If someone grabbed me while I was walking down the street and suddenly demanded to know the best and easiest way to describe Convoy, Sam Peckenpah’s 1978 ode to authority snubbing truckers, I guess I would first, understandably stammer for a little bit and then blurt out something like: Smokey And The Bandit directed by Oliver Stone. While my panicked answer may sound like the product of me swiftly straining to think up any old shit to get this hypothetical, Convoy obsessed, weirdo out of my face, it’s actually somewhat bang on the money too as it plays as one part yehawing comedy, one part gritty 70’s revenge thriller, but also carries a strangely hefty amount of political intrigue too.
Needless to say, a trailer pullin’, CB speakin’, bar room brawlin’, redneck Robin Hood still feels a weird choice of subject for an auteur whose more notorious works included controversial classics such as Cross Of Iron, Straw Dogs and The Wild Bunch – but then, Peckenpah was a weird, weird guy…
Perma-squinting, bearded, living legend Martin Penwald is a trucker who goes by the well-known handle of “Rubber Duck” and spends his days roaring up and down the blacktop of Arizona, hauling goods to make his living. However, his simple life hits a moustachioed speed trap in the shape of the corrupt, gap-toothed sneer of Sheriff “Dirty” Lyle Wallace, who has taken to padding his wallet by posting false reports on the C.B. radio, telling truckers that they’re clear to break the speed limit and then busting them in person for speed limit.
Rubber Duck takes the expensive con in his stride, but his trucking comrades “Love Machine” (soon changed to the far more suitable “Pig Pen” due to the stinky hogs he’s transporting) and “Spider Mike” take it far harder and tempers soon come to the boil when, much later, Spider Mike is targeted on a trumped-up charge that causes foolhardy fists to finally fly. However, in the aftermath of a particularly rowdy brawl that decimates a road stop cafe, Rubber Duck, Pig Pen and Spider Mike realises that they’ve put themselves in some fairly deep shit, legally speaking and the trio slam their rigs into gear and tear off in the direction of the state line in order to avoid prosecution.
Joining the trio are a clutch of other drivers who got roped into the fight and Melissa, a woman outside of the trucking world who gets caught up in the gravitational pull of Rubber Duck’s reluctant heroism – and it soon becomes obvious that the enigmatic trailer jockey has inadvertently tapped into something far bigger than him as more and more random truckers start joining his journey to form a huge convoy. Soon, matters balloon to something far bigger than just three rigs racing to the state line as public support and political interest start blurring the lines. Where will it end and can the bad blood between Rubber Duck and Dirty Lyle ever come to a peaceful conclusion?
There’s two things that immediately spring out at you when you watch the dusty pleasures of Convoy, with the first being that Peckenpah obviously has a great affinity for the nomadic lives of these C.B. nattering champions of the road as the movie embraces the rich language these sweaty, hairy dudes eloquently launch across the airways as they barrel along in their gargantuan vehicles. However, the other thing that is overwhelmingly obvious is that Convoy is a pretty fucking weird movie when you consider that the famously pugnacious director has essentially tried his hand at a raucous comedy/thriller that was suppose to slot into the baffling trucking/C.B. radio craze of the 70’s alongside such other engine-reving movies such as Chuck Norris’ Breaker Breaker, Henry Fonda’s The Great Smokey Roadblock and, of course, Smokey And The Bandit.
The result is a movie that genuinely seems as disinterested as conforming to a single genre as Rubber Duck himself is similarly not phased by accidently becoming a hero of the people by sticking it to his lawman nemesis. It’s noticably goofy in places, indulging in all the rambunctious bar fighting and Smokey fooling you’d expect from a film that constantly falls back on C.W. McCall’s iconic, twanging country ditty to keep us raucously up to date on the plot, but inbetween scenes of trucks avoiding cops on astonishingly dusty roads set to classical music, Peckenpah infuses his blue collar epic with a strong vein of chest beating, political chutzpah.
However, the sardonic joke is that virtually everyone who gets involved in the enigmatic Rubber Duck’s quest ends up warping it to meet their own ends, with both followers and a shifty governor alike misconstruding the trucker’s actions as some sort of defiance against recent speed restrictions placed on highways. But while massive protests spring up in his wake, Kris Kristofferson’s Rubber Duck proves to be a somewhat of an inpenetrable hero, an enigma in a tank top who remains stubbonly apart from both his followers and the audience and his unexpected, accidental and mostly unwanted rallying of the people feels more like the parody Life Of Brian than a stirring middle finger in the face of the man. In fact, Kristofferson’s womanising, leather-faced, diesel burner is such an underprepared, often illogically shirtless, leader of men, the script suddenly concocts a side quest in order to get him away from the more larger, socially relevant plot and into a more comfortable, thriller-friendly thread that sees him trying to bust an incarcerated Spider Mike out of jail and then making a fatalistic, Thelma And Lousie bid for the border. The result is a film is so uneven, it ironically would be unsafe for Rubber Duck and his cronies to drive one of their smoke-belching juggernauts over it without tipping over. Peckenpah himself naturally complained that the studio cut the guts out of it after getting fired from the editing room and after seeing how random the political aspect of the movie turned out, you’d be hard pressed not to agree. However, where the flick excels is crafting the trucking world from the ground up with the colourful cast all packing nicknames that wouldn’t seem out of place on a cadre of Z-list Batman villains and more varied big rigs than an Optimus Prime audition.
Similarly, the directors use of his beloved slow motion gives standard trucker movie sequences – such as an oddly good natured fight that miraculously doesn’t leave anyone dead or grievously injured despite a judicious use of pool cues – a beautifully artistic flourish and a immensely colourful supporting cast – that includes the salty likes of Ernest Borgnine and Burt Young – keeps things intriguing even if the rug pulling finale of the story feels trucked in from a completely different movie.
🌟🌟🌟
We Have Issues 