A hot genre in the late 70s was the car chase/crash film, best exemplified by Smokey and the Bandit. This Roger Corman production made a lot of money for New World, one of his biggest ever hits. Corman thought this was due to a combination of cars, crashes, laughs and the fact that the hero was a teenager – played by the ever likeable Ron Howard. Howard is a car mad teen who in order to impress a girl in short pants (Christopher Norris) steals a stock car and goes on a mad drive over one afternoon. Normally these sort of films try to make the hero more respectable by making the pursuing cops baddies but not here, here they’re just incompetent.
Although the action and crashes are clearly meant to be tongue in cheek, Howard and co wreck and awful lot of havoc and really does do a lot of dangerous driving. He is a bit of a menace.
The film is light hearted with a bright banjo-esque soundtrack, lots of speeded up front-fender-cam vision, and moves at a flying pace. There is some off the wall humour (mostly courtesy of the adult characters) distinctive of Chuck B. Griffith, who wrote and directed.
Norris’ character is a user, a femme fetale who gets off on speed, but at least she roots Howard’s character twice so he can’t really complain! It all takes place over the one afternoon, going into evening. Howard then starred in Grand Theft Auto, which he also directed.
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