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Struggle of the independent artisan, "owner-operated, gotta operate to own." The Air Force vet (Jan-Michael Vincent) comes home, bride (Kay Lenz) and semi-truck are his loves, free enterprise is the dream along wide Arizona expanses. Contraband in manure crates is the corrupt new way announced by the shipping manager (Slim Pickens), the chiseled naïf protests and gets blacklisted and busted ribs for his trouble. The vertical hierarchy imposed on horizontal terrain has a name, "Glass House," the skunk atop the pile (Don Porter) and his sleazy enforcer (L.Q. Jones) are joined in the jacuzzi by the local prosecutor (R.G. Armstrong) to ponder proletarian unrest. "What's all this, some kind of rigger's revolution?" A ripping diesel Western along the lines of Walsh's They Drive by Night, realized with a feeling for blue-collar wrath and a multiplicity of muscular setups. The hero is pulled over by a crooked patrolman and Jonathan Kaplan combines an ascending crane with a swift zoom to reveal the arrival of a carload of goons, later he peppers a chase with a dolly-zoom on the jumbos barreling down the highway like nothing so much as Demuth's I Saw the Figure 5 in Gold. The camerawork is propulsive and alive to contrasts (the clattering grays of the cannery where the wife toils versus the fat cat's yellow golf cart on vast manicured greens), with a glimpse of Monument Valley covered in snow to refresh the eye. It builds to the fantasy catharsis of the underdog rig crashing through the giant corporate logo, and a closing note of Capra among "fellow shit-kickers." "Pretty soon every trucker's gonna start believing in a goddamn union!" Peckinpah's Convoy floors the populist pedal. With Sam Laws, Johnny Ray McGhee, Leigh French, Dick Miller, and Martin Kove.
--- Fernando F. Croce |