Convoy (1978) Peckinpah Takes a Surprising Route from Novelty Record to Box Office Smash

Have you an eyeball on this, good buddy? Sam Peckinpah’s pop cultural classic road movie Convoy, starring the recently departed Kris Kristofferson, Ali McGraw and Ernest Borgnine, is coming to Blu-ray on the StudioCanal label from 28th October, 10-4!

For those of you who weren’t around during the days of the Citizen Band radio (CB for short)/trucking craze, allow me to explain. Back in 1975, a novelty country song by the name of Convoy was released by C.W. McCall (an alias for singer/songwriter Bill Fries and Chip Davis) that inexplicably became a worldwide smash hit. McCall’s song told the story of a fictional trucker rebellion, led by one ‘Rubber Duck’, that drives non-stop from the West Coast to the East Coast of the United States in protest at, amongst other things, the introduction of the 55 mph speed limit, toll roads and working conditions. The success of the track can be explained by the then growing phenomenon in CB radio and the reconstructed mythology of the Wild West’s rugged individualism, now updated to characterise the independant life of the long-distance truck driver, sticking it to ‘The Man’.

To capitalise on this mood, the film and TV industry produced a slate of “trucksploitation” productions around this time, including Movin’ On (1974-1976), White Line Fever (1975), Breaker! Breaker! (1977) The Great Smokey Roadblock (1977) Every Which Way But Lose (1978), B.J. and the Bear (1979 -1981) and, arguably most famously of all, Smokey and the Bandit (1977), which spawned a further two sequels in 1980 and 1983. What’s remarkable about Convoy is that such a cash-in was helmed by none other than Hollywood’s big bad outlaw, Sam Peckinpah. More, it proved to be Peckinpah’s biggest commercial success ever. Hear that? Sam Peckinpah’s greatest hit was not The Wild Bunch, it was not Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid, it was not Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia; it was a movie based on a novelty record populated in CB speak and featuring a hero who goes by the name of Rubber Duck. I guess you can’t choose what strikes a chord with your audiences, eh?

Kris Kristofferson stars as legendary long haul driver whose CB call sign is ‘Rubber Duck’. Both he and his fellow truckers, ‘Pig Pen’ (Burt Young) and ‘Spider Mike’ (Franklin Ajaye), find themselves harrassed and extorted by corrupt Arizona Sheriff ‘Dirty’ Lyle (Ernest Borgnine) on an endless string of minor driving and civil infractions. When Lyle and his deputies later attempt to arrest Mike on the trumped up charge of vagrancy at a truck stop diner, fists start flying and a good ole barrroom style cowboy brawl ensues. As the truckers prevail, they agree to head for the state line into New Mexico in an attempt to avoid prosecution, and it isn’t long before drivers, sympathetic to their plight and in vehicles of all shapes and sizes, join them in their protest against establishment corruption and unjust federal and state laws. As the mighty convoy of dust-raising trucks heads for freedom, the combined forces of the national guard, the Army, the Police and the feds are called out to halt the truckers, but the truckers don’t want to stop!

Convoy was written by B.W.L. Norton, the man who had previously directed 1972’s Cisco Pike, the film which gave Kristofferson his leading man debut and pitted his former drug dealer-turned-singer against Gene Hackman’s blackmailing cop. Peckinpah, who is said to have discovered McCall’s song being played to death on Armed Forces radio whilst in Europe making Cross of Iron, was in desperate need of a legitimate hit to realise his dream of making Snowblind, based Robert Sabbag’s cocaine trafficking adventures in South America (a film which never came to fruition, despite Convoy‘s subsequent box-office success). He accepted the directing gig, but hated Norton’s screenplay. To his credit, Peckinpah added an extra dimension to the narrative by making the characters of ‘Spider Mike’ and ‘Widow Woman’ African-American (the latter rechristened ‘Black Widow’) as a means to explore Lyle’s racial prejudices. Aside from the considerable toning down of his trademark violence and misogynist excess, this decision was arguably the only significant and positive contribution Peckinpah made during the production.

We need to be blunt here: Peckinpah was a great director, but his success rate was terrible. By the time Convoy came around, his instincts were in freefall, helped in no small part by an addiction to drugs and alcohol that also made him a paranoid and volatile nightmare to be around. On the set of Convoy, the legendary director of many a Western had become, to all intents and purposes, a gun for hire. He wasn’t happy and he didn’t know what the film required of him, which excerbated his volatility, his despair and his predilection for the bottle and cocaine. To put this into some context, on the day that production wrapped, 11 days behind schedule and at a cost of more than $12 million (more than double its original budget), Peckinpah announced “I haven’t done one good day’s work on this whole picture”. Indeed, legend has it that Peckinpah was so incapacitated for much of the shoot that a great deal of the directing duties fell to his assistant director, who just happened to be James Coburn, the star (alongside Kristofferson) of Peckinpah’s Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid from five years earlier.

This uncertainty had led him to shoot 800,000 feet of film. For clarity, on The Wild Bunch, arguably his finest work and a film the studios had baulked at the length of, he had exposed 300,000 feet of film. Whilst the story of Peckinpah is one populated by tales of his vision for a film being interfered with and chopped down to size in the editing suite, Convoy was not a film that meant anything to the filmmaker in the way that The Wild Bunch or the notoriously butchered Major Dundee had. Yet try as he might, Peckinpah was at a complete loss as to how to shape what he had shot.

Turning in a three and a half hour long movie inspired by a corny country track and designed to cash in on the CB craze of the day was never going to fly with the studio heads at EMI, and opinions differ as to what happened next. Some say that, as it ever was, Peckinpah and his long-time editor Garth Craven were fired on the spot by Michael Deeley, the president of EMI. Others claim that Peckinpah did something remarkable on Convoy; he actually allowed the studio to take his film away from him and edit it as they saw fit. Given what we know of Peckinpah during the making of this film, and indeed his own comment upon his abilities with it, I’m inclined to believe the latter. But, as is often the case, legends persist regarding his epic 220 minute cut, with Garner Simmons, author of Peckinpah: A Portrait in Montage claiming that the 110 minute final cut approved by EMI (and still too damn long if you ask me) had “cut the guts out of” Peckinpah’s original vision. Again, given that it sounds like Peckinpah didn’t even know what day of the week it was for much of the shoot, I’m not convinced at all by this romanticising.

Peckinpah was right in one respect though; the screenplay is terrible. Indeed, the whole premise is muddled. I’m all for any film that holds a genuine resentment towards a corrupt system propped up by even more corrupt law enforcement, and I appreciate that Hollywood reached its zenith in such sentiments in the post-Watergate world of the 1970s, but Convoy is just so vague in its intentions beyond its generic cries of “ACAB! Fuck the Man! America, fuck yeah!” The film starts off all well and good in its depiction of Borgnine chasing down Kristofferson and his comrades in order to extort them on trumped up charges but, by the time that their mass drive to freedom becomes a cause célèbre, the film tries to tack on the notion that the assembled are fighting for some cause against the wider political system that’s never adequately explained. It’s possible that Peckinpah knew this, because the interminable sequence in which a newscaster travels alongside the convoy to elicit their motiviations reveals each character to be little more than delusional sheep, each with their own half-baked personal reasons for joining the protest, rather than any clear sentiment of solidarity.

In the traditions of the strong and silent hero, Rubber Duck claims his purpose is simply “to just keep movin'”. One man parrots a plethora of conspiracy theories about government – namechecking Nixon, Rockafeller, Chase Manhattan Bank, the Iron Curtain and the 55 mph speed limit – and another, a cliched butch redneck trucker who is here to “kick ass”, wildly propositions the male journalist as a “Purdy redheaded little boy” and enquires if he’d like to join him in his cab. Another simply bares his arse to the cameras, whilst a drop-out in a dog collar is there as a spiritual quest, leading his motley congregation aboard his flat bed truck into song. Perhaps Peckinpah kept this lengthy sequence in to show some subversive contempt for the film’s ill-conceived political commentary? And, in any case, how does this fight for the ordinary little men and woman tie with the convoy’s subsequent destruction of a small Texan town, its homes and businesses, in its jail-break of Spider Mike? A jail break in which the trucks literally mow down properties that, in reality, would definitely lead to deaths.

Of course, the irony here is that the song Convoy enjoyed a resurgence in 2022 when a series of blockades entitled “Freedom Convoy” beset Canada by similarly befuddled and selfish protesters, incensed by Covid-19 vaccine mandates. If only the movie had the good sense to keep it small, to focus on the hostilities and harrassments of Sheriff Lyle and how such attitudes are backed up and supported at local government level by Seymour Cassell’s hypocritical and duplicitous Governor Jerry Haskins, there might have been something here. Ditch the Robin Hood mythologising as Rubber Duck and his caravan of disciples grab the headlines, and there would at least be a more significant through-line from the extortionate practices in the fist act of the film to the later wrongful arrest of Spider Mike and the subsequent, aforementioned rescue from jail by Rubber Duck.

As you’d expect from a film about rebellious eighteen wheel truck drivers living out some fantasy about how the West was won, Convoy doesn’t afford the women in the cast much to do, but it’s nonetheless refreshingly free of much of the misogyny that Peckinpah would normally direct at female characters as we saw in the likes of Straw Dogs and Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia. Madge Sinclair’s ‘Black Widow’ is depicted as a confident, articulate women with her own agency, but that agency exists to remind the other characters and the audience that she is Black and little more. Nevertheless, that’s still an improvement on the film’s leading lady, Melissa (Ali McGraw) and the character of Violet (Cassie Yates), wife of Sheriff Lyle and sometime girlfriend of Rubber Duck.

Most Peckinpah movies feature female nudity, often in relation to male violence. Mercifully, the PG-rated Convoy is not the kind of film to contain sexual assault but, whilst Peckinpah shoots a love scene between Kristofferson and Yates in a remarkably chaste and almost tender (by his standards) manner, he can’t resist making Yates look harrowingly vulnerable and pitiably tragic as she presents herself to Rubber Duck, the birthday boy, in hastily assembled gift-wrap.

As for McGraw, this was to be her first film since Peckinpah directed her opposite her husband Steve McQueen in 1972’s The Getaway, but it is far from a triumphant comeback. The reason for the six-year hiatus? McQueen was notoriously paranoid, jealous and controlling towards his wife and refused to let her act for fear that she would fall in love with someone she was working with. On learning that his wife was starring in Convoy, McQueen arrived on set and demanded to know what Peckinpah was thinking hiring her, arguing that his old friend was “disrupting my home life”. McQueen – a serial adulterer himself – stayed on the shoot, but failed to spot that his long-suffering wife had indeed taken this opportunity at freedom to its full advantage, conducting a “druggy affair” (as she called it) with an unnamed crew member. On discovering his wife’s infidelity, McQueen filed for divorce, never forgiving Peckinpah for the role he perceived he had in destroying their marriage. The tragedy is that none of this was worth it. McGraw is given a nothing role, reduced to sliding about in the back of the Duck’s cab as he navigates dangerous bends, saddled with an unfortunate late 70s tight perm.

The male cast don’t fare muh better either, and it’s indicative of how little grasp Peckinpah – once regarded as a fine director of actors, who developed a regular rep company across his career – had upon the production. Ernest Borgnine, one of the stars of Peckinpah’s The Wild Bunch, in particular seems lost in the role of ‘Dirty’ Lyle from the lack of direction that Peckinpah affords him and the uneven nature of the screenplay. Unsure if the character is meant to be a comic buffoon, in the mould of Jackie Gleason’s redneck Sheriff Buford T. Justice in Smokey and the Bandit, or a genuinely dangerous antagonist whose bigotry sees him violently persecute Spider Mike and whose ruthlessness leads to him firing a machine gun indiscriminately at Rubber Duck’s explosive cargo, the actor often flounders and falls back on his tendency to play big, if only to be better heard over the roaring engines of the star vehicles. Fresh from the success of Rocky and having performed for Peckinpah in 1975’s The Killer Elite, Burt Young was said to have found the character of Pig Pen so sketchy and elusive that he was still trying him out in various takes during the shoot. As for Kristofferson, it’s equally a nothing character, and one with the added ignominy of being saddled with a ridiculous name. All that is required of him here is to be laconic, and fortunately that came natural to the musician and movie star who we sadly lost last month. It’s an ability that somehow, against the odds, almost makes him iconic here, as the much replicated images of him, shaggy and shirtless, embraced from behind by McGraw, surely testifies.

Is Convoy terrible though? Well, it’s not a good film by any means, and it’s certainly far from Peckinpah’s finest. Despite itself however, there’s the occasional sliver of indomitable charisma that glitters pleasingly from beneath the grit those eighteen wheelers kick up, especially if, like me, you grow up in its taillights in the 1980s. Likewise there are glimpses through those dust clouds and exhaust fumes of the old Peckinpah genius too. In wresting control of Norton’s screenplay and struggling to make the film something more than just a cash-in, Peckinpah adopts his usual theme of men out of time which can be seen in The Wild Bunch, Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid and many other Peckinpah films you’d care to name. Rubber Duck and Dirty Lyle may be adversaries, but they’re both united by their fiercely independent natures and their mutual status as relics of a dying world.

It’s also a technically proficient piece too, and never more so than in some of the film’s big action set pieces that allow Peckinpah to showcase his multi-speed, multi-camera montage style to full effect. The brawl at the truck stop is a great example of this, with fists flying and bodies tumbling in slo-mo as, somewhat cheekily, actual ketchup from the up-ended tables arcs the air as opposed to blood this time around. Robert J. Litt’s sound design in the moments leading up to all hell breaking loose is worth highlighting here too, as the tension is ratcheted up by the howling wail of passing trucks on the highway beyond, serving like an almost unbearable warning siren as each character becomes more alert to the danger they are in.

In conclusion then, Convoy is as muddled a political commentary as you’d expect from a film based on a novelty hit record and directed by a volatile hellraiser, but something about it captured the audience’s imagination, helped no doubt by the phenomenon it traded off being at its apex at the time of its release. Studio Canal have produced an enticing release, that has not only restored the film’s original print but is also stuffed to the gunnels with extras, including a new audio commentary by filmmaker/ Peckinpah scholar Mike Siegel, and another commentary by film historians Paul Seydor, Garner Simmons, and Nick Redman. There’s also a new interview with Franklin Ajaye reminiscing about his time making the movie, and Mike Siegal’s video essay The Lost Convoy, which looks at the differences between Norton’s script, Peckinpah’s vision and the final cut. An animated gallery of international posters and lobby cards explores how the film was promoted, whilst hundreds of rare behind the scenes stills photographs form an in-depth three-part look at the making of the movie. Passion & Poetry – Sam’s Trucker Movie is a 70 minute documentary about the film, featuring interviews with the likes of Kristofferson, McGraw and Borgnine. And if that’s not enough, there’s also trailers, TV and Radio spots, three lost scenes, a featurette looking at the many in-jokes and cameos that litter the movie and even an interview with Norwegian Convoy and trucking fan Anders Løfaldli to round off the release.

10-99 good buddy. Over and out.

Mark’s Archive – Convoy (1978)