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Film directors like to make a big noise, and they need something to fill up a wide screen, so it's hardly surprising that they're so keen on trucks. A big truck can be pretty colourful, and the roving, independent life of the trucker makes him an ideal 20th century rebel with a cause. CM took a large bag of popcorn for a night at the torquies...
ike it or not, the first truck film anybody thinks of is Convoy, the 1978 screen version of CW McCall's hit song. The film's full of heavyweight American iron rather than Sam Peckinpah's usual buckets of blood, though leading man Kris Kristofferson (as "Rubber Duck") has all the charm of a Europallet.
But Convoy was beaten to the screen by The Last of the Cowboys, a ropey 1976 effort with Henry Fonda as a folk-hero trucker evading the massed ranks of the Highway Patrol (who else?). At least this makes the link between truck drivers and cowboys explicit—mind you, the RHA probably wouldn't be too pleased.
The independence of the open road and the comradeship of the CB struck a chord with the public, and the Fonda film was retitled The Great Smokey Roadblock to cash in when Smokey and The Bandit appeared the next year. But Burt Reynolds as The Bandit unfortunately doesn't drive a truck; he burns rubber in a Pontiac Firebird that's like a mobile chest-wig. Beerrunning trucker Jerry Reed is upstaged by his Bassett hound and sings some terrible songs, but the film is made by some good car crashes (of course) and Jackie Gleason as Sheriff Buford T Justice, meanest lawman in the Southern States. Sequels Smokey and The Bandit and /// are more or less exactly the same, with the dubious addition of Dom DeLuise.
Other, less funny films on the theme of the lone trucker beating the system include White Line Fever, Janice and Steel Cowboy with Rip Torn—but Convoy really says it all.
Still, they don't make them like they used to and back in the Thirties and Forties films emphasised the ruthlessness of the haulage business: They Drive By Night, with liumphrey Bogart and George Raft, They Drive By Night (a completely unrelated British film) and Thieves' Highway are all must-sees for the back-projection connoisseur.
Every film-buff's favourite trucking film is The Wages of Fear—not the crummy 1977 remake (where is it now?) but Henri-Georges Clouzot's gripping 1953 Le Salaire de la Pear, a tale of doomed tough guys, led by Yves Montand, hauling nitroglycerine to a raging South American oil well fire. Not a great deal of truck interest here, but it'll glue you to the screen for a couple of hours.
PICTURES from THE KOBAL COLLECTION
41 Britain's answer to The Wages of Fear was Cy Endfield's 1957 melodrama Hell Drivers, about matters close to a trucker's heart: speeding, hours offences and ratecutting. What a cast of angry men! What a lot of ex-Army trucks! What speeded-up footage! That's the problem: where the French film was all inch-by-inch suspense, this relies on some of the unlikeliest driving since the Keystone Kops. Still, it's pretty stirring stuff, and you've got to love a film in which Sid James gets billed above Sean Connery. Just take care not to watch Hell Drivers too soon after seeing Carry on Cabbie— the similarities are striking (not just the Sid James factor) and you might find yourself thinking of Hattie Jacques and Charles Hawtrey rather than Stanley Baker and Patrick McGoohan.
And when you're scanning the video shop's shelves for Hell Drivers, don't take Hellcat Mud Wrestlers by mistake—it's easily done.
These days film directors usually turn to the truck as a handy engine of mass destruction—a real Juggernaut, in fact. Unfortunately, the 1974 film of that name was about an ocean liner. But hardly a thriller of the last twenty years has been without an exploding truck or two: think of the Neutron Dance in Beverley Hills Cop, the tanker chase in Licence to Kill or just about anything starring Arnold Schwarzenegger. In fact, Big Arnie is especially cruel to trucks, not just blowing them up but turning them over or slicing the roof off (Terminator 2). He usually takes it out on Freightliners, but in True Lies there's a slip-sliding ice chase in a van from Freightliner's parent company Mercedes-Benz; a spot of transatlantic product placement, perhaps?
Bad guy
At the end of T2 the big Austrian uses a liquid nitrogen tanker to get rid of the bad guy, but Rutger Hauer's The Hitcher has a much nastier idea, tying Jennifer Jason Leigh between a Peterbilt and its trailer while he revs the engine. The scoreline is predictable: Peterbilt one, Jennifer Jason Leigh nil (or two, if you count the pieces).
At least Kim Greist scores a return point for women by driving a colossal Scammell in Brazil. The artic in Universal Soldier is even more butch, with an elaborate trailer that breaks every rule in the Construction & Use book. It belongs to a long line of daft, futuristic armoured trucks like those in the Mad Max films, Damnation Alley (a worthy science-fiction book but a hopelessly kitsch piece of cinema with short-back-and-sided George Peppard playing a postapocalyptic bikie) and the Sixtiesstyle hi-tech Securicor van of They Came to Rob Las Vegas.
The best movie about trucking (or at least a romantic version of the job) is still probably Convoy. However, the best film with trucks in it has to be The Wages of Fear.
But when it comes to it, there is only one film in which a truck really comes into its own— deserving at least an Oscar, if not an 0licence. It's Steven Spielberg's first feature, Duel, originally made for TV. The giant, dirty Peterbilt tanker acts Dennis Weaver off the screen as it chases him mercilessly and pointlessly across the dry wilderness of the American South-West, without a driver in sight. So whose were those cowboy boots?
"I'll get him on the grade!" says Weaver, but he doesn't until the climax, which has the truck screaming in agony as it rolls down a ravine. Great stuff. Now, who's eaten the popcorn?
11 by Toby Clark