Convoy

Taking CW McCall's hit single as starting-point, scriptwriter Bill Norton (director of Cisco Pike) makes Rubber Duck (Kristofferson) a populist hero of the classic Hollywood kind, leading a group of heavy truckers in their war of independence waged on the highways of America; and Peckinpah's direction places the film in the tongue-in-cheek comic vein of his own earlier Ballad of Cable Hogue. Its blatant and impossible artifice is also completely in keeping with Peckinpah's pessimistic streak. Police cars, trucks and bars are destroyed in balletic slow-motion, but none of the characters appears to get hurt (and no one dies - even when you think they do). The narrative goes a bit over the top in the second half, but it's after a large dose of the best kind of escapist good humour.