The 1978 cult film predicted the rebellion against Covid tyranny.
Sam Peckinpah, the controversial director of violent, elegiac Westerns, made a rare foray into comedy and politics in Convoy, his 1978 movie that stands the test of time. In light of the current Freedom Convoy of Canadian truckers, Peckinpah’s film reveals the long-lost art of civil disobedience, once exemplified by the American Revolution and the protests over civil rights and the Vietnam War, but forgotten during the current lockdowns and mandates.
In Convoy, a modern comic Western on wheels, antagonism between trucker Rubber Duck (Kris Kristofferson) and Sheriff Lyle (Ernest Borgnine) of Arizona’s highway patrol resembles today’s class-based dispute between blue-collar workers and government elites. But it goes back to the Western genre’s fundamental clash of civilization and wilderness, good and evil. The southwestern story is based on the hit song “Convoy,” C. W. McCall’s country ballad that popularized the CB-radio craze used for communication transmission between truckers — social media long before the Internet. Jonathan Demme’s endearing Citizen’s Band (a.k.a. Handle with Care, from 1977) captured the fad’s social significance, but Peckinpah adapted McCall’s tall tale as the basis for an American class myth — truckers vs. the autocratic establishment.
Working from a script by B. W. L. Norton, Peckinpah delights in American plurality, expanding Smokey and the Bear’s blockbuster chase-movie concept to showcase the truckers’ ethnically mixed professionalism — a reexamination of national character that typified the American-film renaissance of the Seventies. Post–civil rights, post-Vietnam, and post-Watergate cynicism converge in the various complaints that truckers express over the CB airwaves as they join Rubber Duck in his escape from a run-in with corrupt Sheriff Lyle. They form a mile-long convoy of big rigs, rolling along highways and desert that create eye-opening vistas of the American scene as astonishing as when John Ford first sent a stagecoach into Monument Valley.
Peckinpah’s beautiful widescreen road vistas give the same delight as the automobile cavalcades in Spielberg’s The Sugarland Express — another renegades-vs.-overlords tale, but filmed back when Hollywood liberalism was humane. Peckinpah’s nighttime truck-and-paparazzi scenes rival the phantasmagorical Fellini’s Roma, yet it is the gathering together of folk that makes Convoy exuberant.
An American road odyssey that is an exercise of liberty resonates with the stated mission of Canada’s Freedom Convoy. The corporate media have virtually blacked out the event, but Peckinpah’s poetic action movie can inform one’s response to it.
Media talking heads now prefer authoritarianism, whereas media images of Sixties protests favored dissent and encouraged sympathetic awareness. Peckinpah anticipated this aberration in his satire of how the convoy attracts the attention of a hustling politician (Seymour Cassel) and an East Coast fashion maven (Ali MacGraw), who seeks to profit from her sexual and economic attraction to redneck rebellion (symbolized by the initial flirtation between MacGraw’s Jaguar XKE and Kristofferson’s Mack truck).
Convoy makes the point that the maintenance of democracy depends on how social information gets manipulated by the media — we can’t communicate our common rights, individual choice, or common will without access to truth and free speech. Peckinpah’s Major Dundee, from 1966, diagrammed the conflicts of the Civil War, and Convoy understands the modern politicization of social grievances — the truckers’ objection to the 55-mile (“double nickel”) speed limit is a political issue.
The closest Peckinpah comes to expressing ideology is when MacGraw charges, “They’re following you.” But Rubber Duck answers, “No, they’re not. I’m just in front.” He explains, “The only reason they’re coming in behind us is because they ain’t got nobody else.” That’s where Convoy really echoes the Freedom Convoy and its exposure of the failures (enforced mandates) of official leadership, including the contemptuous responses from executive officeholders in the U.S. and Canada.
Film culture regularly romanticizes May ’68 rebellion (in Europe and America), but returning to Convoy corrects that cultural and political bias. CB discourse is a rolling metaphor for Peckinpah’s idiosyncratic, cinematic expression — an American aesthetic impulse stated when one isolated trucker joins the caravan: “I heard you modulating and figured we’d give you some congratulations.”
Peckinpah modulates his Western romanticism when McCall’s pop hit is underscored by Merle Haggard’s “Okie from Muskogee.” It’s during Rubber Duck’s rescue of Spider Mike (Franklyn Ajaye), the black trucker assaulted by dirty cops. (Sheriff Lyle could be Biden when he tells Spider Mike, “I’m gonna use you for bait.”) Plowing into the jail, Rubber Duck responds to the most nightmarish aspect of our history pre-Covid — the racial lynching that remains a specter in the American mind. But even Peckinpah’s Seventies Hollywood liberalism was different from today’s exploitation of race that influences both government and media control.
Peckinpah’s convoy of racial and social liberation climaxes with truck horns honking in tribute and remembrance — alarms that the Canadian government prohibited and that today’s Hollywood no longer knows to respect. Peckinpah’s Convoy honors what civil-rights protesters used to call “good trouble.” It’s a feel-good movie about American camaraderie going up against injustice and abusive, overreacting tyranny. It’s the most relevant movie of 2022 so far.
