Making of this was famously troubled, like so many Sam Peckinpah films, with the cocaine riddled director booted off the film. It has a lot of pleasures - gorgegous shots of trucks going through the desert, Kris Kristofferson looking handsome, a sense of camraderie around the truckers, a feeling of pace and speed (they're always in trucks).
It's got silly things like Ali Macgraw's perm. I always remember the trucker girl Kristofferson slept with and how sad faced and unhappy she looked and wondered if that was the original intent which was surely to show Kristofferson to be a stud.
Ernest Borgnine's racism against Ajaye is very effective dramatically. It's great there's a black female trucky too. Bognine works well as a villain even if the "top level government conspiracy to get Kristofferson" is confusing and dumb and probably the result of too many drugs. Macgraw isn't much in this - if only they'd given her straight hair - but she doesn't have much to do, her tan matches nicely with Kristofferson and she does serve as a non-trucking surrogate for the audience to identify with. (This may have helped the film become such a big hit.)
And that title track is catchy.
James Coburn directed second unit!
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