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I can picture myself walking down the street when suddenly someone stops me and asks out of nowhere how you would best describe Convoy, Sam Peckinpah’s 1978 love affair with commandeering truckers. My first reaction would be to stammer uncontrollably and then quickly blurt out something that sounds like, “Provided by the same comedians that brought you Smokey And The Bandit, but directed by Oliver Stone.” While my first answer is a panicked response to some hypothetical, Convoy obsessed person, there is truth to it as it is equally one part yes yanking comedy and one part gritty, yet surprisingly heavy, 70s revenge thriller with a strange cadence to it.
It goes without saying that a redneck robin hood who speaks in CB slang and gets into bar fights feels like an odd subject for a movie director who is notorious for his less mainstream works like Cross Of Iron, Wild Bunch and Straw Dogs but, hey, Peckinpah was a weird guy.
Martin Penwald for most people is a living legend, he is a trucker who goes by a well-known nickname – Rubber Duck. Due to how he demons truck on the blacktop of Arizona, it is hardly surprising that he makes decent profits. That said, a simple life is all he dreamed of, but his day has come to an abrupt end due to a brown Moustachioed speed trap. The golden toothed corrupt sheriff, Dirty Lyle Wallace, got annoyed by how well Rubber Duck was doing and due to this, he decided to start padding his wallet by posting false reports on the CB radio. Telling truckers they were ready to break the speed limit and then smashing them in person.
Despite the world rife with troubles, there’s always a good starting point to ponder ‘next steps’. Rubber Duck makes do with the expensive lie but his trucking workmates, Love Machine aka Pig Pen because of the filthy hogs he’s got on his truck, and Spider Mike are not able to cope with the situation. With all this going on, the john is now setting Spider Mike up and with tensions at an all high, reckless fists fly. However,after a particularly brutal fight with Screwy Louie that seems to have ravaged the roadhouse cafe, it dawns on Rubber Duck, Pig Pen, and Spider Mike that they are knee deep in some hot water, legally speaking, and the trio are frantically escaping with their trucks towards the state line away from arrest.
Along with the other three, Melissa and a group of others who got caught up in the struggle also decided to join in. She is an outsider of the trucking world, but she unknowingly gets sucked into the reluctant heroism of Rubber Duck. As more truckers continuously add themselves to his journey, it becomes clear that the cryptic trailer jockey has unintentionally infused himself into a matter much larger than what he is. Matters begin to blow out of proportion. It goes from just three rigs racing towards the state line to a convoy with public supporters as well as political enthusiasts. At this point, it raises the questions where will it stop and is there any resolution to the ongoing feud between Rubber Duck and Dirty Lyle.
The first thing that grabs your attention while watching Convoy, is that Peckenpah clearly has a bias towards the rugged and tough nomadic lives of these C.B truck champions. With this statement, I also aim to highlight the unique and rich language that sweaty and hairy men use while they are barreling in their trucks.
Indeed, the other thing that springs to mind is that Convoy is what we would call a “freak show” bearing in mind that the notoriously combative director has taken a stab at a riotous comedy/thriller, which does place him right in the baffling trucking/C.B. radio craze of the 70’s alongside with other engine-revers such as Chuck Norris’ Breaker Breaker, Henry Fonda’s The Great Smokey Roadblock and, of course, Smokey And The Bandit.
The outcome is a movie that appears to be genuinely uninterested to conform to a single genre as Rubber Duck himself is similarly unimpressed by accidentally being a hero of the people by sticking it to his lawman adversary. It’s without doubt goofy in parts, giving in to all the riotous bar fighting and Smokey frolicking about one would expect from a film, which seems to rely on C.W. McCall’s iconic, twanging country ditty of sorts to keep us raucously updated on the plot. But, set in between scenes where trucks are skirting cops on dusty roads while dub set classical music, Peckenpah illustrates his blue collar epic with a clear stroke of robust political chutzpah.
It is a bitter pill to swallow though as the sardonic joke is that nearly everyone who gets drawn into the mysterious pursuit of the Rubber Duck ends up distorting it to suit themselves with followers and a dubious governor both misinterpreting the attempts of the trucker to throttle some form of protest against the new speed limits on highways. But as huge rallies are erupting around him, Kris Kristofferson’s Rubber Duck proves to be something of an a man, a puzzle in a tank top who decidedly remains at an armslength from all his followers, the audience, and most notably, his unexpected, unintentional, and largely unwelcomed attempt at leaning sentiments of the people. In fact, Kristofferson’s womanising, leather-faced, diesel burner is how one would expect Gordon to look while Kristofferson is so unprepared, often ridiculously ill clad except for his automobiles, the script has to reveal this alongside the unnecessary and constant drive to lessen the depth of the story, effectively altering it to something much more comforting, action movie friendly. Where instead of hiding out in a more comfortable, socially relevant plot, Gordon is desperately trying to bust an incarcerated Spider Mike out of jail and then attempts some hopelessly Thelma and Louise style escape towards the border.
As much as I hate to admit it, the story is so uneven that it quite literally could be hazardous for the Rubber Duck to allow his smoking monstrosities to bellow over it without tipping over. Peckenpah himself of course complained the studio butchered it after getting fired from the editing room and having random political portions with how chaotic the rest of the movie was, I am amazed he wasn’t put in jail. Regardless, where the movie really does extremely well is world-building the trucking industry in such a unique manner where everyone has the sort of names that would be reserved for lower tier batman villains and there are more diverse semi trucks than what you would see at an Optimus Prime audition.
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