubber Duck” is involved in a cat and mouse game of leap frog with a convertible sports car driven by Ali MacGraw, a photojournalist, each passing one another until a policeman stops him for speeding.  Very cleverly, he gives the cop a story about how that female driver up ahead was driving without any panties, which certainly diverts the cop’s attention, as he heads off to arrest the woman.  A word about each of the stars, as both had worked with Peckinpah before, but this time Kristofferson had gotten himself clean and was totally sober, making it harder for the director to work with him, as without the booze and drugs there was little rapport between them, and as for MacGraw, heavily tanned and wearing what appears to be a short afro, one of her worst looks ever, this film really points out her acting deficiencies, where an exasperated Peckinpah wasted valuable time just running the camera, hoping later to find something of value.  The shoot was chaotic anyway, mostly in New Mexico, where half the time the CB radios didn’t even work, with MacGraw’s jealous husband Steve McQueen often intruding, thinking MacGraw was having an affair with someone on the set and making wild death threats, as his marriage was on the rocks, with many days where the raving and near psychotic director was so coked up that he never came out of his trailer, where the assistant director James Coburn actually shot some of the main shooting, with the film going overbudget, largely due to the difficulty lining up such massive vehicles for a second or third shot, which required substantial time and effort, where the script called for using a hundred 18-wheel trucks for a good portion of the film, doubling the initial $6 million dollars and the film went over schedule.  They actually shut down the entire production to allow Kristofferson and his band, seen in the film as the “eleven long-haired friends of Jesus in a chartreuse microbus,” as described in the song, to complete a previously scheduled 30-day tour before resuming filming, where many of the crew simply never returned.  Even worse, the director was so disgusted with the film, shooting nearly three times the footage as The Wild Bunch (1969), where he was known to utter “I haven't done one good day’s work on this whole picture,” that he eventually abandoned the project completely, never able to get the film under three and a half hours, putting the final cut in the hands of the studios to finally complete.  Irrespective of all these problems, it was the highest grossing film in Peckinpah’s career.         

Despite the troubles on the set and the overwhelmingly negative reviews, Peckinpah immersed himself in a love affair with trucks, where more than any movie stars, they were the real stars of this show, where the film excels at glorified stunt driving sequences, including a handful of highly choreographed crashes, where often the thrill is to put the audience into the driver’s seat.  So as a purely adrenaline laced, entertainment venture featuring plenty of trucks and even muscle cars flying through the air, crashing through billboards, the film is a success.  Where it fails is in the human element, as Peckinpah’s idea was to explore the mystique of truck drivers as modern-day cowboys, as if they were the last bastion of freedom on the highways in the American West before the government all but put them out of business.  While the film attempts to build into something of a protest movement, it can never figure out what it’s trying to protest, linking independence and true freedom as outside any collaboration with politicians or a trucker’s union. While it does present the idea that a man alone is not as strong as someone with the force of 100 trucks behind him, this idea degenerates into the mass chaos of an extended wrecking sequence, where trucks simply destroy much of the local property, where instead of a hail of bullets and explosions from a prolonged gunfight, trucks annihilate everything in their path.  It certainly continues Peckinpah’s nihilist themes, but without the poetry behind it.  Only Ernest Borgnine stands out as the indefatigable, trucker-hating sheriff, as his contempt for these lawbreaking “modern cowboys” couldn’t be more devious, pulling out all stops to find a way to stop them in their tracks, where he’s really playing the constantly thwarted coyote in the Roadrunner cartoons, literally rising from the dead on multiple occasions only to pull out more dirty tricks to try and trap them again, always with that gleeful look of anticipation on his face, where the audience, unfortunately for him, continually roots against him.  This kind of cartoon generates a few laughs, offers up some good ol’ boy trucker lore, sounding off on just about everything from Viet Nam to the proposed “double nickel” nationwide speed limit, where giant trucks barreling down the road are seen as an expression of rebellion and defiance of “The Law,” as represented by Borgnine, a guy who routinely shakes down truckers.  It’s a modern American parable of unnecessary government intrusion, where Uncle Sam is seen as dipping into the trucker’s pocketbooks and affecting their livelihood, or so goes the myth, as it was always more about inflation and the unstoppable price of oil from OPEC than anything having to do with the truckers.       

Pat Garrett & Billy the Kid

PAT GARRETT & BILLY THE KID              A-                   

USA  (106 mi)  1973  ‘Scope  d:  Sam Peckinpah              

1988 restored version (122 mi)             2005 DVD Special Edition (115 mi)

There are various cuts of this film, the original at 106 minutes which was drastically cut by the studios, a 1988 restored version which adds 15 minutes, and a 2005 Special Edition DVD that cuts half of the added minutes.  By all accounts, the 1988 restored version is the way to go, but a recent theater screening turned out to be the 115 minute Special Edition version which cuts some actors out of the movie completely, edits out certain lines as well while re-structuring various scenes.  Peckinpah’s last western feels like a somber death march, a mournful, poetic elegy to an end of an era where the values that men stood by were slowly disappearing along with their freedoms, replaced by the will of a few rich and powerful men who ruled the territory, monetarily and politically, putting an entirely new restricted face of commerce on what used to be wide open spaces and the land of the free.  The applicable metaphor, which is mentioned in the film, is their utter disgust at men who would fence in the West, in this case, cattle barons.  Set in New Mexico in 1881, James Coburn, in what is easily the performance of his career, chucks that career-defining hustler’s grin for a solemn frown as Pat Garrett, a world weary former gunslinger turned lawman, a man who rode with Billy the Kid in some capacity in their past, who opens the film riding into town visiting the Kid, a very young and clean shaven Kris Kristofferson, warning him to get out of the territory, as in 5 days he’ll become a lawman sworn to get rid of him, cleaning up the state, making it safer for bankers and cattle owners and prospective business ventures.  Even earlier, before the opening credits, there is a Black and White sequence of Garrett himself getting gunned down, an event that happens some 30 years into the future, certainly a foreshadowing of ominous things to come, and an interesting use of differing time periods where the death of both are mysteriously but inevitably linked together.    

The first 45 minutes of the film are simply extraordinary, featuring the music by Bob Dylan, whose name is credited above the title of the film and who also appears in a small role, where the mixture of sepia and Black and White from the opening set the tone for some astonishing use of ‘Scope by cinematographer John Coquillon, capturing the essential brightness of the empty desert landscape in early morning, but also the extreme light at dusk, where one of the more brilliant shots is seeing a rider on a horse on the far shore of a river get buried in the dark shadows, but a clear and vivid silhouetted reflection can be seen in the water as he rides across the entire length of the screen.  Two of the opening set pieces are riveting, among the best in the film, the taking of Billy alive and his subsequent jailhouse break out, which is unlike anything seen before or since.  After his memorable escape, someone brings him a horse which immediately throws him, an unusual commentary since it happens in front of a gawking crowd on Main Street right in front of the hangman’s execution site they are constructing.  From that point on, Garrett is on a mission to appoint involuntary deputies to help go after him, avoiding until the end the one place he’s most likely to be, instead visiting a litany of ornery characters throughout the vast territory who are never introduced but seem to have a history together, whose faces are synonymous with westerns, who simply appear out of thin air, where virtually every sequence is built around inevitable killings, compiling a high body count by the end, even for Peckinpah.  These secondary characters are essential, however, as they provide the emotional heft of the film, starting out with Slim Pickens and his rifle toting wife Katy Jurado, carrying bullets in her breast, both of whom appeared in Marlon Brando’s ONE-EYED JACKS (1961) a decade earlier, who silently express with their eyes everything we need to know about the murderous and endlessly bleak landscape.  

As Garrett wanders through the vast expanse of the territory, it’s obvious he’s not in any hurry, that he’s simply setting the tone for his mission by announcing his intentions across the state.  The Kid as well shows no sign of panic or alarm, as the film loses much of its initial vigor and sense of expectation and instead seems to meander slowly to its inevitable conclusion.  Unlike Brando’s film, based on the same Pat Garrett & Billy the Kid source material, The Authentic Death of Hendry Jones by Charles Neider, who inverts the story making the Kid the killer, another infurioratingly downbeat western where a maniacal lawman (Karl Malden) seeks public glorification by building a reputation of killing or humiliating a notorious outlaw (Brando), similar to Gene Hackman’s Sheriff “Little Bill” in Clint Eastwood’s UNFORGIVEN (1992), sadistic lawmen who will resort to murder as a way of enforcing the law, Garrett seeks no public affirmation and asks for no special compensation, and is instead driven by a complex code of honor that is already outdated, like the end of the samurai era, and he wearily knows it, where the routine of killing has become a rotten job doing the bidding of others who are more ruthless and brutally despicable than the so-called outlaw.  While there may have been a motivation at the outset, as the Kid broke out of his jail and he sought revenge, but by the end, after the passage of time, all that is surprisingly meaningless, as what he’s asked to do is kill a friend, man to man, someone he respects perhaps above all others, especially those who are paying him to do it.  This hint of anguish and regret affects every move he makes as he eventually closes in, actually waiting patiently outside the Kid’s window as Kristofferson is making love to his eventual wife Rita Coolidge, another sign of obvious affection and respect.  But this is a story of a destroyed friendship, one who remains a free spirit until the end and another who is encumbered by age, duty, and responsibilities, who disappointingly accepts compromise and domesticity, all of which adds to an alcoholic portrait of bitterness and scorn, contemptuous of the vile men he works for and the short-sighted interests of lawmen who seek the same aim, thinking a kill may somehow bring them glory.  For Garrett, fulfilling his duty leaves a pathetic emptiness, dulling any hopes that the future offers any glimpse of righteousness or respectability.