SMOKEY & THE BANDIT: ‘Cause You’re Kinda Cute Like a Frog … and I’d Like to Jump You

Smokey and the Bandit (1977) – Directed by Hal Needham – Starring Burt Reynolds, Sally Field, Jerry Reed, Mike Henry, and Jackie Gleason.

I’ve always liked movies about cars and ships. Dukes of Hazzard, Starblazers, Cannonball Run, Knight Rider, Speed Buggy … even if the ship or car couldn’t make or break a movie or show, it sure as heck made it cooler. I really didn’t care a whit about them confounded Duke Boys or Michael Knight, and I couldn’t even tell you the name of one character on Speed Buggy, but show me the General Lee jumping a creek, or KITT’s Cylon grill, or Speedy Buggy spinning his wheels and I was hooked. I think I was more broken up about being told the General really couldn’t make all those jumps than I was about finding out Santa Claus wasn’t real.

Cars can make a guy just as stupid as women, and in as many ways. If I see David Hasselhoff hosting a reality show I never say, “Oh, cool, Michael Knight!” but every single time Mr. Feeny showed up on screen, I was like, “That dude was KITT.”

Somehow I’ve managed to go my whole life without seeing SMOKEY AND THE BANDIT all the way through. Well, that’s been corrected and I’m happy to say that BANDIT is 96 minutes of awesome.

I should hate the movie. For starters, Burt Reynolds acts like he’s daring the producers to not pay him. Bandit is introduced in the movie when Big and Little Enos come looking for him, wanting him to bootleg some Coors beer from Texarkana, Texas to Georgia. See, kids, in 1977, you couldn’t buy Coors beer east of Texas because in 1977 the United States was run by Communists. Bandit is all stretched out on a hammock, sleeping away with his hat pulled down over his eyes. His capitalizing on his local fame, basically getting paid to sleep there so people can say they saw the local legend. When the Burdettes come to him with an offer, it’s like Bandit has to be dragged to participate, but then once he commits it’s all a laugh and not to be taken too seriously.

Maybe it’s because Reynolds is that good an actor or maybe it’s because it looks like he’s not acting at all, it’s hard not to see Reynolds treating the movie the way Bandit treats the bet. Like, “you’re gonna pay me a crapload of money to do this? Cool. Bring me a hot car and hotter woman. Or the other way around. It’s all good.”

There’s something charming about the way Reynolds acts; he’s one of the very few movie stars who literally seems like he’s acting for you. It’s like he’s letting you in on the joke and he’s just gonna do his thing for 90 minutes and then you can go grab a beer together and chase skirts and laugh about that time he drove a Firebird across a wide open field in Georgia. There’s no pretense here that this is an actual movie. When Bandit pulls off a tricky escape from a local cop there’s no one there to see it so he pulls the car to a stop and looks right into the camera and gives you a little smile in a such a way that he knows you’re impressed with what he just did.

Bandit says all kinds of things that make no sense (and not just because I don’t understand CB jargon) and the impression it leaves you with is that Reynolds only bothered to read half the script and then just riffed the rest. When Carrie tells him she wants a handle, Bandit tells her he’s going to call her “Frog,” which he then explains he chose as her handle “’cause you’re kinda cute like a frog … and I want to jump you.”

What?

The entirety of the plot is that Bandit and Snowman (played by country music legend Jerry Reed, who also co-wrote and sings the movie’s excellent theme song, “East Bound and Down”) go to Texarkana, pick up the Coors, and then drive it back to Georgia. Bandit gets in a brand new Pontiac Firebird and serves as the “blocker,” deflecting the cops attention away from the big rig transporting the illegal booze. Bandit picks up runaway bride Carrie (Sally Field), which sets Texas Sheriff Buford T. Justice (Jackie Gleason) on his tail because the man Carrie jilted was Buford’s son, Junior (Mike Henry).

Plot threads appear and disappear depending on their ability to lead to a good stunt sequence or funny line.

The whole set-up is getting that Coors into Georgia, but the cops never actually give a crap about catching Snowman’s rig. There’s one small bit where a cop asks for his manifest, but then Bandit shows up and the cop goes after him instead. Buford is chasing Bandit because Carrie’s in the car, but Bandit never finds that out and as the film progresses it’s like no one cares about that anymore. We’re told that Bandit and Snowman have 28 hours to get to Texarkana and bring the beer back, but other than Bandit occasionally asking Snowman, “How we doing on time?” and Snowman responding with, “We’re 28 minutes ahead” there’s no real start or end to the time as staying ahead of the cops takes precedence over getting the beer to the Burdettes.

Jackie Gleason plays the good ol’ Texas boy Sheriff and his schtick basically consists of telling his idiot kid to shut up and order people around on the CB radio. Gleason isn’t so much funny in BANDIT as he is committed to being this egotistical, backwards thinking purveyor of one-liners. Half the things that come out of his mouth are awful, but they’re often pretty funny, too. After his kid does something to tick him off, Buford tells his son, “The first thing I’m gonna do when I get home is punch your momma in the mouth.”

Horrible.

Really, really funny.

Watching Sally Field play the cutesy, flirty, desperate Carrie is a bit disconcerting. I’ve always thought Sally Field was a wonderful actress, but I never thought of her as hot until watching BANDIT. I won’t make that mistake again – 1977 was a damn fine year for Sally Field, and to think that movie goers had both Princess Leia and Frog to witness that year … that’s a heck of a double feature.

The car chases are all pretty good and director Hal Needham does a great job making you feel the speed and power of these machines. Hell, he makes a Firebird look bad-ass and that alone should’ve got Needham a Best Director nod from the Academy.

There’s really only one serious scene in the movie and it comes when Snowman has stopped off at a local dive to refuel his rig and get some food. He takes his basset hound Fred into the restaurant and some biker thugs tell Snowman that the dog bit them and they should shoot it. Snowman sees he’s in trouble and when the inevitable bar brawl breaks out, he totally gets his ass kicked and tossed outside. His face bloodied and bruised, he struggles to pick his body off the ground and get himself and Fred back into his cab. You’re like, “Um … this isn’t fun,” but then Snowman recovers and drives his big rig straight over the biker’s row of bikes, demolishing them and moving on down the road.

1977 wasn’t just a good year for Sally Field; it was a damn fine year for movies, too: BANDIT, Star Wars, Close Encounters of the Third Kind, Saturday Night Fever, A Bridge Too Far, Annie Hall, Slap Shot, The Spy Who Loved Me … that’s a whole lot of good cinema. SMOKEY AND THE BANDIT certainly isn’t my favorite movie of that year, but in it’s own way it’s every bit as enjoyable as the rest of them.

CANNONBALL RUN II: It’s General Patton and General Admission

Cannonball Run II (1984) – Directed by Hal Needham – Starring: Burt Reynolds, Dom DeLuise, Dean Martin, Sammy Davis, Jr., Jamie Farr, Shirley MacLaine, Marilu Henner, Frank Sinatra, Charles Nelson Reilly, Telly Savalas, Tony Danza, Mel Tillis, Catherine Bach, Susan Anton, Jackie Chan, Richard Kiel, Jack Elam, Tim Conway, Don Knotts, Alex Rocco, Abe Vigoda, Joe Thiesmann, and an orangutan.

The real “stars” of CANNONBALL RUN II aren’t Burt Reynolds, Dom DeLuise, Dean Martin, or Sammy Davis, Jr. It’s Alex Rocco and Abe Vigoda, who get an incredibly inordinate amount of screen time to fulfill their ridiculous sub-plot to kidnap the Sheik (Farr) in order to pay Telly Savalas $9 million to get Charles Nelson Reilly out of debt.

That, in a nutshell, is what CANNONBALL II gets completely and utterly wrong, and why the first movie works and the second movie doesn’t. There’s no great plot in either movie, of course, but the two films are about something, and it’s that difference of something that influences the two films in very different directions.

The Cannonball Run is about a love of cars and the rebellious freedom that comes with it and CANNONBALL II is about chasing money and this difference goes a long way in coloring the overall tone of each movie.

Neither of these films are cinematic masterpieces, of course, but the first Cannonball movie is funny, likable, and breezy car chase movie while the second film isn’t either funny or likable, and it’s traded its loves of cars for a love of jokes.

Perhaps the simple difference is that Brock Yates isn’t back as the screenwriter for CANNONBALL II. Yates is a car guy. He was exec editor editor of Car and Driver and a pit reporter for CBS’ NASCAR coverage in the 1980s. Most relevant to this discussion is that Yates didn’t just write The Cannonball Run, but created the actual event that the Cannonball movies are based on: the Cannonball Baker Sea-To-Shining-Sea Memorial Trophy Dash.

According to the Never Wrong, Yates wanted Steve McQueen to play J.J. McClure in the original Cannonball film, but McQueen’s illness prevented this and the role went to Burt Reynolds, which turned a much straighter film into the Reynolds Car Comedy it became. Comedy that it is, a love of cars permeates Cannonball Run: there’s Adrienne Barbeau’s Countach, Roger Moore’s Aston Martin, Terry Bradshaw’s Donnie Allison-inspired semi-stock car, and Dean and Sammy’s Ferrari. J.J. and Victor have a significant discussion about which car will be their best option for the race after their souped-up Porsche gets wrecked.

Almost all of this is lost in the second movie. The Countach makes a brief appearance at the start of the film (with Barbeau and Tara Buckman replaced by Catherine Back and Susan Anton), but it breaks down, forcing the women to use their sexual wiles to con their way into another car. This becomes a running gag throughout the movie, as they keep promising “a weekend you’ll never forget” to one male sap after another. Roger Moore doesn’t come back for the sequel, and neither does the Aston Martin, but the Bondian gimmicks are given to Jackie Chan’s Mitsubishi. Chan is kicked out of the driver’s seat and into the back, and in case you missed the Bond reference, Bond villain Richard Kiel is the new driver. The semi-stock car is gone (as is Terry Bradshaw, replaced by Tony Danza) and instead we get a joke limousine with an orangutan pretending to drive. Dean and Sammy’s Ferrari is replaced by a Corvette (and not a particularly classic or attractive one), and the best car they can drag up for Frank Sinatra – FRANK SINATRA – to drive is a Dodge Charger. (And no, not the cool late-’60s-70s muscular Charger, but this pedestrian, lame-ass, early-80′s Charger.) J.J. and Victor are back in costume, but instead of the ambulance driver routine, they’re now a General and Private and their traveling companions aren’t the crazy Doctor (Elam) and their lovable patient (Farrah Fawcett, who’s sorely missed), but two actresses pretending to be nuns (MacLaine and Henner) who want to get to Broadway.

MacLaine and Henner play nuns because it’s apparently hilarious to see Reynolds and DeLuise fret about MacLaine’s effect on J.J., who proclaims his desire to “jump her bones.” This whole sub-plot (including a really weird make-out session between Reynolds and MacLaine in which you half-hope, half-fear that his toupee is going to come off) goes completely counter to the chaste pursuit of Farrah by J.J. in the first movie. There, J.J.’s focus was on winning the race, but here, he’s only interested in winning the million dollars and getting laid.

Heck, J.J. is almost a completely different character – in the first movie he runs a gargae/delivery service, but here he’s become a ridiculous stuntman who stands inside a metal cylinder that looks like a bomb and gets dropped from a plane and shot through a giant bullseye and into a net.

What?

There’s way too much set-up, too. The darn race doesn’t even start until about 40 minutes into the movie and despite starting in California, it doesn’t get further east than Las Vegas until there’s about 10 minutes remaining.

There’s a whole series of absolutely groan-inducing gags that are included simply to replicate the successful gags in the first movie. It’s quite simply some of the very worst hack writing you’ll see this side of Batman and Robin.

The worst part of the movie, however, is the entire dumb sub-plot with cartoon gangsters. Charles Nelson Reilly plays an incompetent son of a head of a once-big NYC mafia family. He owes Telly Savalas $9 million, so he gets Rocco, Vigoda, and two other guys to kidnap the Sheik (to steal the race’s $1 million prize) and then hold him for ransom (to come up with the other $8 million). We then get way, way, way too many Wile E. Coyote-type schemes to stop the Shiek from Rocco and Vigoda, which completely detracts us from the race.

This is not to say CANNONBALL II is a completely unwatchable movie. By the very nature of the multitude of guest stars and the rapid-fire pace of joke scene after joke scene, the film may be terrible, but it’s not without a certain watchability. If you like cars, this film blows, but if you just want to watch a light comedy featuring a bunch of people who used to be famous, watching CANNONBALL II is better than watching a marathon of Hollywood Squares, and not just because it doesn’t have Whoopi Goldberg in it.

If nothing else, CANNONBALL II is an oddly historic movie – it’s not only the last “car comedy” movie that Reynolds does, but it’s the final movie appearances of Frank Sinatra and Dean Martin.

THE CANNONBALL RUN: The Only Thing Hiding It In the Pool Did Was Make It Pretty

The Cannonball Run (1981) – Directed by Hal Needham – Starring Burt Reynolds, Roger Moore, Dom DeLuise, Farah Fawcett, Dean Martin, Sammy Davis, Jr., George Furth, Adrienne Barbeau, Jackie Chan, Jack Elam, Jamie Farr, Terry Bradshaw, Mel Tillis, Bert Convy, Peter Fonda, Rick Aviles, Tara Buckman, Michael Hui, Joe Klecko, and one sweet ass black Lamborghini Countach.

There was no movie my brother and I rented more from the local video store when we were kids than THE CANNONBALL RUN. If the Music Forum (in hindsight, a really dumb name for a video rental store) didn’t have anything we wanted, they always had CANNONBALL waiting for us. (Or Clue. Or Cannonball Run II.) I probably haven’t seen it in over 20 years, and if you’ve been following along on Facebook, you know it’s taken this stupid film almost two months to get to me, which officially makes it the second-longest wait in the history of my Netflix queue. (Inglorious Basterds took four months.) Two months is a long time to wait for anything (except for a baby – then it’s wicked short), so I was a bit nervous to drop CANNONBALL in the DVD player and see if it held up.

It holds up.

In fact, CANNONBALL is the rare childhood joy that has actually increased its enjoyment with my age, now that I actually know who these people are. As a kid, almost everyone in this movie was, “______ from CANNONBALL RUN,” so when I watched the film then they were just people in a movie. I had no idea who Dean Martin or Jackie Chan or Jack Elam or Adrienne Barbeau were, but they became “Funny Drunk Priest,” “Funny Kung-Fu Driver,” “Crazy-Eyed Doctor,” and “Woman in Countach.”

The Countach was as much a star as any of the actors. Still Lambo’s most famous car, the Countach manages to be both ridiculous and sublime, futuristic and dated, cutting edge and classic. It’s everything that Batmobile should be (and maybe could be? Make it happen, Nolan.), even if Bats would have to do something about the doors.

CANNONBALL opens with Barbeau’s black Countach (this one, in fact) toying with a cop in a Firebird through desert highways as Ray Stevens’ title track plays over the top and the credits roll. The moment that sealed the chase scene for me was when the cop car whizzed by some open road and then then the Countach pulled out AND WENT AFTER IT.

How was a ten-year old kid not going to love that?

More than anything else, CANNONBALL RUN probably introduced to me my love of cars, chase movies, Dean Martin, and boobs.

Thank you, Hal Needham and Brock Yates. Thank you.

CANNONBALL RUN is, of course, almost completely and utterly devoid of any sense of political correctness but what it is, what it does beautifully, is present a live-action comedy cartoon for adults who know that, yes, pretending to be doctors and kidnapping Farrah Fawcett is wrong. So is drinking and driving, no matter how cool Terry Bradshaw, Mel Tillis, Roger Moore, Dean Martin, Sammy Davis, Jr. make it look. Telling a cop that someone is a sex offender? Not right. Unzipping your top to try and get out of a speeding ticket? Not only is it wrong, it doesn’t work. (Eat me, Ohio. I despise you more with every passing day.)

I’m not going to turn CANNONBALL RUN into some kind of symbol for Comedy’s Last Stand Against the Takes Everything Too Seriously Crowd, because there are lines that can’t and shouldn’t be crossed, but comedy allows us to play with ideas in a pretend safety world where Burt Reynolds can drink a beer as he flies a plane, then lands the plane in the middle of a downtown street so Dom can buy more beer, and then takes off as people dodge out of the way.

We all know this is wrong, yes? It’s still cool. Even as a kid, I recognized that this was probably not something to be attempted. You know how I knew this? Because kids aren’t stupid, and we don’t need to sanitize everything in society just because there’s exceptions to that rule.

When Bradshaw and Tillis are driving their NASCAR-inspired Donnie Allison Hawaiian Tropic car away from the cops (another no-no) and ditch it in a pool as people scatter, you don’t have to worry about the consequences of people getting hurt. There’s no moment of, “OH MY GOD, DID TERRY BRADSHAW JUST KILL A BABY?!?!?!?” because this is a car race comedy and so your only real question is, “What does this do to the car?”

As Tillis says a few scenes later: “The only thing hiding it in the pool did was make it look pretty.”

The plot in CANNONBALL RUN is supremely minimal. There’s a cross country race. People drive across country. Hilarity ensues. Someone wins. (The film doesn’t even follow through on the correct rules about who should win. The Cannonball is a time trial and yet, at the end, everyone has forgot this and decides that whomever punches their ticket first wins.) The film simply tacks funny bit after funny bit as the race progresses westward.

Burt Reynolds is the star and this is Burt Reynolds semi-parodying Burt Reynolds. (The amount of self-parody that accompanies Burt’s career is mind-boggling.) He plays a guy who wants to win the race, who decrees to Farrah Fawcett in the back of an ambulance how he decides to go after whatever he wants the moment he wants it (yet doesn’t, as you would expect, immediately try to get Farrah nekkid), and yet is also so laid back that you half-expect J.J. McClure to turn back into Burt and wander off the set in pursuit of that hot new extra standing by the hot dog cart.

McClure and his partner Victor Prinsi (DeLuise) are pretending to be ambulance drivers and Jack Elam plays a wacked out proctologist they’re using as a cover. Needing a female patient to play on the sympathies of any cop should they somehow manage to get pulled over, they kidnap Pamela Glover (Fawcett), who Reynolds renames “Beauty” for the length of the picture, and then drug her so she’s all loopy for the cops that do, in fact, pull them over.

Glover is the ultimate nature-loving dreamer type, who’s also a photographer for some reason that has no pay-off in the movie. “I love trees,” she tells everyone in a voice that is as sweet and innocent as it is naive and dumb. She’s not so dumb that she thinks being kidnapped is awesome, however.

The film mitigates the kidnapping in several ways besides the fact that this is a ridiculous comedy. For starters, it creates an obvious attraction between Glover and McClure the night before, so when Glover is pulled into the ambulance and Prinsi takes off before the film’s do-goody, nerdy bad guy Arthur J. Foyt (Furth) can jump in the back she’s not exactly among strangers or trying to escape.

The most important and telling way that it stays clear of any possible bad vibe is that McClure is completely gentlemanly towards Beauty (besides renaming her, that is) the entire trip. There’s the requisite scene where Fawcett strips down to bare legs and light shirt, but McClure doesn’t put the moves on her despite them being alone in the back and despite his “I go after what I want” speech. Instead, he simply tells her about his dad, who worked in the coal mines and died two days before retirement. You think it’s going to be a line, but if it is, it’s a line with a long-term pay-off that happens after the final credits roll. McClure’s primary interest is in winning the race – they need a female patient (so they’ve decided), and Glover was in the right/wrong place at the right/wrong time.

She admits to him during this scene that she was nervous. “What did you think was going to happen?” McClure asks. “Gang rape,” she answers sheepishly. “Gang rape?” he asks incredulously. “We’re racers, not rapists.”

Comedy that it is, the film wants you to know it knows they’re aware of how this whole kidnap-a-woman-into-an-ambulance thing can be read and they don’t want to risk turning you against Reynolds by having him take advantage of her.

To make this point one last time, there’s a scene where Jackie Chan is driving his car and pops a porno into the car’s VCR. The porno of choice is Marilyn Chambers’ Behind the Green Door, which has Chambers being kidnapped and then forced to perform sex acts in front of a live audience. There’s a voice-over narration on the tape that explains this, a not-so-subtle message to the audience that this is not happening with Farrah Fawcett.

CANNONBALL RUN isn’t particularly a laugh riot from start to finish, but it is constantly amusing and it does contain several very funny scenes, typically involving the feud between Raynolds/DeLuise and Martin/Davis, Jr. Martin and Davis pretend to be priests (Blake and Fenderbaum, respectively) and drive a Ferrari 308 GTS. Often, Dean is drunk because Dean being drunk is funny.

Their best scene together is a verbal throwdown between Dean and Burt where they trade knowing but uncomfortable insults at each other, daring the other one to take a step closer to the Insult That Goes Too Far. Blake is angry for McClure lying to the cops about them being sex offenders, and McClure shoots back that he was just getting even for what Blake and “the chocolate monk did back in Ohio.” (They let the air out the ambulance’s tires.) Fenderbaum is offended, but Blake pretends to come to McClure’s aid just so he can top the insult. “He can say that,” he assures Fenderbaum, “because he’s riding around with the Goodyear blimp.” It’s Prinsi’s turn to be offended, but McClure assures him that Blake can say that because, well, because he’s got a big nose. They never get around to making fun of Reynold’s for being a Southerner, but that’s because they’ve got to go beat up Peter Fonda and his biker gang friends.

By the time Prinsi gives up his sure shot at winning to save a dog from drowning, everyone is ready to celebrate and hang out and get drunk together.

And why not? As Stevens sings in the title track, “it’s not what you do, it’s how you do it.” Lookee there. A message in a silly all-star car chase movie. They practically slipped it right past you.

Good times. I love this movie.