Sam Peckinpah’s Convoy starts to lose momentum just as the rubber hits the road

Judged by what made it to the screen, Convoy is far from Sam Peckinpah’s best work. Intended to capitalise on the booming popularity of CB radio and American road culture during the 1970’s, this ruggedly goofy movie adaptation of the C W McCall song of the same name was a superficial commercial success (the biggest of Peckinpah’s career) but a critical and financial failure, prematurely killing off the nascent auteur/ novelty song subgenre of cinema and robbing us of potential classics such as Nicolas Roeg’s “Itsy Bitsy Teeny Weeny Yellow Polka Dot Bikini” or Frederico Fellini’s “Shaddap You Face”.

When an altercation with vindictive Sherriff  Lyle “Cottonmouth” Wallace (Ernest Borgnine) escalates out of control, trucker Martin “Rubber Duck” Penwald (Kris Kristofferson) finds himself at the head of a growing anti-establishment movement which eventually garners national attention.

A notoriously troubled production – Peckinpah wouldn’t make another film for five years after this due in part to his behaviour and substance-abuse compromised performance – the problematic shoot was compounded by a falling out between the director and producer Robert M Sherman over editing which saw Peckinpah fired and a studio approved editor in the driving seat, cutting much of the harder-edged story in an attempt to lighten things up and capitalise on the popularity of Hal Needham’s Smokey And The Bandit which had come out the year previously.

What remains, while enjoyable in and of itself, lead by a rugged Kris Kristofferson and a smoking hot Ali MacGraw (despite her baffling Estelle Getty as Sophia Petrillo perm) starts sensationally in the white-hot heat of the Arizona desert but quickly loses momentum as the cuts begin to bite and the narrative can’t avoid becoming disjointed and truncated. There’s still plenty of fun before it gets tangled up in its own good intentions, though, and the best bits are often nothing more than a bunch of big boys playing with their trucks in the world’s biggest sandpit.

Is CONVOY a comedy? A satire? A hard-hitting action thriller? The film itself never seems quite sure and, for Peckinpah – even bowdlerised Peckinpah, it feels oddly bloodless but while it arrived just a little too late to really capitalise on the brief infatuation with CB radio and trucker culture, there’s something decidedly contemporary now in its portrayal of a vindictive, racist and brutal police crackdown on the truckers while opportunistic politicians meddle from the side-lines looking for ways to leverage the conflict to their own advantage.

I fondly remember watching Convoy on TV when I was much younger and while looking at it today it’s absolutely drenched in the testosterone-fuelled machismo and cultural mores of the time it still runs pretty well despite the years and the mileage. Certainly well enough to run more recent trucker movies like The Ice Road off the highway.