Cast overview, first billed only: | |||
Kris Kristofferson | ... | Rubber Duck | |
Ali MacGraw | ... | Melissa | |
Ernest Borgnine | ... | Dirty Lyle / Lyle Wallace | |
Burt Young | ... | Pig Pen | |
Madge Sinclair | ... | Widow Woman | |
Franklyn Ajaye | ... | Spider Mike | |
Brian Davies | ... | Chuck Arnoldi | |
Seymour Cassel | ... | Governor Haskins | |
Cassie Yates | ... | Violet | |
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Walter Kelley | ... | Hamilton |
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Jackson D. Kane | ... | Big Nasty (as J. D. Kane) |
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Billy Hughes | ... | Pack Rat (as Billy E. Hughes) |
Whitey Hughes | ... | White Rat | |
Bill Coontz | ... | Old Iguana (as Bill Foster) | |
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Tommy J. Huff | ... | Lizard Tongue (as Thomas Huff) |
While driving through the Arizona desert, Albuquerque based independent trucker Martin Penwald - who goes by the handle "Rubber Duck" - along with his fellow truckers "Pig Pen" and "Spider Mike", are entrapped by unscrupulous Sheriff Lyle "Cottonmouth" Wallace using a key tool of the trucker's trade, the citizens' band (CB) radio. Rubber Duck and Cottonmouth have a long, antagonistic history. When this encounter later escalates into a more physical one as Cottonmouth threatens Spider Mike, a man who just wants to get home to his pregnant wife, Rubber Duck and other the truckers involved, including Spider Mike, Pig Pen and "Widow Woman", go on the run, figuring the best thing to do being to head to New Mexico to avoid prosecution. Along for the ride is Melissa, a beautiful photographer who just wanted a ride to the airport. As news of what happened spreads over the CB airwaves, other truckers join their convoy as a show of support. Cottonmouth rallies other law enforcement officers ... Written by Huggo
Sam Peckinpah's 'Convoy' works as, if nothing else, a little cultural/pop cultural archeology. Based on a novelty song that was itself a product of a short-lived CB (citizen's band) radio/trucker craze that swept the States in the mid 70s, it offers up a rather vivid slice of life from the days of malaise. It was one of several such films ('Smokey and the Bandit', 'Breaker! Breaker!', 'White Line Fever') trying to cash in, but this one is notable for the presence of Peckinpah behind the camera (though how much the struggling Peckinpah was actually behind said camera is apparently open to debate).
'Convoy' is a tough film to nail down. At times it veers into the dadgummit, cornpone comedy territory of Smokey and the Bandit, and at others it evokes a more traditional Peckinpah zeitgeist. Ironically, it probably works best when it straddles that line. At those times, 'Convoy' offers up a broadly entertaining action yarn, with colorful characters occupying simple, well defined turf. I wish Peckinpah and Co. had somehow been able to marry that more cohesively to his standard themes while leaving the broad yucks out of the equation.