Burt Reynolds appreciation, and Smokey's surprising modern relevance

When Burt Reynolds died, I felt the inclination to write something about it on my blog. But then I wondered, what would I write?

Reynolds was much more of a tangential figure in my childhood, not a central character. I felt a kind of mythic awareness of him from the movie posters I saw, and vague ideas of the racy material of the movies he starred in, which I couldn't see.

But my first-hand experience with him was still, to this day, more to do with his later work, like Boogie Nights, than the period when he was one of Hollywood's biggest box office draws. The first movie I think of when I think of Reynolds is probably Cannonball Run, and I still haven't seen it.

I managed to correct that on one of his other iconic roles on Saturday night -- in fact, it was the iconic role that certainly led directly to his casting in Cannonball Run. On Saturday night, I finally saw Smokey and the Bandit, thereby also getting to engage in a little belated appreciation of the recently deceased icon.

It wasn't premeditated. I was flipping through the Recently Added section on Netflix, and saw Smokey pop up. That surely wasn't a coincidence, though I didn't know for certain until then that Netflix goes out and gets titles just because they might be a little more popular following the death of one of the stars. I suppose it's also possible they had Smokey buried somewhere, but promoted it to the Recently Added section in order to give it the higher profile necessary for it to get watched. I mean, if Netflix doesn't hold itself accountable to providing us any viewing numbers, they hardly would bat an eyelash at calling something "recently added" even if it wasn't. (It wouldn't be the first time I'd seen something in that section that I happened to know had been on the site for at least a couple years, most notably one of their original programs.)

Anyway, I chose this over another movie that would have given me a chance to honor a star who died not quite so recently. The death of Whitney Houston only feels a bit more recent because I recently saw the documentary devoted to her life (and death). That gave me a little more curiosity about The Bodyguard, which I've never seen, but the damn thing is over two hours long, and Smokey's 95-minute running time seemed a lot more palatable ... especially while I was drinking whiskey and likely to succumb to sleep sooner rather than later.

Speaking of succumbing to the desire to sleep ... I did spend the first half of Smokey and the Bandit wondering about the curious division of labor between Reynolds and Jerry Reed, who also sings the hilariously specific theme song, which basically describes the plot of the movie over and over again. Reed is driving the 18-wheeler full of illicit Coors beer (more on that in a moment) and Reynolds the Trans Am that goes on ahead of it. I kept thinking "If this is a two-man job, and they need to get the 400 cases of Coors back from Texarkana within 28 hours, wouldn't it be better to both ride in the truck, and let one guy drive while the other guy sleeps?"

Eventually I came to understand that Reynolds' Trans Am is the so-called "blocker," which breaks speed limits and draws the attention of podunk cops who might otherwise be interested in the contraband in the back of the truck. (It's contraband because it was once illegal to sell Coors east of the Mississippi. Funny, right? Still more on Coors in a moment.) While the logic makes sense, I have to imagine that leads to two very sleepy drivers, one of whom has a fortune in beer that won't be much good to anyone if it ends up in a ditch by the side of the road. Then again, if you're a big rig driver, I guess you know how to drive safely on little sleep.

It was indeed nice to get to appreciate Reynolds in his prime. Looking back at his filmography, I realize the only Reynolds films I've even seen that came out before Boogie Nights were Deliverance (1972), Silent Movie (cameo only) (1976), The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas (1982), All Dogs Go to Heaven (voice only) (1989), The Player (as himself) (1992), Citizen Ruth (1996) and Striptease (1996). He had no less than 72 other movies fit in there somewhere. So really, this was not a Reynolds I knew all that well, and I found him pretty charming. I didn't know if that would be the case because I found the later career Reynolds a bit douchey and disengaged.

I also loved seeing a young Sally Field at the height of her charms. There are a lot of gems from early in Field's career I haven't discovered either. Man was she spunky.

Then of course you have the great Jackie Gleason approaching the end of his career. If a lot of this movie feels like a template for Dukes of Hazzard, which it probably was, then Gleason is a great template for the kind of frustrated, humiliated, power-hungry red neck cop Boss Hogg was in Dukes. Any time someone would say the word "germane," a friend of mine in college used to say "The goddamn Germans got nothing to do with it!" I never knew that was Gleason's Buford T. Justice he was quoting until last night. It's a perfect match of a delicious role that the actor plays deliciously. He's wonderfully detestable.

In short, I had a blast watching this movie.

Back to Coors. One reason the contraband nature of Coors interested me particularly is that my uncle was an executive at Coors for something like 30 years. I've never liked the beer all that much myself, but Smokey in the Bandit clued me in to the fact that this was once considered one of the finest beers in America, and Big Beer (i.e. Anheuser-Busch) wanted to keep the Colorado product out of their neck of the woods to avoid competition. I never knew any of that. I'll have to email my uncle. (And just so you don't think I'm totally dismissive of my uncle's employer of three decades, the beer I often consider my favorite of all time, Killian's Irish Red, is also a Coors product.)

The last thing I wanted to talk about today is the strange modern significance of Smokey and the Bandit. No, Coors is not illegal east of the Mississippi. No, cop cars are not brown anywhere anymore, as far as I know. No, the Trans Am is not considered the height of flashy automobiles. And no, cowboy hats are not really cool. But there is something interestingly current about the film, and I'll tell you about it after a dramatic paragraph break.

It's the CB radios. It's not the radios themselves I find modern, though I'm sure they are still widely used. It's what they represent. In their attempt to set this record, Bandit and Snowman are assisted by a range of other truckers and CB radio users who have heard about their exploits in progress. Their exploits have "gone viral" over these CB channels, in a way very much like the way strangers follow each other in real time on the internet. The internet is a place of supreme anonymity just like these CB channels, where you can talk directly to someone you've never met, whose identity and exact location you don't really know. Yet a community in which people genuinely care about each other can develop from such things, as it does here. (The angrier, trolling side of the internet can be said to exist between Bandit and Sheriff Justice.) And just as people on the internet often go by names that are not their own, so do all these truckers and other CB radio users. In fact, the term "handle," which now applies to things like Twitter, had its origins in CB radio use.

Now to see if I need to follow these same principal characters in Smokey in the Bandit II, though I hear that this involves transporting an elephant to the GOP convention, not the double-or-nothing trip to Boston to pick up clam chowder that ends this film.