Romancing the road: “Convoy” and its vanished populist age.

I promise that this blog is not going to become a retrospective of Sam Peckinpah films! But I’m going to beg your indulgence to do another article, fresh off the heels of my recent one on the terrible 1983 “thriller” film The Osterman Weekend, analyzing a film from that mercurial director. You could consider this a companion piece to that one, but as you’ll see, American history and culture figure heavily in it and why I find it an object of interest. The object is the 1978 film Convoy, which is, like The Osterman Weekend that came five years after it, a terrible picture by any objective measure. Though not as muddled, bizarre or repulsive as Osterman, Convoy is arguably more interesting from a historical perspective, particularly because it hatched out of a brief moment of hopeful—and also cynical—populism that existed at the end of the 1970s. It is that unique political and cultural moment that makes Convoy both relevant and interesting, despite its obvious and serious failures as a quality piece of filmed entertainment.

As a film and a story, Convoy is almost laughably bad. It’s protagonist is a trucker nicknamed “Rubber Duck,” played by country-western star Kris Kristofferson. Rubber Duck has a brief encounter on the road with a woman, Melissa (Ali McGraw), who despite being white sports an Angela Davis-style Afro for some unfathomable reason. Then the Duck gets extorted at a roadside speed trap by corrupt Sheriff Wallace (Ernest Borgnine). There’s an inexplicable fight sequence at a local diner, which is directed and photographed in director Sam Peckinpah’s signature style. Think of fists plunging directly into the camera lens, followed by men’s bodies flying through the air in slow-motion, only to crash down on items of breakaway furniture. For what seems like 20 minutes. Only after these preliminaries does the film get down to its main plot, wherein the Duck assembles a convoy of rebellious truckers headed for the state line to avoid being prosecuted for their role in the diner fight. And, of course, the sheriff is pursuing them doggedly. The convoy attains political significance, such that the Governor of New Mexico (Seymour Cassel) tries to associate himself with them. At the end a town gets destroyed, some trucks blown up, and the Duck fakes his own death to run away with Melissa.