Smokey and the Bandit

When TCM did its memorial tribute to Burt Reynolds at the end of last year, one of the movies they ran was Smokey and the Bandit. I hadn't done a review on it here before, so I DVRed it to sit down and rewatch it so it would be fresh in my memory.

Burt Reynolds plays the Bandit, who has as a best friend truck driver Cledus (Jerry Reed). Cledus has been taking part in the truck driver games at a fairgrounds in the Atlanta area, and it's there that they meet the Enoses: Big Enos (Pat McCormick) and Little Enos (Paul Williams). Big Enos proposes a dare for Cledus and the Bandit: bring me 400 cases of Coors beer within 28 hours.

Now that sounds odd to modern viewers, but you have to remember that Coors, based in Colorado, didn't have national distribution until the mid-1980s and at the time the furthest east distribution went was Texas. Cledus and the Bandit are going to have to drive to Texarkana, TX to pick up the Coors and then turn right around and bring it back to Atlanta. And since Coors didn't have a license to distribute back in those days (remember that one of the provisions of the 21st Amendment's repeal of Prohibition was to make controlling alcohol specifically a matter for the individual states regardless of what the rest of the Constitution says about interstate commerce), for somebody to bring back that much beer obviously not for personal use would be a crime.

But Big Enos is offering $80,000 if they can bring it back in the requisite time, and if you think that's a tidy sum today, it was worth a lot more back in 1977. So Cledus sets off in his truck, with Bandit in his Trans Am as a blocker, which is basically the same function he served in White Lightning, a blocker being a decoy to throw off the cops.

With all that speeding going on, of course they're going to run afoul of the police. Sure enough, they raise the hackles of one Texas sheriff Buford T. Justice (Jackie Gleason). It's bad enough that you've got a guy speeding, but Buford has more reason to go after the Bandit: the Bandit picks up a hitchhiker, Carrie, in a bridal gown (Sally Field). Carrie was supposed to get married to Buford's son Junior (Mike Henry). So for Buford it's personal, and a reason to cross state lines in his pursuit of the Bandit.

That's pretty much all there is to the movie, which in some ways isn't very much. And yet Smokey and the Bandit is so much fun. It's more or less one long, entertaining chase scene that works despite the ridiculous number of plot flaws. I'm obsessive enough that I looked up how far it is from Atlanta to Texarkana, and where the movie said 900 miles, it's more like 700. (I don't know how much of the interstate was in place back in the 70s, although part of the trip back through Alabama is definitely on an interstate highway.) That would make it around 12-1/2 hours at the speed limit, if you had two drivers to split shifts, and make the 28-hour turnaround relatively doable. (At the very end there's a bet to go to Boston and back in 18 hours, which is utterly impossible.)

There were also no scenes at night that I could find, which is at least one thing that Vanishing Point got right. Unless most of the nighttime travel was on the way to Texarkana, but then they would have gotten to the distributorship when it was dark.

Still, as I said, Smokey and the Bandit is enormously entertaining, in no small part thanks to Jackie Gleason's performance. His irascible, bumbling sheriff is a high point of the movie whenever Gleason is on screen. The stuntwork is also quite good, which is no surprise considering the movie was directed by stunt legend Hal Needham.

If you want to sit back with a bowl of popcorn and relax, Smokey and the Bandit is a great movie to do it with.