A tale of two generations: Sam Peckinpah's Convoy

 Kris Kristofferson, Ali McGraw, Ernest Borgnine, Madge Sinclair, Franklin Ajaye. Dir. Sam Peckinpah, United Artists, 1978

Among the myriad charges subsequent generations have laid at the feet of Baby Boomers, one I've seldom, if ever, seen is what they did to racial diversity and progress in movies. From 1970 to 1976, blaxploitation pictures pretty much saved Hollywood studios still trying to rebrand and retool after television helped bring an end to the Old Hollywood's studio system. By '76, however, Jaws had established the era of the modern blockbuster, while Martin Scorsese, Francis Ford Coppola, Brian De Palma, Robert Altman, and Peter Bogdonovich pioneered the auteurist New Hollywood of more personal movies, made on the cheap and often covering the same genres as the great B-pictures of Golden Age H'wood, but breathing new life into them with grittier violence, nudity, adult language, and more nuanced characters and stories. The black-themed movies faded from multiplexes fast, their directors and stars struggling to find work in these new pictures. Which, let me be blunt, are lilly-white.

Is there a single person of color, particularly African-American, in Godfather & Godfather Part II? Part II does feature some LatinX folks in the Cuba sequences, though none has what I'd call a substantial or significant part. Much as I love Marty Scorsese, the New York City of Taxi Driver and Mean Streets is remarkable in its lack of blacks, Asians, and LatinXes.

Moving into the '80s, most of the classic popcorn movies of the era feature either chalk-white casts, members of minority groups in stereotypical - often criminal or clownish - roles, or find a way to kill the sole minority supporting actor off in the first reel. If we look at a film like Steven Spielberg's The Color Purple, it tends to reinforce what I think of as the McDonald's-commercial-paradigm. Those old commercials tacitly endorsed a separate-but-equal vision. The commercials featuring black actors only feature happy, comfortable, friendly black people, the commercials featuring white actors only happy, comfortable, friendly whites. Color Purple was and is a commendable film in many respects, but why do Spielberg's movies always appear to be either-or?

I'm not suggesting Spielberg or Scorsese or the others were/are specifically racist, and some of those casting decisions probably owed as much to studio pressure as to the filmmakers, but the '80s cinema I grew up with tends to run mostly-black or -white. I watched Savage Steve Holland's Better Off Dead recently and couldn't help but notice the only black characters are the two linemen who comment on John Cusack riding by in the back of a garbage truck, in full ebonics:

"It be a shame when white people be throwin' out perfectly good chirren like dat."

In context it remains a funny line, but in a larger context it's symptomatic of the era. Beetlejuice made Harry Belafonte, a leader in the Civil Rights movement, the figure of parody. Ivan Reitman's Ghostbusters cast Ernie Hudson in a principal role, though not one that got the big laugh-lines, but his NYC is astonishingly white given its actual composition in the 1980s. I visited NYC in '84, an affluent white teenager, and part of what made it so exciting to me was seeing people from every conceivable part of the planet everywhere.

Contrast Boomers' mainly-white Hollywood of the '70s onward with that of the more problematic (or so we're told) '50s and '60s. I won't try to rewrite history to make that era some kind of racial/ethnic utopia, but it's worth observing that the big directors and stars of that era, largely WW2 vets, were pro-civil rights and found ways to get more people of color into their films than ever before. If John Ford's take on Native Americans vacillates regrettably - misunderstood good guys in one picture, relentless enemies the next - the Navajo nation considered him one of its great allies for employing them in all his Monument Valley pictures. His 1960 western, Sergeant Rutledge, is the first American major studio release to feature a black actor, Woody Strode, in a lead role, though it does recast the Indians as villains.

Sam Fuller cast African Americans and Asians in substantial roles when no one would (see his Korean War picture, Steel Helmet, or 1963's Shock Corridor) and paid a heavy price, as most of his pictures underperformed at the box office. His magnum opus, The Big Red One, is possibly his least-diverse picture, yet his last movie, White Dog, saw Paul Winfield try to retrain a dog conditioned to attack African Americans.

The 1960s saw Belafonte, Dorothy Dandridge, and Sidney Poitier emerge as mainstream stars, Dandridge and Poitier Oscar nominees. Gene Rodenberry's Star Trek featured Nichelle Nichols and George Takei in main-cast roles, and Charlton Heston, so villified for his leadership of the NRA, was recognized as a passionate proponent of Civil Rights and Dr. King. Indeed, it's pretty well impossible to watch Planet of the Apes as anything other than an extended metaphor for America's racial problems. 

It is significant that most of these men served either in WW2 or in the military. They witnessed firsthand the horrors of the Holocaust, of Japanese-Chinese conflict, and they served with African-American GIs, even if the divisions were still segregated. Ford, a first-generation American, grew up seeing his Irish-immigrant parents treated as second-class citizens, which marked him for life. Jewish Fuller went from North Africa to the concentration camps of Eastern Europe as a soldier in the First Infantry. When they returned to the US, they were outraged to see their fellow veterans forced back into subservient, socially inferior roles in segregationist America.

Director Sam Peckinpah joined the Marine Corps in 1943, serving in China, where he witnessed massacres and torture of Chinese citizens by Japan's Imperial Army. His legendary western, The Wild Bunch, featured LatinX actor Jaime Sanchez as a member of William Holden and Ernest Borgnine's gang, and Emilio Fernandez as the Mexican General they attempt to double-cross. These were meaty supporting roles, not one-dimensional walking stereotypes.

None of these men were Boomers, and opportunities for them to make the kinds of pictures at which they excelled dried up by the mid-'80s, just as work for Pam Grier and Melvin Van Peebles and Richard Roundtree did.

Which brings me, at last, to Peckinpah's trucker-picture from 1978, Convoy. Nominally a clone of earlier, better-regarded trucker-movies White Line Fever and the megahit Smokey & the Bandit, Convoy tries for something more subversive and, I believe, succeeds admirably. Where Smokey & the Bandit posits a majority-white trucker culture, Convoy's brothers of the road ethic sees black actors Madge Sinclair and Franklin Ajaye play not only owner-operators but important characters within the story, particularly Ajaye's Spider Mike, one of the instigators of the titular convoy. Indeed, the story hinges on Kristofferson's determination to rescue Spider from Ernest Borgnine's racist Sherrif Lyle "Cottonmouth" Wallace, who has jailed Spider Mike and presided over his beating by deputies. Not what we'd expect in a movie about truckers in the American Southwest.

Convoy certainly looks and feels like a Smokey & the Bandit knockoff in its initial setup, which sees Kristofferson's "Rubber Duck" Penwald offer Ali MacGraw's Melissa a ride to Dallas after her Jaguar, which he races in the film's opening, breaks down, forcing her to sell it. Borgine's Sherrif Wallace has already tricked Kristofferson, Ajaye, and Burt Young's "Pig Pen" into speeding on the highway in order to extort $70 apiece from each. When Wallace appears at the truckstop where all three have stopped to eat, checking license plates, Ajaye and Young incur his wrath by mocking him over the 'stop's PA, yet Wallace only tries to arrest Ajaye, who wants to get home for the birth of his son, for "vagrancy," a classic tactic used by cops to harass people of color. Meanwhile, Kristofferson increases Wallace's rage by taking his daughter, a waitress, into his sleeper-cab (though they don't have sex.)

Antagonism established, the obligatory chase at the heart of all these pictures ensues, as Wallace and a growing number of cops pursue the three drivers and Melissa. As fellow truckers hear of Wallace's pursuit they link up with Kristofferson & company, forming a massive convoy hell bent on helping Kristofferson get Melissa to Texas and Spider Mike to his wife.

As the convoy rolls on, they're viewed with sympathy as a symbol of the harassment of truckers and the working poor, by police, with Kristofferson emerging as a reluctant hero. In time, the governor of New Mexico, Jerry Hopkins (a scheming Seymour Cassel), intent on a run for the White House, attaches himself to the convoy's cause, offering them amnesty at least long enough to stage a photo op and exploit the truckers and their blue collar friends as his political base.

Doesn't sound much like Smokey & the Bandit, does it? Though Peckinpah allegedly spent most of the shoot in his trailer in a drunken, drugged haze, turning over second-unit direction to actor James Coburn before ultimately being fired by EMI Studios, he crafts a movie more interested in racial and economic justice than in crazy, stunt-laden chases. Though EMI recut the picture to emphasize the Smokey & the Bandit comparisons, the bootleg version I watched balances the sociopolitical and the exploitation plots more than sufficiently to keep me engaged. I don't know if my bootleg (bought for $1 at a local thrift shop) is the official release or not, but had it been more like Smokey... I doubt I would have enjoyed it so much.

Upon rescuing Ajaye, the picture veers into the ridiculous as Wallace recruits a National Guard unit to help him stop the Rubber Duck with heavy artillery, his sleazy racism mutating into maniacal hate as he empties a machine gun into the tanker truck, causing it to explode and plunge into a river, presumably killing Kristofferson.

The film's ending, which sees Wallace not only escape comeuppance but even become something of a fan of the unkilled Rubber Duck, sounded the only false notes in the entire picture. Had Convoy ended with Wallace meeting Jennifer Jason Leigh's fate in The Hitcher, torn apart between two truck cabs, Kristofferson martyred and avenged, I would award Convoy full-throated support.

It doesn't though, and if the ending feels bogus, the rest of the picture brings enough authenticity, untraditional casting, and unexpected moral heft to escape my wrath. A little disappointing, a little cliche, Convoy is a lot of fun, nevertheless. I'm in the early stages of a longer piece on my 12 favorite movie discoveries of the pandemic, and Convoy is one of the dozen. Damn good, if not quite great, stuff. Color me happily surprised.