In his prime he was very nearly the ultimate leading man.
Editor’s Note: In memory of Burt Reynolds, who died today at age 82, National Review is reprinting this essay, which was originally published March 15, 2018.
The list of movie stars who commanded the U.S. box office for five consecutive years is short: There’s Bing Crosby, and there’s Burt Reynolds. Along with Shirley Temple, herself Hollywood’s leading attraction for four straight years, Reynolds is one of the great movie stars of yesterday who seem most in danger of being completely erased from the cultural memory. Let’s not allow that to happen. May this week’s retrospective celebration of five of his films at New York City’s Metrograph cinema prompt a renewed appreciation of his good-humored vitality.
There is a reason for Reynolds’s precipitous fall, or rather about 40 of them: Rent a Cop and Cop and ½, Stroker Ace and Stick, Heat and City Heat, Cannonball Run II and, for that matter, The Cannonball Run. His mustache-first persona became a walking joke, a precursor to those man-parodies Ron Swanson and Ron Burgundy. Burt! The name itself, immediately summoning him and only him, became funny, at the other end of the naming scale from Eggbert, the hypermasculine end. In part because of Burt, macho and manly became words that could no longer be used, except jokingly. The sketch-comedy version of Reynolds was a swaggering dope, a sexist jerk, the guy whose chest hair clogged up the drain in the hot tub. He married Loni Anderson; he was Brawny Man come to life. The proud emblem of hairy virility on his upper lip became ridiculous, downgraded to the status of “pornstache.” After a while, its like became unwearable except ironically.
Watch him at his peak, though — Smokey and the Bandit, Gator, Semi-Tough, The Longest Yard, Deliverance, Hooper, and The End, the underappreciated 1978 black comedy he directed as well as starred in — and you’ll notice how little the stereotype has to do with what he did on screen. Bad scripts, not his personal attributes, were his undoing. As much as any movie star, Burt in his prime was the distillation of American cool. He was nearly the ultimate leading man, combining Crosby’s good-humored unflappability with John Wayne’s physicality and Steve McQueen’s sexiness. Such was his impact that, like Charlie Chaplin, he inspired doppelgangers, ripoff artists — early ’80s TV was awash with Tom Sellecks and Lee Horsleys.
Most of us first saw him in Deliverance, which many would call his best film and is probably one of the few Reynolds efforts that is watched much anymore. Yet this was an atypical role: No mustache, for a start, and he’s plays a city slicker, a professional man drawn into a life-and-death match with hostile hillbillies, saving his friends from rapists with a deadly recurve bow. As he settled into a recognizable type, Reynolds became a good ol’ boy who didn’t fight much because he didn’t have to.
In the 1980s, his heir proved to be Tom Cruise, the shrimp with the floodlight smile who was always wound about 10 percent too tight. Reynolds embodied the loose, louche ’70s: He was muscular, but you couldn’t picture him at the gym. He smoked for pleasure, not because it made him look good. You couldn’t picture him waxing his chest or flexing in the mirror. When he posed for the infamous shot on a bear rug that became the most famous male centerfold in history when it appeared in Cosmopolitan in 1972, he looked beefy, not ripped.
In what other car chase does the hunted man stop for a leisurely session of making whoopee with a girl he picked up on the road?
McQueen, much preferred by critics and growing in stature among them since his 1980 death, better embodied ’70s American cinema. But if McQueen’s message was They’ll capture you and they’ll hurt you, so remain stoic, Reynolds’ was Those jerks aren’t as smart as they think. Have another beer. In what other car chase but the one in Smokey and the Bandit does the hunted man stop for a leisurely session of making whoopee with a girl he picked up on the road? Learning that Reynolds and Jackie Gleason essentially improvised the movie on the fly makes Smokey that much more of a pleasure. More than McQueen, Reynolds was in tune with a true American character — the dumb jock who isn’t so dumb, the back-of-the-class clown who barely tries but succeeds anyway, the guy who just keeps winning. Instead of intensity, athletic grace radiated from him. Before he played football in The Longest Yard, he played it at Florida State, where he lettered at tailback. With his sangfroid and his arched eyebrow he was a kind of redneck James Bond, partial to moonshine instead of martinis: Cubby Broccoli even asked him to play 007, but Reynolds demurred, saying no American could do it.
Central to his laid-back appeal was his generosity as an actor; at his commercial peak in 1981, when he made The Cannonball Run, he was content to be the calm center in an ensemble piece of crazed performances — Sammy Davis Jr., Jackie Chan, Jamie Farr, Jack Elam, and especially Dom DeLuise, with whom Reynolds starred many times. DeLuise didn’t live life as a gay man — when he died in 2009, he’d been married to the same woman for 44 years, and they had three children. But he came across as exceptionally gay on screen, and Reynolds was happy to be his straight man (in both senses). This tolerance for eccentricity, too, was very American: Contrary to the red-state stereotype, Reynolds showed how a strong, self-confident Southern man takes everything in stride, even a rotund sidekick who likes to play dress-up while calling himself “Captain Chaos.” And who more stirringly channeled our national credo than the Bandit when he explained why he was bootlegging a truckload of Coors across the Mississippi? “For the good old American life: For the money, for the glory, and for the fun. Mostly for the money.”