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Unlucky truckers
Page 59
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-If truckers didn't have bad luck, they'd have no luck at all," says a character in Steel Cowboy. The epigram comes from another of those American films about owner-driver hauliers and their misfortunes, which the BBC showed recently.
Clayton Pfanner owns an immaculate White six-wheeled tractor which a hire-purchase company is trying to repossess for non-payment of instalments-. Everyone else is dunning him,too.
The hire-purchase man broadcasts Clayton's financial plight to the freight terminals on which he relies for traffic, with the result that the haulier gets either no loads at all or only unremunerative ones. The prospect of his ever paying his debts accordingly diminishes by the minute. One hopes that American finance companies are not really as stupid as that.
Our hero is finally persuaded by a crooked freight agent to haul stolen cattle — a good paying game until crime catches up with him.
If the evidence of Convoy, released in Britain last year, and Steel Cowboy is to be believed, American owner-drivers are in the habit of settling scores by using their lorries as battering rams. Clayton razes the wooden house of his betrayer just as Rubber Duck in Convoy flattened a sheriff's office.
These big American trucks take terrible punishment from cardboard and emerge unscathed.