SMOKEY AND THE BANDIT (1977) **1/2 A film centered on four hundred cases of beer, and no one even drinks one. It's Coors, admittedly, but, you know, any port in a storm. This is a historic film, in the sense that it catches Southern culture at a pivotal moment. Fleeing the patriarchal segregated south represented by Jackie Gleason, defying authority for one loose moment of freedom and glory...the South of Waylon Jennings and Lynyrd Skynyrd. It's Burt Reynolds greatest performance, in a sense, the best example of him doing what he does best, which is, as he observes, "showing off." If mustachioed tall, dark, handsome, southern, devil-may-care wise asses are your thing, he's the trump card. Sally Field gained so much recognition for her subsequent serious roles that it's easy to forget how naturally she played the hot, young sweet thang. So he shows off for her as hard as he can, and she admires him amiably. The greatest, wittiest, if not to say profound, moments of the film, however, are unquestionably Gleason. He's not so much creating a blueprint as mocking a substrata of humanity under the misapprehension that they're safely entrenched, a caricature more accurate in its malignance than that of James Best (as Sheriff Rosco P. Coltrane) in "The Dukes of Hazzard." So it's all about drivin' fast as you can down the road, makin' the best jokes you can about everything. If most of them are more enthusiastic than funny, ain't that life? Cinema reality, or somethin'? The things it's mocking deserve to be mocked; now if someone will just make as effective a film about the "politically correct" mutation of the New South that rose from the closing scenes of this film to the office-oriented reality of the descendants of bootleggers and truck stop Romeos, and women who wanted nothing so much as anything different.
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