Truck Stops

One never knows which Dwayne Johnson (aka World Wrestling Entertainment superstar The Rock) is going to show up in a movie. It could be the no-holds-barred action hero wreaking vengeance on the bad guys in "Walking Tall" or "Faster," it could be the fledgling thespian stretching his acting chops in "Gridiron Gang," or the sly, winking comedian in "Get Smart" and "The Other Guys," or the family-friendly father figure of "The Game Plan" and "Tooth Fairy." Whoever shows up, audiences, if not critics, have enjoyed his company. (One thing that is for certain is that other crossover-wannabes from professional wrestling and ultimate fighting arenas - remember Hulk Hogan in "Suburban Commando" and "Mr. Nanny," John Cena in "Fred: the Movie," or Randy Couture in "The Scorpion King 2"? - must envy the charismatic Johnson’s ease in transitioning into a successful screen career.)

Dwayne Johnson’s latest starring role, in "Snitch," seemingly blends the best of his talents to convey paternal protectiveness with the ability to mete out kick-ass justice in his portrayal of a father who goes undercover to bust a drug cartel in a deal with the justice department to lessen a prison sentence for a son convicted of selling narcotics. The screenplay was "inspired by true events" (in the loosest sense of the phrase), based on a PBS "Frontline" documentary which did not have a happy ending and certainly did not involve rat-a-tat shoot-em-ups and breakneck truck driving stunts. But it is that careening 18-wheeler in the previews that riveted our attention in the moviehouse. Who cares if we haven’t seen the movie? We’re here to take a look back and appreciate some of our favorite truck drivers on the screen.

Before the 1900s, most freight was transported cross-country by train, limiting trucks to short hauls on urban routes while being utilized as mobile advertising space for local businesses. By 1910, the development of new technologies gave birth to the modern trucking industry. Once the U.S. entered World War I, trucks were used extensively by the military. With increased construction of paved highways in the 1930s, trucking established a significant foothold.

By the 1940s and 1950s, truck drivers were romanticized as knights of the open road, independent nomads who often aided stranded travelers, while songs and movies about truck drivers became popular. One of the earliest hit songs of the road was 1939’s "Truck Driver’s Blues," written by Ted Daffan and recorded by Cliff Bruner and The Texas Wanderers:

"Keep them wheels a-rollin’
I ain’t got time to lose
Got a low down feelin’
Truck driver’s blues
Ride, ride, ride on into town
There’s a honky tonk gal a-waitin’
And I’ve got troubles to drown."

Forties movies with truck drivers as protagonists blared titles like "High Explosive," "Truck Busters," and "Thieves’ Highway," but one high-spirited melodrama of the period left the others in the slow lane. "They Drive by Night" (1940) cast George Raft and Humphrey Bogart as brothers struggling to make it as independent truckers in a film noir world of loan sharks, crippling accidents, jealous dames, murder frame-ups, and courtroom breakdowns. At one point, Raft declares, "We’re tougher than any truck ever come off an assembly line."

Humphrey Bogart, Ann Sheridan, George Raft in "They Drive by Night"

Ida Lupino is the fiery, adulterous hellcat bent on vengeance for being spurned by the stalwart Raft, who instead falls for flaming red-haired truck stop waitress Ann Sheridan (who costarred with James Cagney and Bogart in 1938’s "Angels with Dirty Faces" and was featured in 1942’s "King’s Row," which launched Ronald Reagan to stardom). It’s a black-and-white movie, but the snappy, wisecracking dialogue makes a number of things obvious, as evidenced by Raft’s pick-up line: "You know something, Red? I like you. I like the way you fill out your clothes."

To promote "They Drive by Night," a 15-ton big rig was driven cross-country courtesy of members of the International Brotherhood of Teamsters as a presentation to Ann Sheridan. On it were painted autographs of truck drivers, mayors, and members of fan clubs, added at each stop between Chicago and Los Angeles. The truck became a popular news item, and before long, everybody was talking about "the Sheridan truck."

Citizens’ band (CB) radios became widespread in the 1960s among such small businesses as electricians, plumbers, and carpenters, but primarily grew popular with truck drivers. In the wake of the 1973 oil crisis, CB radios were used extensively by truckers to find service stations with ample fuel supplies, to alert fellow drivers of speed traps, and to organize blockades and convoys in retaliation against various trucking regulations. CB radios became a rampant craze in the 1970s (even First Lady Betty Ford chatted on the airwaves using the handle "First Mama"), thanks to media exposure in several movies and TV series, and popularized, especially, in one hit novelty song.

"Convoy," which topped both the country and pop music charts in 1975, relates the saga of a trucker with the CB handle "Rubber Duck" who inadvertently leads a cross-country convoy of "a thousand screamin’ trucks" as they crash through road blocks set up by smokeys in their protest of the speed limit, toll roads, and mandated log sheets. The song, riddled with CB chatter and jargon, was recorded by C. W. McCall, real name Bill Fries, a small-town jingle writer for local commercials who wrote "Convoy" with Chip Davis, founder and leader of Mannheim Steamroller.

Truck drivers found themselves glorified as modern-day cowboys, outlaws, and rebels during the peak of truck driving culture in the 1970s. The 1978 made-for-television film "Steel Cowboy" starred James Brolin as an independent trucker conned by good ol’ boy Rip Torn into hauling a cargo of stolen cattle. The supporting cast featured Jennifer Warren, Strother Martin, and a young Melanie Griffith.

Claude Akins, Frank Converse in "Movin' On"

Costars Claude Akins and Frank Converse actually earned chauffeurs’ licenses (forerunner of commercial driver’s licenses) to drive their Kenworth W-925 in the TV series "Movin’ On," which ran for two seasons from 1974 to 1976, casting the two as a veteran independent trucker and a college boy who, not unlike the characters in "Route 66," encounter a variety of adventures in their travels. The show’s theme song by Merle Haggard was a #1 country single.

Judy Landers (second from left)
as "Stacks" in "B. J. and the Bear"

In 1979, Claude Akins portrayed Sheriff Elroy P. Lobo, nemesis of itinerant trucker Greg Evigan (now a staple performer in a number of SyFy Channel "Originals") and his pet chimpanzee in the series "B. J. and the Bear." When Akins left the show for his own series, "The Misadventures of Sheriff Lobo," Evigan and the chimp started their own trucking company in L.A. with a bevy of young, beautiful female truck drivers, including perennial blonde bimbo Judy Landers as (ho-ho!) the busty "Stacks."

Undoubtedly the most popular movie to cash in on the CB and trucker craze was "Smokey and the Bandit," made in 1977 by stuntman-second unit director turned first-time feature film director Hal Needham (who received a special Oscar at the Governors Awards in 2013), starring Burt Reynolds in a Pontiac Trans Am Special Edition, with Sally Field along for the ride, Jerry Reed in a Kenworth W900A short-frame semi, and Jackie Gleason as a foul-mouthed sheriff named Buford T. Justice, in what the editors of The Movie Guide called "one long stupid car chase punctuated by four-letter words in a live-action version of the ‘Roadrunner’ cartoons." The movie raked in millions and was the fourth highest-grossing film of 1977.

Inevitably, director Needham and the original cast reunited (along with Dom DeLuise) in the lousy 1980 sequel "Smokey and the Bandit II." Even worse was 1988’s "Smokey and the Bandit Part 3," minus Needham and Field, and Reynolds reduced to a walk-on.

It also seemed inevitable that someone would turn the previously mentioned song "Convoy" into a movie, but nobody expected that filmmaker would be Sam Peckinpah, the feverish but flawed genius responsible for such elegiac westerns as "Ride the High Country," "The Wild Bunch," and "Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid." On the downslide of his career, Peckinpah, hopelessly addicted to cocaine at the time, threw out the script for "Convoy," encouraged his cast (which featured the painfully lackluster pairing of Kris Kristofferson and Ali McGraw, with an embarrassed looking Ernest Borgnine as a nemesis lawman) to script their own dialogue, alienated practically everyone behind the camera, fell behind schedule, went way over budget, and was finally fired before the studio tried to salvage the mess for release. Ironically, "Convoy" was a big hit in Southern drive-in theaters, as well as in Europe and Japan, and ended up being Peckinpah’s highest-grossing film, the biggest box-office hit of his career.

Peckinpah stock company players Slim Pickens, L. Q. Jones, and R. G. Armstrong were featured in the 1975 action flick "White Line Fever," starring square-jawed Jan-Michael Vincent as a Vietnam War hero who wants to go legit as an independent truck driver but has to contend with a corrupt trucking industry and unscrupulous law enforcement.

A pre-"Walker, Texas Ranger" Chuck Norris brought his martial arts sensibilities to his first starring role in 1977’s "Breaker! Breaker!" as a trucker battling crooked cops and a corrupt judge. "Smokey and the Bandit’s" Jerry Reed was on the road again, with a post-"Easy Rider" Peter Fonda, in 1978’s "High-Ballin’," portraying - you guessed it - independent truckers battling, in critic Leonard Maltin’s words, "a rival kingpin’s goons who want to force them off the road for good."

Even Peter Fonda’s aging old man, Henry Fonda, got into the game, starring as an ailing truck driver aptly named Elegant John who becomes a media folk hero when he steals his repossessed rig for one last perfect run, transporting a truckload of dispossessed hookers (including Eileen Brennan and Susan Sarandon) cross-country, in 1977’s "The Great Smokey Roadblock" (originally, and more fancifully, titled "The Last of the Cowboys").

The CB-truck craze of the 1970s pretty much fizzled out as fast as it flared up, but a fitting swan song for the fad can be found in the quirky 1977 comedy "Handle with Care," directed by Jonathan Demme (best known for "The Silence of the Lambs," "Philadelphia," and the recent trilogy of Neil Young documentaries) from a script by Paul Brickman (of "Risky Business" renown). The film had an unsuccessful run on the drive-in theater circuit the previous year as "Citizens Band" but was re-edited and resurrected under its new title at the New York Film Festival.

Paul Le Mat (still fondly recalled at the time as the doomed street-rodder John Milner in "American Graffiti") plays a CB vigilante in a small Southwestern town whose mission is to ensure that the airwaves are kept open for emergencies, putting him at odds with, not a corrupt trucking industry or crooked cops, but an assortment of local loonies, including a bigamous truck driver, a local prostitute who solicits business on the radio, a cheerleader coach who has erotic chatter with teenage boys, one of whom enjoys reading pornography over the air, and a priest and a Nazi supremacist who broadcast their individual dogmas.

Charles Napier as "Chrome Angel," the bigamous trucker in "Handle with Care"

Time magazine critic Richard Schickel surmised that CB radios offered "a form of power to the powerless…a way for them to make themselves heard in a world that does not pay them much heed." One reviewer dismissed "Handle with Care" as " ‘American Graffiti’ gone redneck," while Schickel praised it as "a curious and very original movie."

Marco St. John in "Thelma & Louise"

From the 1980s into the last part of the 20th century, the image of trucking declined, and truckers’ reputations suffered. Truck drivers found themselves cast as the bad guys: male chauvinists like the sexist trucker in 1991’s "Thelma & Louise" whose rig is exploded by the maligned heroines (above); kidnappers, like the semi driver portrayed by J.  T. Walsh in "Breakdown" (1997); even serial killers, such as the hulking "Jason"-like trucker "Rusty Nail" in "Joy Ride" (2001) and its direct-to-video sequel "Joy Ride 2: Dead Ahead."

Trucks themselves became sentient, self-aware beings of destruction, sometimes with extraterrestrial assistance. "Maximum Overdrive" (1986), the first and only film directed by horror writer Stephen King, was a cheesy adaptation of his short story "Trucks," depicting driver-less semis terrorizing a truck stop, whose stranded humanity includes intelligent actors who ordinarily would have sidestepped this road hazard in their careers, among them Emilio Estevez, Pat Hingle, and Yeardley Smith. King himself, who later claimed he was heavy into cocaine at the time, called it a "moron movie" and vowed never to direct again.

The 1998 action flick "Black Dog" was a nostalgic throwback to the "White Line Fever" era of trucker melodramas, featuring Patrick Swayze as an ex-con tricked into hauling millions of dollars worth of illegal firearms.

Randy Travis, Patrick Swayze, Meat Loaf in "Black Dog"

"Black Dog," which costarred Randy Travis and Meat Loaf, was too late for the ‘70s cycle of trucker cinema, but Swayze’s square-jawed presence reminded us of what we set out to do here a few miles up the road, and that was to honor those truck drivers up on  the screen who have proven their mettle as "tougher than any truck ever come off an assembly line."

The first big-rig driver to pull into the moviehouse truck stop is the faceless road marauder behind the wheel of 40 tons of rusty, diesel smoke-spewing, grease-smeared, bug-spattered Peterbilt terror in Steven Spielberg’s "Duel" (1971)  In what the director called a "cat-and-mouse game of classic suspense," an already tightly-wound traveling businessman named Mann (a not at all veiled allusion to Everyman) becomes a random target for destruction by the anonymous trucker on the rural highways north of Los Angeles. Filmed entirely on-location, the paranoia thriller tapped into an almost primeval dread of every car driver on thoroughfares.

Dennis Weaver in "Duel"

Spielberg had previously directed a number of episodes for TV series, including "Rod Serling’s Night Gallery" and "Columbo," but this was the 25-year-old’s first opportunity to make a feature film. (OK, arguably, "Duel" was produced as made-for-television movie, but it was subsequently released, with additional scenes, as a theatrical film in Europe, and Spielberg would thank "Duel" for leading to his bona fide debut motion picture, "Sugarland Express," starring Goldie Hawn, and "for giving me a career.")

Famed science fiction writer Richard Matheson (The Incredible Shrinking Man) wrote the teleplay for "Duel" based on his own "novelette" originally published in Playboy magazine, inspired by a personal, harrowing encounter with a tail-gating truck. The author later dubbed his tale a "pre-road rage story." Impressed by Dennis Weaver’s performance as a high-strung motel night manager (imagine "Psycho’s" Norman Bates on amphetamines) in Orson Welles’ 1958 film noir "Touch of Evil," Spielberg passionately pursued the actor (then starring in the "McCloud" TV series) to portray the harried businessman. Matheson himself thought Weaver "was perfect for the role. He was Every-Mann."

Carey Loftin is barely visible at the wheel
of the 1960 Peterbilt 281 tanker truck in "Duel"

Carey Loftin, one of Hollywood’s most revered stuntmen and stunt drivers (whose nearly 60-year career included car stunts for, among numerous others, "It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World," "Bullitt," and "Vanishing Point"), was called upon to play the faceless highway menace in "Duel." When the 57-year-old Loftin asked Spielberg what his motivation was, Spielberg replied, "You’re a dirty, rotten, no-good son of a bitch." Loftin said, "Kid, you hired the right man." Thankfully, no explanation for the truck driver’s deadly behavior is offered in the film, although the Peterbilt’s grille is adorned with several battered license plates like hunter’s trophies.

Carey Loftin (1914 - 1997)

Loftin’s flawless skills were utilized in the previously mentioned TV series "Movin’ On" and "B. J. and the Bear," as well as the movies "Steel Cowboy," "White Line Fever," "Smokey and the Bandit," "Smokey and the Bandit II," "High-Ballin’," and "Maximum Overdrive." The last film he worked on before his death at the age of 83 was "Black Dog."

"Lady, just because I drive a truck does not make me a truck driver." So proclaims the whimsically astute Quid, a transplanted American transporting a load of slaughtered pork 1600 miles across Australia’s Nullarbor Plain from Melbourne to Perth, in the deviously clever 1981 Hitchcockian thriller "Road Games."

Stacy Keach, fresh from his role as Jesse James’ brother Frank James in "The Long Riders," delivers one of his most enjoyable performances as Quid (the filmmakers wanted Sean Connery but couldn’t afford him), a road-weary driver who travels with a pet dingo named Boswell, plays Mozart on his harmonica, and quotes poetry. Paraphrasing Geoffrey Chaucer’s prologue to "The Canterbury Tales," he declares, "With full devout courage, of sundry folk, by adventure fall, in fellowship, and pilgrims were they all."

"Good morning, pilgrims!" he greets other drivers on the desert highway, making up their backstories as he gives them nicknames: Sneezy Rider, Fred and Frieda Frugal, Captain Careful. Quid grows increasingly suspicious that one particular fellow traveler in a van (whom he dubs "Smith or Jones") is a serial killer whom radio news reports say is dismembering and discarding his strangled victims along the same route, initiating a game of cat-and-mouse in which who’s the cat and who’s the mouse frequently changes.

Everett De Roche, who co-wrote the screenplay with director Richard Franklin, recalled that they were "inspired by Chaucer’s ‘Canterbury Tales’ and (Stephen) Sondheim’s ‘Sweeney Todd,’" but the obvious inspiration comes from Alfred Hitchcock’s "Rear Window" (1954), in which a voyeuristic, wheelchair-bound photographer (James Stewart) becomes convinced that an apartment complex neighbor (the hulking Raymond Burr) murdered his wife.

Australian-born Richard Franklin was a film student at USC when he befriended Alfred Hitchcock, who subsequently invited the young man to hang out on the set of "Topaz." As if with Hitchcock’s blessing, Franklin, three years after Hitchcock’s death, was chosen to direct the 1983 sequel to "Psycho," "Psycho II," starring Anthony Perkins, Meg Tilly, Robert Loggia, and Vera Miles (repeating her role from the 1960 original).

"In homage to ‘Rear Window,’" Time Out’s review of "Road Games" noted, the windshield of Quid’s truck "stands in as the blank sheet upon which he sketches fantasies about what he observes on the road." Hitchcock, as he did in so many of his own films, makes a cameo "appearance" in "Road Games," on a magazine cover in Quid’s cab.

Jamie Lee Curtis as "Hitch" in "Road Games"

And, in a winking nod to the master, Quid dubs a young woman thumbing a ride "Hitch," and it doesn’t hurt that she’s played by the daughter of "Psycho" shower victim Janet Leigh, Jamie Lee Curtis. (Coincidentally, only a year prior to "Road Games," Curtis, whose breakthrough scream queen role was in 1978’s "Halloween," portrayed a hitchhiker in "The Fog.") Curtis and Keach share an offsetting chemistry, triggered by their first, beguiling exchange: "Aren’t you kind of young to be hitchhiking out here all by yourself" "Aren’t you kind of old to be picking me up?"

As Quid, in his own words, dazzles her with his "stylish rhetoric and witty innuendoes," it isn’t long before "Hitch" joins his deadly game with "Smith or Jones." "I could go to Disneyland for a little adventure," she says, "what I’m looking for is a little excitement." Much of that excitement is provided by the film’s stunt coordinator, Grant Page, who portrays the killer. (Page was also the stunt coordinator for "Mad Max" and "Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome.")

Reviewer Vince Leo wrote, " ‘Road Games’ makes it on its own terms as something wholly different than anything you’ve seen before. It’s actually quite an odd little thriller, lackadaisical in its approach, and even though it is predictable in where it ultimately ends up, how it gets there is refreshingly off the beaten path."

Kurt Russell, after playing antiheroes in total control of their universe in "Escape from New York" and "The Thing" - both directed by John Carpenter - brought a new definition to "anti hero" when he reunited with Carpenter in 1986 for the tongue-in-cheek action adventure "Big Trouble in Little China," portraying Jack Burton, a truck-driving blowhard with a rig called the Pork Chop Express who talks with the swaggering bravado of John Wayne ("If we’re not back by dawn, call the President!") but finds himself way over his swollen head when he gets mixed up with warring Asian gangs, kidnapping, sorcery, and monsters in San Francisco’s Chinatown.

Originally scripted as a western about a cowboy who contends with Oriental mysticism in 19th-century San Francisco, the resulting film, in the words of director Carpenter, is really about a sidekick - the clueless, often klutzy Jack Burton - "who thinks he’s the leading man." The real hero, Wang Chi - well versed in Eastern myths and magic and more than a little knowledgeable about high-flying swordplay - is played with charm and aplomb by Dennis Dun, a Chinese American actor who appeared in John Carpenter’s "Prince of Darkness" before landing a recurring role in the late 1980s TV series "Midnight Caller."

Kim Cattrall, Kurt Russell, Dennis Dun, Suzee Pai

The entertaining ensemble cast boasts spot-on performances by Kim Cattrall (future "Sex and the City" vixen Samantha Jones), whose previous roles in the cheesy comedies "Porky’s" and "Police Academy" gave no hint of her knack for the snappy, Howard Hawksian banter she rattles off in this film; James Hong (a moviehouse favorite of ours as Master Wong, the blind ping pong guru in 2007’s "Balls of Fury") as the irascible 2000-year-old sorcerer Lo Pan ("This really pisses me off to no end!"); Victor Wong (memorable as a metaphysics professor in "Prince of Darkness" and as a general store owner in "Tremors") as Chinatown tour bus guide and sagacious wizard Egg Shen; and Kate Burton (daughter of Richard Burton) as a news reporter wondrously unfazed by the supernatural goings-on.

A number of familiar, respected names in martial arts cinema acted in the film and participated in the spectacular fight sequences, choreographed by James Lew (who worked on the original "Buffy the Vampire Slayer" movie) and accomplished with visceral gusto, long before the cranes, wires and digital sleight-of-handiwork of "Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon." Limited by budget but not by imagination, the eye-candy special effects were supervised by multiple-Oscar-winning Richard Edlund, whose storied résumé includes the original "Star Wars" trilogy, "Raiders of the Lost Ark," "Poltergeist," and "Ghostbusters." (The movie’s truck stunts were performed by - you guessed it - Carey Loftin.)

The heart of the movie comes down to the genuine rapport between Kurt Russell and Dennis Dun. At film’s end, before he walks off into the fog and drives the Pork Chop Express into "a dark and stormy night," Jack Burton tells his buddy, "We really shook the pillars of heaven, didn’t we, Wang?" "No horseshit, Jack." "No horseshit."

Renowned science fiction writer Harlan Ellison remarked that "Big Trouble in Little China" had "some of the funniest lines spoken by any actor this year" - "This whole place is filthy!" - "to produce a cheerfully blathering live-action cartoon that will give you release from the real pressures of your basically dreary lives."

Jonathan Winters in "It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World"

Before we pull over and take the exit ramp, we wanted to include a pair of honorably mentioned truckers in the cinematic convoy. Of all the top bananas of the era who romped through the mayhem in the 1963 comedy masterpiece "It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World," Jonathan Winters, portraying truck driver Lennie Pike,  emerged as the most manic (single-handedly demolishing a service station) and the most pathetic ("But this is a little girl’s bike, this is for a little girl!…I gotta admit, I feel kinda silly, know what I mean?") participant in a frantic race for buried cash.

Large Marge (Alice Nunn) in "Pee-wee's Big Adventure"

And then  there’s Large Marge, the spectral trucker in 1985’s "Pee-wee’s Big Adventure," who picks up the hitchhiking man-child on a misty night and chillingly relates, "On this very night, ten years ago, along this very stretch of road in a dense fog, I saw the worst accident I ever seen. There was this sound like a garbage truck dumped off the Empire State Building. And when they pulled the driver’s body from the twisted, burning wreck…it looked like this - "