burt reynolds smokey and the bandit clip

That it wasn’t probably has something to do with that fact that its director Hal Needham was not an experienced filmmaker, but a Hollywood stuntman. Smokey and the Bandit should have been a dumb, right-wing movie. Junior Johnson runnin’ thru the woods of CarolineĮven Burt Reynolds in that black Trans-AmĪll gonna meet down at the Cadillac Ranch Back in 1977, building the biggest, fastest muscle car you could afford with the most powerful, gas guzzling engine you could fit under the hood was an act of rebellion. There’s a lot of denial out there about global warming. These days, all you have to do is go to your local newspaper’s website, and look at the comments under the latest weather report. Just as in 2016, a lot of people in what would later become known as “red America” weren’t quite willing to accept reality. Where only a few years before we had listened to President Kennedy tell us that we could go to the Moon, we had now resigned ourselves to watching President Carter put on a sweater and tell us to lower our thermostats. GTOs, Mustangs, and tail-fin Cadillacs had become Ford Pintos and Chevy Vegas. That cheap gas, which everybody thought would go on forever, had come to an end. I’m sure that a good many Millennials have read about them, but I doubt very many know just how important the oil shocks were to the transformation of American culture. If there’s one thing that divides Gen Xers and Boomers from Millennials it’s the memory of the gas lines of the 1970s. In 2016 that probably involves some combination of global warming, the recognition that single payer healthcare will, in the words of Hillary Clinton, “never ever happen,” and the creeping realization that, however hard we fight it, sooner or later Wall Street is going to get our social security money. In 1977, however, in the form of Jimmy Carter, they limited themselves to suggesting that we lower our expectations, that we get used to the idea that our children might not have it as good as we did. In 1980, they would unite behind Ronald Reagan and ram “morning in America” down our throats. It would take them a few years go fully go on the offensive. An increasingly tolerant, liberal culture was dampened by a general sense of “economic anxiety.” The left had been crushed, but the establishment had not yet regained the confidence of the American people. Where Tony Manero and his thuggish friends in Brooklyn had taken all the fun out of sex, Bo “Bandit” Darville, Carrie the runaway bride, and Cledus “Snowman” Snow had rediscovered the joys of sticking it to the man.ġ977 was a lot like 2016. Smokey and the Bandit was a lot more optimistic. Saturday Night Fever, which was released a few months later, showed the dark side of a democratized sexual revolution. It’s a fascinating glimpse into the world of the late 1970s.

Smokey and the Bandit, which was the second highest grossing film in 1977, beaten out only by Star Wars, is not only a great “bad” movie. That’s Marching Through Georgia in that clip.

Burt reynolds smokey and the bandit clip