CONVOY (A): directed by Sam Peckinpah, starrint Kris Kristofferson and
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All MacGraw I ATTENDED a preview of Convoy recently (on London release now).
It was directed by Sam Peckinpah, whose name I associate with the kind of film that has kept me away from the cinema for 25 years. In Convoy he redeems himself with a hilarious send-up of brutal films, in which the scenes of high drama are shot in slow motion and become ridiculous or funny or both.
Ther hero is Rubber Duck (Kris Kristofferson), who drives a Mack five-axled chemical tanker. In view of the recent tragedies in Spain and America, his antics with it are perhaps unfortunate.
His buddies are Pig Pen (Burt Young) whose neglect of a load of pigs would call down the wrath of British law, and a young Negro, Spider Mike (Franklyn Ajaye), in an articulated van.
Melissa (Ali MacGraw), who has an E-type Jaguar, is a superfluous but decorative photographic journalist.
The story opens with a brush between the Duck and a police patrol. This is followed by a 75mph race between the Duck, Pig Pen and Spider which is interrupted by a particularly nasty sheriff, Dirty Lyle Wallace (Ernest Borgnine), with whom the Duck has a feud_ After that there is real trouble.
Wallace calls at a drivers' chromium-plated pull-up and makes himself unpleasant, and the ensuing fight between the police (the baddies) and the drivers (the goodies) is a splen did send-up of all the Dodge City saloon brawls you have ever seen. It is filmed in slow motion and bodies glide gracefully through the air. The proprietor watches in wide-eyed amazement while his property is demolished, complaining that the place has only just been redecorated.
Needless to say, the policE are all laid out and the driver walk away little the worse for E hiding that would have killed thE average man.
As the news of the war with the police is spread by CB two way radio between drivers more and more trucks join thE ccinvoy until it extends into eter nity. Sandwiched in the middl( is a bus-load of singinc evangelists, who are sent uj along with the rest. The column originally making commercia deliveries, assumes the naturi of a crusade against the police.
The column continues to bat ter its way across Americ creating havoc, Melissa tag: along, fascinated but frightenec to death.
And so the inexorabl( crusade reaches what the blurE promised me would be "tremendous heart-stoppin climax.This is predictabli half-way through the film an( occurs about 10 minutes befon the end (in case anyone has ti catch the last bus). After glass to-mouth resuscitation I wa allowed to go home. But M Peckinpah should remembe that heart-stopping can be fatal