Forget Oppenheimer; For a Real Movie About Real Men It's Impossible to Beat Sam Peckinpah's Masterful Trucker Comedy Convoy
Welcome, friends, to the latest entry in Control Nathan Rabin 4.0. It’s the career and site-sustaining column that gives YOU, the kindly, Christ-like, unbelievably sexy Nathan Rabin’s Happy Place patron, an opportunity to choose a movie that I must watch, and then write about, in exchange for a one-time, one hundred dollar pledge to the site’s Patreon account. The price goes down to seventy-five dollars for all subsequent choices.
I have a confession to make here. It is not unusual for me to write about a movie a second, third, fourth, or even a fifth time. That’s because the nature of my career and pop culture media more or less demands that I don’t limit myself to writing about movies just once.
But it’s also because I see reviews and articles and retrospectives like this less as definitive, objective judgments on a film’s ultimate merit than as a ragingly subjective take on how I feel about a movie at the time that I’m writing about it.
One of the wonderful things about being a writer is that you can change your mind. When I first saw and wrote about Convoy in October of 2014 for my Forgotbusters column at The Dissolve I was gobsmacked that such a tacky, ridiculous trifle could be the top grossing film of a giant like Sam Peckinpah’s career, rather than a game-changing masterpiece like The Wild Bunch.
Being a pompous, pretentious boob who wore a monocle and a top hat and compared every movie I reviewed unfavorably to the films of Abbas Kiarostami, I thought it was beneath Peckinpah’s dignity to lend his mastery to a zany CB trucker comedy based on a novelty song.
I considered Convoy to be a crassly commercial nadir for Peckinpah that found him emulating the car-crash based blockbusters of a philistine like Hal Needham rather than elevating the western to new heights with his bloody-minded virtuosity.
I am not ashamed to concede here that I was wrong. I was more than wrong: I was fucking idiot, a grade-A maroon, a real Olympic-quality dumbass who somehow thought he was too good for Convoy when the truth is that Convoy was too good for me.
I previously found it silly that a great Auteur like Peckinpah was making a movie with a hero named Rubber Duck.
Rubber Duck is, in fact, an amazing nickname, one that appeals equally to the only two demographics that matter: CB radio freaks/long-haul truckers and Ernie from Sesame Street.
Now that I’ve seen the light I think it’s stupid that people make movies with heroes who aren’t named Rubber Duck. Think about how much better Schindler’s List would be if its hero was Oskar “Rubber Duck” Schindler.
That, my friends, is a handsome man.
Similarly, I think people would have more respect for Casablanca if Humphrey Bogart played suave, world-weary cafe owner “Rubber Duck” and explained to Ilsa that he acquired the nickname because his mama told him to be like a duck: calm on the surface and paddling like the devil underneath.
Honestly, Convoy ruined me for all movies whose protagonists aren’t named Rubber Duck.
I was so moved and entertained by Convoy that I now wish to be known as Rubber Duck. It’s a name that commands respect. Only one actor was worthy of playing a role like that: Kris Kristofferson, who oozes brawny masculinity and sex as Rubber Duck, a trucker who inspires a revolution by standing up to corrupt authority in the form of “Dirty Lyle”, a world-class villain unforgettably played by Ernest Borgnine in a career-best turn. Yes, I know that Borgnine won an Oscar for Marty. His performance in the Paddy Chayefsky-penned so-called “classic” is pure shit compared to his villain turn here.
With the benefit of hindsight, it’s now clear that everything that Kris Kristofferson had done in his extraordinary life and career in music and film was but a warm-up to his career defining role as “Rubber Duck” in Convoy.
Flying helicopters in Vietnam, winning the Rhodes Scholarship, writing songs like “Sunday Morning Coming Down”, “Me and Bobby McGee” and “If I Make It Through the Night” and starring in movies like A Star Is Born, Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore and Pat Garrett and Billy The Kid gave Kristofferson powerful insight into the mind of a man like Martin 'Rubber Duck' Penwald, who starts an underdog revolution just by standing up to corrupt authority like some manner of CB slang-spouting Bernie Sanders.
Kristofferson’s amazing life and career allowed him to not just play Rubber Duck, but to be Rubber Duck in a powerful existential sense.
Convoy begins with Rubber Duck in his element, luxuriating in the freedom of the open road with his trucker comrades Pig Pen (Burt Young) and Spider Mike (Franklin Ajaye).
Their eighteen wheel Garden of Eden is corrupted by Sheriff “Dirty” Lyle Wallace (masturbation enthusiast and Nathan Rabin’s Happy Place mascot Ernest Borgnine), a sniveling snake of a corrupt lawman who impersonates a trucker for the purpose of shaking down Rubber Duck, Pig Pen and Spider Mike for bribes.
Ain’t it a beautiful sight?
When Dirty Lyle tries to shake down Spider Mike for a bullshit vagrancy charge after relieving him of what little money he has left for bribes it kicks off a war of will between the corrupt cop and truckers who embody the spirit of the Old West, only better, because they communicate through trucker CB slang and have cool names like Big Nasty, Pack Rat, Old Iguana, Lizard Tongue, Silver Streak and Septic Sam.
Rubber Duck hooks up with Melissa (Ali McGraw), a fancy big-city gal who is intrigued by the trucker subculture Rubber Duck represents because he’s the sexiest and coolest motherfucker in the world.
Only Kristofferson could make a line like, “Ya ever ride in a truck?” seem like an irresistibly sensual offer.
Are there two more beautiful words in the English language than “Truckers welcome?” Alternately, is there anything LESS American hassling a bunch of CB radio freaks just because they want to be free?
With Smokey on their tail and bears in hot pursuit, the truckers form a mile long convoy fronted by Rubber Duck composed of his buddies and fellow travelers along for the ride of a lifetime, featuring the kind of heroism journeyman country singers write novelty songs about.
The truckers join Rubber Duck’s convoy because it represents an American ideal: the freedom and ecstasy of the open road and the sense of solidarity and community that comes with being part of something bigger than yourself. But they also join the convoy because it’s just plain fun.
As the head weed-smoking Jesus freak, played by Donnie Fritts, Kristofferson’s keyboardist, observes happily, “I don’t read nothing in scripture that says, “Thou shalt NOT put the petal to the metal!”
The media AND the governor, Governor Jerry Haskins (THE Seymour Cassel, in a subplot that feels purloined from one of Robert Altman’s broader social satires) become fascinated by Rubber Duck, or at least think they can exploit him and his simultaneously ineffable and earthy appeal for their own political and financial gain.
Haskins lionizes Rubber Duck as a hero of the people whose nebulous message he shares and will spread, even though The Duck, or Duck if you’re into the whole levity thing, doesn’t have a political message, beyond standing up to corrupt authority, which is itself an inherently political act, I suppose.
The man wants to co-opt Rubber Duck but the Duck can’t be co-opted.
When pressed for the message behind the convoy, Rubber Duck responds “The purpose of the convoy is to keep moving”, which is at once borderline meaningless and strangely profound.
He’s a cracked prophet, that Duck, a messiah and a good old boy. People cannot resist him. As the convoy grows in force and size his powers grow.
The convoy is nature’s greatest spectacle, the eighth wonder of the world and Convoy alone captures its oily, migratory majesty.
Convoy starts off like Sam Peckinpah’s Smokey & the Bandit but grows more serious, even somber, as it becomes a contemporary western that plays out with cop cars and tanker trucks instead of horses and railroads, in truck stops instead of saloons and God’s most perfect creature, the long-haul, CB radio-adept trucker in place of the loser cowboys that inhabited Peckinpah’s lesser films, before he found his muse in Doctor Demento’s “Funny Five.”
Borgnine and Peckinpah bring a whole lot of The Wild Bunch to a climax that finds Rubber Duck’s chemical tanker truck (shades of William Friedkin’s Sorcerers) getting machine-gunned by the fascist forces of law and order represented by the wild-eyed Dirty Lyle.
A worthy adversary for a musky force of nature like Rubber Duck, Dirty Lyle is in some ways a simpatico spirit, a strong-willed independent who lives by his own code in a world of yes men and sycophants. By the end of the film the corrupt lawman comes close to rooting for The Duck, or at least taking mischievous vicarious pleasure in his hillbilly shenanigans.
I now know why Convoy is the top-grossing film of Peckinpah’s career: the moviegoing public’s impeccable judgment. Convoy is an unpretentious blast, a goofy and giddy underdog romp with a crazily over-qualified cast and an infectious sense of fun.
It’s not just an unusually American movie: it IS America. It’s what America SHOULD be. The camaraderie, the banter, the love, the trucking, the slang, the vehicular slapstick: it’s what we as a nation should aspire to.
Convoy suggested a bold new direction for its director’s career: making moves based on popular novelty songs. I would love to see Peckinpah’s “Monster Mash” with Warren Oates as Dr. Frankenstein, L.Q Jones as the Wolfman, James Coburn as Dracula and Bo Hopkins as his son.
Can you even imagine what Peckinpah would have been able to do with something like “Itsy Bitsy Teenie Weenie Yellow Polkadot Bikini?” And I think I speak for all Dr. Demento fans when I say that he was the only filmmaker worthy of turning Barnes & Barnes” “Fish Heads” into a big-budget studio movie.
It was not to be, however. Despite Convoy’s boffo box office and creative triumph the director’s unprofessional behavior and drug and alcohol abuse rendered him borderline unemployable for a number of years afterwards.
Peckinpah wouldn’t have an opportunity to direct another film until 1983’s Osterman Weekend and he had to prove himself to studios by doing uncredited second-unit work on the Bette Midler flop Jinxed.
Convoy is a curious entry in Peckinpah’s filmography. He apparently directed it because he desperately needed money and was promised full creative control. Yet when Peckinpah turned in a three and a half hour cut an anxious studio took the film out of his hands and gave to editor and future Gleaming the Cube director Graeme Clifford with a mandate to turn it into something commercial like Smokey and the Bandit.
Also, when Peckinpah was too high or drunk or stoned to work, which was apparently much of the time, second-unit director James Coburn, yes, that James Coburn, the famous movie star, reportedly took over, ghost-directing much of the film for his friend and sometimes collaborator.
Peckinpah disowned the radically trimmed down version of the film that was a hit with audiences if not critics as he did so many of his films but if Convoy is not high art it is nevertheless spectacular fun, a high-octane tribute to the weird, wonderful world of truckers that’s gloriously unpretentious and wildly entertaining.
In the end it does not matter WHO directed Convoy, all that matters is that this bizarre miracle of a movie exists, in that most noble of traditions, the novelty-song-based CB trucker sexploitation comedy.
Convoy is a preposterously enjoyable lark from a filmmaker who usually took himself way more seriously, and not always to his benefit.
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