In an industry notorious for wasteful pretentiousness — directors shooting a hundred takes, crews taking all day to light a single shot, gazillions spent on the latest effects — Hal Needham was a rebel. Directing? “There is no magic to it, you know. All you have to do is look through the camera and see if it’s got the lens on it that you want. . . I don’t really think it’s that tough.” Cinematography? “We’re not doing Gone with the Wind or Fiddler on the Roof. It’s action/comedy. . .don’t give me none of this artsy-fartsy stuff, just shoot the film.” Expensive locations? “I like to get outside whenever I can. I think it gives a film energy to be outside. . . and beauty.”
And so Smokey and the Bandit was made fast and loose, outside, on a low budget. In Reynolds’ words, they worked “lightning quick,” with first-time director Needham “reigning over crew and camera with instincts that made him, in my humble opinion, the best action director in the business.” The entire film was shot on location in the South. “We moved all over Georgia. . . It was a screwy chase picture, but Hal’s fun, outlaw, hell-bent-sensibility made it sparkle.”
Needham’s blistering pace also served to instill a certain freedom in his actors, of a kind seldom enjoyed by the more paint-by-numbers Hollywood productions. Critical darlings like Mike Leigh — Naked (1993), Secrets & Lies (1996), Vera Drake (2004) et al. — are often praised to the high heavens for having actors invent a script during rehearsals. Although Needham doesn’t get anywhere near the same respect for it, he is also an expert practitioner of improvisation. Lots of his footage ends up on the cutting room floor, or in the blooper reels that often run under the credits of his movies (alas, he didn’t start that gimmick until after Smokey). Peeking at those muffed shots gives an idea of what it’s like to film a Needham script: lots of experimentation, lots of laughter.
This brand of seat-of-your-pants filmmaking requires the right talent, and — just like with the other aspects of a Needham production — pretentious people need not apply. Enter Burt Reynolds, Jackie Gleason, Sally Field, Jerry Reed, a bunch of game amateurs and character actors, and a hound dog.
Field was the good-natured, saccharine star of television shows such as Gidget (1965-66) and The Flying Nun (1967-70), and by 1976 was firmly typecast as, in her estimation, “the All-American syrupy meaningless girl-next-door with no belly button. Just about as bland as you can get.” She took the Smokey role in an attempt to shatter that impression, scarcely aware of what she had gotten herself into. Flipping through her script on the first day, she innocently asked Reynolds why Big and Little Enos, the jolly pseudo-villains of the piece, shared such a strange name. “Because it rhymes with penis!” Reynolds happily replied (and if you think about it, that is exactly why the name is inherently funny). Her acting in Bandit would be nominated for a Golden Globe.
Jerry Reed (1937-2008) was a country music star and a friend of Reynolds and Needham, who had already acted for them in several earlier redneck movies. Originally slated to play the Bandit, he gamely allowed himself to be demoted to the role of Snowman when Reynolds entered the picture. In hindsight, it was a great move — Snowman was the role he was born to play. He also wrote and sang the iconic songs for the film. “Eastbound and Down” took Reed all of an hour to dream up, and looking back it was one of those tunes that perfectly encapsulates a movie and a genre. The fact that it wasn’t even nominated for an Academy Award while the likes of Melissa Etheridge and Eminem have won Oscars tells you everything you need to know about how irrelevant the Best Song category has become in the modern age.
To find a suitable Chewbacca for Reed’s truckin’ Han Solo, Needham held a “canine beauty pageant” down in Atlanta, won by a dog named Happy (who is called Fred in the movie). Many of the sweetest laughs in the film concern the Snowman worrying and fussing over his dog, who Needham carefully includes in the corner of many widescreen compositions, panting contentedly as they motor down the highway. It’s a rare chase movie that makes time for things such as Snowman’s request that the Bandit get Fred a hamburger at the local “choke-n-puke,” or Reed pursuing a playful Fred into a nearby lake. Heck, the damn dog got laughs just from the Bandit and Snowman lugging it across the yard and into the truck. Another movie might have had the heroes leave Fred behind as an impediment to winning the bet on time. Not Bandit. And audiences didn’t need to be told why Snowman brought him along without a second thought, nor why the Bandit doesn’t raise the slightest objection. It’s his dog, man.
If there was one figure who held these disparate elements, characters, and improvisations together, it was Burt Reynolds. His energy and good humor fuels the picture and paces the action. “When I go on the set at the start of a picture,” Reynolds says
I make a nest for myself. I make jokes and try to get comfortable. When I’m doing comedy, I like to get into a rhythm. I begin working in that same rhythm with the crew first. Once I get them laughing, I know it’s working because they’re a very tough audience. Sometimes people on the outside who don’t know my way of doing things criticize me for wasting time or screwing around, not doing my lines. But I am actually preparing for what’s coming up in a scene.
Like John Wayne a generation before him, Reynolds worked damn hard to create the charisma he projected on the screen. It takes a certain courage and talent for an actor to just be, and to make “just being” something that possesses its own depth and meaning. “What is it about acting that grabs hold of us and won’t let go?” Reynolds once asked. “Acting! Why, it’s nothing but make believe. . . pretending to be something you’re not. Or is it a chance to be something you really are? A chance to transfer an emotion, like joy, to someone?”
That transference explains perfectly the appeal of guys like Reynolds and Wayne, and it serves as a rebuttal to the method excesses of all the De Niros and Streeps and Penns out there with their tiresome array of tics and quirks. The “charismatic hero” school of acting is designed to appear effortless, but in fact it takes a lot of work and concentration. “You’ve got to like the people in the picture for it to be successful,” Reynolds maintains.
Smokey and The Longest Yard, I think, were terrific films, better than most critics gave them credit for. When the gross is over 100 million dollars, a lot of people must like them. And in both of them, I was making a really conscious effort to have the time of my life in front of the camera. I think that’s what came through. . . the fun we had on the film was, I think, infectious to the American people who saw it.
Creating that sense of fun was easier said than done, given Reynolds’ precarious physical condition. He was then suffering from years of undiagnosed hyperglycemia, so bad that he would often faint dead away for no discernible reason. One of the reasons he looks so thin in Bandit is because he had lost a lot of weight. “It got to the point where they would just prop me up and put on more makeup because I’d turned white. I’d think, ‘We’ll, this is a good time to die. I have number-three Desert Tan on, and I’m nice and thin’.” If the role hadn’t allowed him to spend most scenes sitting in the Trans Am, he might not have finished the picture at all.
But it’s often the case that physical illness brings out the best in actors. Think of Gene Kelly doing his famous Singin’ in the Rain dance while running a temperature of 103, or Harrison Ford chasing Nazis and Arabs through the streets of Cairo in Raiders of the Lost Ark while racked with dysentery. And so it was with Reynolds — his sickness kept any pesky “Look at me — I’m a big star!” temptations in check, and gave him a down-to-earth, sympathetic streak that winningly offset his brash cockiness. Reynolds usually projects an anger simmering under the surface of his characters, but that quality is nowhere to be found in Smokey, leaving the Bandit far more endearing than he might have otherwise been.
Like Reynolds creating his “nest” and getting into a comedic rhythm, Needham also saw value in having a certain vibe course throughout his set. “Dailies were a big thing with me and my company,” he says today. “I would set up a bar and have some finger food, sandwiches, hors d’oeuvres and things, big table of it. I’d pay for it, not the company. I invited everybody on the crew. If we were on location, they could bring their wife and kids, I didn’t care.” Guys like Spielberg, Lucas, and Cameron shroud their sets in secrecy, but Needham’s viewings of the previous day’s work were family affairs. “Everybody’d get a drink,” Needham explains. “We’d put a reel on. That reel would go off, everybody’d get another drink. Hell, about five reels into it, we thought it was funny as hell whether it was or not.”
Perhaps it was this family-skewed audience that reminded him to keep the film relentlessly joyous and light on its feet. Like most other filmmakers in the 1970s, Needham easily could have added a bit of “the old ultra-violence” to Bandit, shocking the audience but ruining the movie’s charm. But like his mentor John Wayne, he would have none of it. “I think there’s a big difference between violence and action,” he says emphatically. “In any movie I ever directed, you’ll never see violence. You’ll see action but never violence. Never in all my movies was anybody ever killed. And I did a war film, for Christ’s sake. But that was my theory and my thinking, and I chose to do it that way.” Throughout Smokey and the Bandit, every time a stunt results in a crashed car or motorcycle, Needham is careful to include a shot of the occupants getting out of the wreck without any injuries. Little touches like that frequently escape the attention of Hollywood executives, but audiences notice and appreciate them.
All of this — the energy, humor, pace, improvisation, charisma, and action — paid off in spades. Smokey and the Bandit was first released in New York to terrible reviews and lukewarm box office. Needham told Universal that they were doing it all wrong — they needed to debut this picture among the people it was made for. So Universal changed tactics, opened the movie down South, and it took off like a rocket. Once the word spread, the movie was re-released in the cities and caught on there as well. It ended up being one of the biggest grossing movies of all time, an amazing feat given that it didn’t have any expensive special effects to buoy its must-see factor. What it had was humor, inventive stunts, a dash of romance, and a deep love of the South. And that was enough.
In between the critics panning the movie as crude, lowbrow, and racist/sexist/homophobic, a few managed to take the film’s proper measure. Writing in the Washington Post on July 29, 1977, critic Gary Arnold made an early case for Needham as a cultural throwback to a more optimistic era in our popular culture:
Needham seems to possess a comic outlook and timing extending beyond his erstwhile specialty. The prevailing mood of the film is cheerful and witty. Every element seems to be in balance, from the flirtatious exchange of Reynolds and Field, who make an endearing romantic comedy team, to throwaway bits of business, like the moment when Field begins practicing a dance step on the inside of the Trans Am windshield.
Needham also demonstrates a form of comic-poetry rabble-rousing talent that reminds one of Frank Capra at his most affectionate and, thankfully, least mawkish.
Affectionate. That is an adjective seldom attributed to Smokey and the Bandit, yet it gets much closer to the truth of what the movie was really all about than all the scathing reviews combined.
Next Saturday in For Conservative Movie Lovers, we conclude our look at Smokey and the Bandit by addressing the movie’s cultural impact and its recapitulation of oft-derided American values.
Previous posts in the series “Hal Needham, Burt Reynolds and Smokey and the Bandit“:
FURTHER READING and VIEWING
ANOTHER LOOK AT SMOKEY AND THE BANDIT: Here’s a very nice look back at Smokey from John Pearley Huffman at the Edmunds Inside Line website. Lots of clips, quotes from Needham and other principals, and behind-the-scenes anecdotes. Definitely worth a read.
THE COOLEST SMOKEY REVIEW EVER: Check out this hilarious appreciation of Smokey and the Bandit by a clever Austrian dude.
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We’ve heard a lot in the last few years about how American films now need to appeal to a broad international audience, and so they must tone down their American patriotism and values. The Austrian guy narrating the above video is a walking advertisement for the other point of view: that an America secure in its image is far more attractive to international audiences than the reverse.
The video is around ten minutes long, the narrator has all kinds of appreciation for and understanding of American culture, and it’s well worth watching until the end. Lots of laughs, and light-years better than what passes for film criticism on domestic TV these days. I especially enjoyed his takedown of those silly American Film Institute lists that come out each year.
BURT BUILDS A BANDIT: Netflix subscribers can rent a DVD containing a five-part miniseries from the cable reality show Celebrity Rides, wherein Burt Reynolds watches a modern car shop give his old Smokey and the Bandit SE Trans Am a hot update for the new millennium. Along the way he tells lots of fun, behind-the-scenes stories, such as learning that Alfred Hitchcock adored Smokey and the Bandit — his daughter told Reynolds that toward the end of his life he would watch it again and again and mutter “How did they do those things!”