Over the opening logos of The Cannonball Run, one hears Burt Reynolds’ distinctive laugh. A high-pitched giggle delivered in exasperated staccato bursts, the laugh may be Burt’s defining characteristic. It suggests, in all of its knowing glee, the star’s most indelible quality: he’s fun. Whether navigating the grim Atlanta underbelly in Sharky’s Machine or singing alongside Dolly Parton in The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas, Burt’s starring roles are defined by a certain openness and infectious energy, the feeling that you were along for the ride with an old friend — a less sophisticated Cary Grant cruising through the American south.
The idea that it’s fun to hang out with Burt is built into films like The Cannonball Run and The End. Reynolds pioneered the style of filmmaking later mastered by Adam Sandler, treating many of his movies as an opportunity to hang out with his friends — like frequent co-stars Dom DeLuise and Sally Field, country singers Jerry Reed and Mel Tillis, football player Terry Bradshaw, to name but a few regulars — and make each other laugh. The humor in these films generally stayed within the realm of unsophisticated schtick, down home Southern charm, and big car crashes, but all of it rendered with unassuming authenticity. Billy Bob Thornton once said that in the south, they consider Smokey and the Bandit a documentary.
With his carefree persona, Burt Reynolds became one of the top box office stars of the 70s and early 80s, often vying for the top spot alongside icons like Al Pacino, Robert Redford, Clint Eastwood and Paul Newman. Unlike these actors, Reynolds’s commercial success rarely coincided with critical success, and he was never nominated for an Oscar during his heyday (He did eventually pick up a nomination in 1997 for Boogie Nights, in a role that attained a certain poignancy from his faded stardom). Burt’s best films were not, to paraphrase Andrew Sarris, art with a serving of espresso in the lobby. For this reason, it’s easy to forget just how good he was.
Reynolds’ first two big successes were Deliverance (1972) and White Lightning (1973), two films that established his Southern cinema bonafides. Deliverance famously depicts the dangers of the rural south, particularly for outsiders. It follows a group of four friends on a river-rafting trip in Georgia, where they run afoul of the locals and struggle to navigate the river’s contours. A trenchant critique of hyper-masculinity and man’s inability to triumph over nature, the film is basically the antithesis of Burt’s subsequent commercial hits. Its minimalist direction and rugged physicality make it one of the decade’s best thrillers, as well as one of the finest showcases for Reynolds’ acting (He often singled it out as being his best work). In White Lightning, he plays a bootlegger named Gator McClusky who gets released from federal prison so that he can help break apart a moonshine ring in Arkansas. A thriller with a broad sense of humor, it establishes a few of Burt’s movies’ frequent fixtures, including the long car chases, the thick Southern atmosphere and the sleazy villain, played here with appropriate aplomb by the great Ned Beatty.
During this early period of Burt’s stardom, he also took a few more adventurous roles that didn’t quite square with his persona, making two films each with the auteurs Robert Aldrich and Peter Bogdanovich. Aldrich, a studio era renegade who made some of his most compelling work in the 70s, first collaborated with Reynolds for The Longest Yard (1974). One of the star’s best films, it’s a very typical Burt Reynolds vehicle in most respects: a sports comedy set in Georgia, Burt plays a former star football player who gets sent to the state prison after a drunk driving escapade, where the sinister warden (Eddie Albert) coerces him into playing in a football game against the prison guards. The Longest Yard opens with a big car chase, and its sense of humor is as crude as any of Reynolds’ lesser films. But Aldrich, whose films often display a strong anti-authority streak, pulls no punches in his depiction of this corrupt establishment. The film’s second half is taken up by the football game between the prisoners and the guards, and it’s a truly thrilling piece of filmmaking. There's so much bloodlust and anger — all of this guard-on-prisoner carnage on a field emblazoned with Coca-Cola sponsorship logos, intercut with sly insert shots of people in fur coats cheering in the stands.
Reynolds and Aldrich followed The Longest Yard with Hustle (1975), a decidedly less commercial project. A grim neo-noir, the film opens with a young girl’s dead body washed up on a beach, a chilling image that kicks off an interlocking narrative of down-and-out people trying to figure out how to survive in the morally corrupt city of Los Angeles. Aldrich’s brute force filmmaking takes on some surprisingly tender permutations here. There are plenty of button-pushing scenes involving racism and misogyny, all of the exteriors are shot in claustrophobic shadow, and there is a pronounced dinginess present in most scenes (the Aldrich aesthetic, especially in this late period, is one of deliberate, unfussy ugliness). But Reynolds’ quiet performance cuts through all of the darkness, and his character's story — one of searching for contentment in a lifestyle and, indeed, a world predicated on the very opposite — turns out to be surprisingly moving. This is especially true in the final scene, which takes a very New Hollywood approach to noir's fatalism, leaving one with the feeling that this search for contentment is ultimately futile. As a spiritual follow-up to Aldrich’s similarly bleak 1955 noir classic Kiss Me Deadly, Hustle is frequently brilliant, but it bears little relation to what the public would expect from a Burt Reynolds movie. It is anything but fun.
That same year, Burt starred in Peter Bogdanovich’s passion project At Long Last Love (1975), a musical about the shifting romantic relationships between a group of four socialites. Since Reynolds had classical movie star charm, it’s a joy to see him in one of Bogdanovich’s intelligent, very funny screwball homages. It’s certainly odd when the man who played Gator McClusky sings “You’re the Top” to Madeline Kahn, but it becomes wholly convincing in the end. With its ravishing black-and-white production design and elaborate long takes, At Long Last Love is a brilliant re-invention of the movie musical. It was also a box office disaster. The next year Reynolds appeared in another box office disaster: Nickelodeon, Bogdanovich’s portrait of a group of independent filmmakers during the early days of movie production. Another ensemble comedy with a lot of silent-era slapstick woven in, it’s a great depiction of the joy of artistic creation. Burt’s performance is strong, and it’s quite strange to imagine an actor of his stature appearing in such personal, uncommercial work.
His films with Bogdanovich and Aldrich were Burt Reynolds’ most artistically daring projects during his period of stardom, but the defining work of his career is his six collaborations with the director Hal Needham, his good friend and former stuntman. Their first two films together, Smokey and the Bandit (1977) and Hooper (1978), are also their best.
In Smokey and the Bandit Burt plays the titular Bandit as he tries to bring 400 cases of beer from Texas to Georgia in just 28 hours while being tailed by the determined Texas sheriff Buford T. Justice (Jackie Gleason, in a justly iconic performance). Also along for the ride is Sally Field as Frog, the runaway bride who throws herself into the Bandit’s Trans-Am somewhere in Texas, and country singer Jerry Reed as the Bandit’s partner Snowman (Reed also supplies the film’s catchy theme “East Bound and Down”).
Clearly a personal project for Needham, Hooper is a plotless comedy with Burt as a legendary stuntman whose aging body can no longer handle the job’s physical demands. Jan-Michael Vincent portrays the young hotshot stuntman who threatens Hooper’s status in Hollywood, Sally Field again plays the love interest, Adam West shows up as himself to play the star of the movie-within-the-movie, and comedian Robert Klein plays the whiny and difficult director who is really just a thinly veiled version of Peter Bogdanovich.
Needham evinces a real directorial sensibility in both Smokey and the Bandit and Hooper. His style is no-frills and purposefully relaxed — despite technically portraying a high-speed chase, his approach to action in Smokey and the Bandit is notably easy-going. He chooses to revel in the journey and the sense of camaraderie, and it’s easy to forget that there’s even a chase going on. The movie is a marvel of simplicity, a breezy comedy where every complication — every death-defying car jump — is treated with Zen-like acceptance. There’s never a moment where the Bandit’s future is in doubt; not just because Buford T. Justice is a comic buffoon, but because the Bandit is just that good at what he does.
At times resembling the work of Howard Hawks, the friendships and relationships in Needham’s first two films are authentic and deeply felt. The romance between the Bandit and Frog is electric. Their chemistry is so uniquely physical and immediate in a way that harkens back to the great romantic comedies of the 30s. Burt and Sally Field were romantically involved in real life, which is certainly a factor, but it’s Needham who opened up his southern action comedy so that it had room for such an affecting romance. Hooper is even more of a genuine hangout movie with a strong sense of camaraderie among its ensemble cast, who do not do much besides drink beer and laugh with one another. One of the film’s standout scenes involves Hooper and his stuntman buddies going on a joyride down the Pacific Coast Highway. They drive backwards, circle around one another and barely avoid oncoming traffic, all while passing beers from car to car. A completely inconsequential scene, its wonderfully carefree nature makes it a defining moment in the Burt Reynolds’ oeuvre.
Howard Hawks’ influence also comes through in the way Needham illustrates the Bandit and Hooper’s professionalism. At their core, both characters are highly skilled, and it’s their quiet determination to complete their work that drives the films forward. In Hooper, the entire film is building up to the moment where the titular stuntman has to complete a complicated, practically impossible stunt — a harried drive through a series of explosions followed by a car jump of a proportion that could very well kill its driver upon impact. The Needham/Reynolds philosophy is most strongly expressed in the execution of this scene: all of the myth-making building up to this flawlessly executed stunt spectacle, a truly death-defying sequence that is at once awe-inspiring and utterly ridiculous. It would also be pointless, if not for Hooper’s — and by extension Needham and Reynolds’ — total belief in its beauty.
Smokey and the Bandit was a huge success, becoming the second-highest grossing movie of 1977 behind Star Wars. Naturally, it was followed by a sequel in 1980. Smokey and the Bandit II gets the gang back together for another high-stakes road trip, with Sally Field, Jerry Reed and Jackie Gleason all reprising their supporting characters. It opens with the Bandit at a low point in his life, a former niche celebrity way past his prime. Not content to merely replay the first film, Smokey and the Bandit II adds an interesting complication — for reasons too convoluted to relay, the Bandit’s cargo is actually a giant elephant. Consequently, the Bandit also ends up recruiting an Italian gynecologist, played by Dom DeLuise, to help take care of the elephant along the way.
With Smokey and the Bandit II, the playful, almost cartoonish incoherence is intentional. One of its best jokes is that, somewhere in between the events of the first and second movie, the Bandit released a failed novelty single called “Let’s Do Something Cheap and Superficial.” It’s a great example of how these movies take their ridiculousness at face value, and how that self-awareness adds to their authentic brand of camaraderie.
However, in retrospect, Smokey and the Bandit II represents an artistic turning point in Reynolds and Needham’s careers. “Let’s Do Something Cheap and Superficial” became something of a mission statement. Their charmingly tossed-off, carefree style began to devolve into lazy hackwork.
It’s hard to say whether Reynolds and Needham had actually become lazy, or whether the breezy rhythms of Smokey and the Bandit and Hooper were more difficult to capture than they let on. They seized upon a formula for Reynolds that worked very well, but it didn’t take long for the cracks to show. The films that Reynolds directed in this period give a good sense of his personal priorities. Gator (1976), his sequel to White Lightning, deepens the first film’s polarity between comedy and drama. It swings uneasily between cartoonish visuals and baldly offensive comedy on the one hand, and grim violence and saccharine pathos on the other. It’s compelling because Reynolds is utterly sincere, but it’s easy to see how this worldview could translate into horrible filmmaking.
Case in point, Reynolds’ second directorial effort The End (1978) is a truly wretched comedy about a man who decides to commit suicide after learning he’s terminally ill. Every sequence involves him goofing around with a different member of his cohort or a big celebrity (Sally Field, Myrna Loy and Joanne Woodward all among them). Simultaneously, there are multiple saccharine scenes where Burt's character says goodbye to his teenaged daughter and his other family members. The pathos is laid on thick, reflecting the fact that this is actually quite a sad premise for a movie at its core, but the tonal changes are poorly handled, and no one in the cast is able to portray a real emotion. Reynolds cited Joseph Losey’s 1976 masterpiece Mr. Klein as an influence on this film, and it goes without saying that these two works could not be farther apart — one an expertly constructed thriller about the Nazi occupation of Europe, the other a sickly sentimental comedy with a robust part for Dom DeLuise as a mental patient. Both Gator and The End take the cheapest, fast routes possible to whatever emotions they’re trying to convey.
In a way, the same is true of The Cannonball Run (1981), Needham and Reynolds’ fourth film together. An ensemble comedy in the vein of It’s a Mad Mad Mad Mad World, it’s about a coast-to-coast race across the United States, with pairs of drivers competing for the glory of crossing the country in record time. The cast includes show business legends and modern stars like: Dom DeLuise, Dean Martin and Sammy Davis Jr., Roger Moore, Farrah Fawcett, Peter Fonda, Terry Bradshaw, famed western character actor Jack Elam, and Jackie Chan (paired with fellow Hong Kong comedy star Michael Hui, who never crossed over to American success).
Armed with such a distinguished cast, Needham provides his least functional movie yet. A comedy with very few real jokes, Needham leans on his stars’ personas to try and give the movie some energy. Everyone plays to type — Dean Martin is an alcoholic womanizer, Roger Moore is James Bond, etc. — but the inherent charm of the performers cannot mask what a thoughtless exercise this all is. Reynolds basically cedes the spotlight to Dom DeLuise, whose schtick is much more annoying here, especially when his character has hallucinations about being a superhero named Captain Chaos. Even the premise of a cross-country race is wasted. Rather than using the changing locales to its advantage, the entire film feels stuck in the same nondescript desert highway location. Needham never conveys a sense of speed or urgency, nor are there any cool car stunts to match the hijinks from Needham’s first few films. It is a shockingly bland movie.
The Cannonball Run was financed by the Hong Kong production company Golden Harvest, which explains why Jackie Chan and Michael Hui are among its ensemble cast. The two Chinese stars play Japanese drivers whose car is tricked out with computers and other gadgets meant to give them an advantage in the race. While not as offensive as this premise could have been, the stereotype-based humor is a far cry from the stereotypes lovingly invoked in Smokey and the Bandit, which grounded its outsized characters with a sense of well-worn authenticity. The way the film fails to utilize Chan, one of the most dynamic and exciting movie stars ever, is perhaps the surest evidence of its creative bankruptcy. It’s a puzzling choice to put Jackie Chan in a movie where he has to sit in a car the entire time. His one brief fight scene towards the film’s end is a very minor consolation.
Most of the cast of The Cannonball Run returned for Cannonball Run II (1984), another movie about a cross-country race. This second entry feels more like a cheap celebrity roast than a feature film, but it’s not that much worse than its predecessor. The lows are lower, including a long sequence where Reynolds, DeLuise and Sammy Davis Jr. perform in drag. But it also gives Jackie Chan a bit more to do, pairing him this time out with Richard Kiel. It adds the great Shirley MacLaine as Burt’s love interest. There is also a cameo from Frank Sinatra, who appears to have shot his scene on a different day from the rest of the cast. At times, it even feels like there is a hectic and exciting race occurring, which is a nice change of pace from the first movie.
In between the two Cannonball Run films, Needham and Reynolds made what would come to be their cinematic death knell. Stroker Ace (1983) is a comedy about the titular NASCAR driver who, in a moment of professional desperation, signs a demanding sponsorship contract with a fried chicken restaurant chain. Much to Stroker’s chagrin, the contract requires him to be a living advertisement for the Chicken Pit. He drives a race car with their logos emblazoned all over it, and dons a humiliating chicken suit in between races.
Stroker Ace plays like an attempt at recapturing Smokey and the Bandit’s magic. It has the same Southern milieu and the same kind of car action. As the Chicken Pit’s owner Clyde Torkel, Ned Beatty plays an amusingly over-the-top villain in the mold of Buford T. Justice. Reynolds also co-stars with another real-life love interest — this time it’s his future wife Loni Anderson as the Chicken Pit’s director of marketing Pembrook Feeney. Even though it is a better and much more fun movie than either Cannonball Run, Stroker Ace shows that Reynolds’ rascally persona and Needham’s laidback direction can only go so far. It indulges all of the pair’s worst qualities. It is among the most cheap and superficial movies ever made, with a flimsy grasp on what made Reynolds such a great movie star. One of the more unpleasant plot threads in this movie involves Stroker’s obsession with Pembrook’s virginity. Burt's winking delivery makes it somewhat tolerable, in so far as he's making a mockery of his own behavior as much as anything else. On the other hand, a scene where he carefully undresses her passed-out body just goes too far past what's acceptable — Burt's fourth-wall-breaking looks at the camera can't sell a joke as fundamentally upsetting as this one.
The truest moment of Stroker Ace actually occurs during the blooper reel that plays over the film’s end credits. While Reynolds is in the middle of shooting a scene clad in his chicken suit, his friend and former co-star Jerry Reed sneaks onto the set and starts poking fun at this clearly subpar production. He says to Burt, “The sets are kind of weak, and the dialogue’s kind of weak… but the home run is, your wardrobe is beautiful.” Burt smacks him over the head with his feathered wing, presumably in on the joke, but Reed’s assessment is wholly accurate. Audiences largely agreed with him, and the film was a box office failure that began Reynolds’ fall from stardom.
The arc of Reynolds and Needham’s partnership is one of wasted potential. Smokey and the Bandit and Hooper are both mainstream comedies with a distinctly personal bent. While proudly lowbrow in their ambitions, these are dumb fun movies made at a very high level of quality. Their feeling of camaraderie was carefully crafted and contagious. Needham’s laid-back action-comedy approach gave his characters space to hangout and have fun in a way that is immensely compelling and even, in the films’ simplicity and honesty, moving. But every thing that was a virtue in these two films became a flaw in the pair’s subsequent work. The human quality and generous spirit that defined the brilliant scenes between Burt and Sally Field in Smokey and the Bandit disappeared. Instead, there was Burt leering over Loni Anderson’s unconscious body in Stroker Ace.
It could be that Hollywood itself changed, leaving less room for small and personal comedies like Smokey and the Bandit, or that they were in it mostly for the money. Maybe Reynolds and Needham just lost sight of what made their movies compelling, ignoring the small-scale pleasures for star-studded casts, half-hearted schtick and increasingly ludicrous premises. Maybe the answer is as simple as the Bandit’s novelty country single: “Let's do something cheap and superficial / Let’s do something that we might regret / Let’s do something shabby and insensitive / This might be the only chance we get.”