THE CANNONBALL RUN (1981) ** Inferior but more expensive version of The Gumball Rally . It's entertaining, though, mainly because of the bizarre and glorious typecasting. Mel Tellis and Terry Bradshaw as good ol' boys, Farrah Fawcett as the somewhat dizzy fertility totem, Burt Reynolds as the smooth-talking show-off, Roger Moore the debonaire British movie star, Peter Fonda the outlaw biker, Jackie Chan the martial artist, you get the idea...Bianca Jagger, Jamie Farr, Dom DeLuise, Bert Convy, Sammy Davis, Jr. and Dean Martin as phoney priests, lots of cool people on screen being silly all the time. And the more sober reality of ‘80s USA hadn't settled in yet, so there's a lot of drinking, and driving, and drinking and driving, and t&a and crude jokes, and making fun of the government and law and order...none of which is done either badly or at historic levels. It looks, and is, a formula that didn't have much left to offer. It imparts abundant joy that doesn't entirely transfer across the screen: there's very much a sense that they had incredibly brilliant cast parties of a magnitude that refused to be interrupted for anything as trivial as filming. So who wins? None of my very favorites are represented (the selections are as pedestrian as the script) but I'd give the cool car award to Sammy and Dean's Ferrrari over Roger's Aston Martin. The actors all do what they're supposed to, but I'd give the acting award to DeLuise barely over Roger again, and I'd say that Dino carried the parties, could carry any party, is even as we speak carrying a party somewhere. Farrah obviously wins the dinghy racing babe award, no one else comes close.
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