The highbrow among you will have to wait patiently in your dens with the port for the day when I'm waxing about film in the vein of Welles, Bunuel, Murnau, Almodovar, Ozu, Eisenstein, and the rest of the highfalutin gang. This day is set aside for a more modest cinematic artisan-- Needham.
I'm not sure what possessed me to screen "Smokey and the Bandit" last night, but it may have been my numerous failed attempts to find a movie our whole family could watch. My 12-year-old suffers from the media curse of this benighted era-- the blight of "animated" children's movies about adorable anthropomorphy has finally lost its charm for him, in part because of heavy exposure to the intermittently clever but mostly mean-spirited satires of the Seth McFarland empire, and his attitude about the kudzulike Star Wars franchise could best be described as tolerant, but despite his extensive internet-gleaned knowledge of everything under the sun, he has yet to make the jump to anything remotely adult. A trial balloon with Woody Allen's "earlier, funny" movies proved a bust, and in desperation I reached for a film that was like catnip for my generation. I'm talking about an exercise in cinematic storytelling that once upon a time fervently whispered to rednecks and middle schoolers alike-- "Smokey and the Bandit."
Watching this film in 2017 on a DVD is both similar to and different from the 1977 experience. Subtitles thankfully drained some of the mystery from Paul Williams's Method acting as Little Enos,
but it underscored the film's kinship with Casablanca and Easy Rider in the tiny group of movies where memorably creepy characters are dangled before us in the early scenes, only to be untimely ripp'd from our vision in order to set the plot in motion. Just as Peter Lorre is shot in front of an ambivalent Bogart, and Phil Spector recedes to an offscreen mansion after buying a ton of coke from a somnambulant Peter Fonda, the diminutive songwriter clicks his white bucks and disappears from the story after peeling off a clutch of hundreds and handing them to Burt Reynolds, whose magical ability to make monkeys out of overacting cops is just getting warmed up as the story begins.
Nothing can really fill the void left by the departing elfin co-composer of "We've Only Just Begun," but things look up when Reynolds pulls Jerry Reed out of bed and takes five seconds to explain the plot to him. Once they're both wearing cool jackets and hats behind the steering wheels of their respective vehicles, the revving engines become a leitmotif to accompany the director's vision of redneck conservative philosophy. As with Trump's bug-eyed vision of America, "law and order" is a revered shibboleth that seems to apply mostly to others. When laws threaten to compromise the buzz of a mustachioed white guy just out for a few laughs, lawmen must be forced off the road into the nearest crick. This is the core of Libertarianism, it seems to me in my less charitable moments; a basic reverence for foggy conservative values coupled illogically with an unwillingness to change one's own behavior to suit an apocalyptic "government."
But all of this palaver is unavailable to my brain while the film rolls; I'm sucked in once again by the popcorn romance between Reynolds and Sally Field at her most adorable. If feminism means demanding equal pay and rights for women, and an acknowledgment of their boundless abilities and potential, count me in, but don't ask me to pretend that Reed and Reynolds don't know whereof they speak when they point out that Sally has a great ass in her 1977 pants.
And once Field is out of her wedding dress and back in jeans, we get a fascinating melange of rom-com, car chase crosscutting that looks back to D.W. Griffith, and a sort of "My Dinner With Andre" conversation conducted through Citizens Band radio technology. Sheriff Jackie Gleason tries gamely to make up for two decades of idling genius by filling the screen as the hammy Texas ogre constantly taking out his hammy frustration on his smaller-than-life dumbass son.
In the same way the crackerjack insults of Donald Trump kicked the recent election season into a high gear where many were unwilling to even glance toward the speedometer (or, more importantly, the gas gauge), the speed of the dialogue and action in this film make it easy to just go along for the ride. Whether we're seduced by Sally Field's baby fat, or Gleason's adult fat, or Burt's sub-Cary Grant wit, or Reed's sweet relationship with a hound gettin' busy adopting the onscreen persona of a dyspeptic catfish, it all moves so fast that it's hard not to put your boots on the ottoman and let the narcoleptic magic wash over you.
Many Americans love the wisecracking anarchist more than they love Lady Liberty, and as a huge George Clinton fan, I must admit I'm not entirely immune to that myself. I'm just concerned that people seem to have confused refreshing irreverence for statesmanship and stewardship. I'm happy to spend a few hours with an untouchable, unreachable trickster on the screen, especially if there are plenty of Telecaster licks in the background; just don't ask me to pretend that the same guy can sit behind a desk ably reading from pieces of paper and weighing policy options. Time will tell, the aggrieved conservatives say. I suppose it will, but we've had a little time, and I feel like my ears are already starting to get told.
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