Movies - Smokey and the Bandit

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	Movies - Smokey and the Bandit

Smokey and the Bandit was a 1977 movie starring Burt Reynolds, Sally Field, Jackie Gleason, Jerry Reed, Paul Williams, and Mike Henry. It is considered by many to be "the truck drivers movie" and would inspire several other trucking films including two sequels, Smokey and the Bandit II
, and Smokey and the Bandit Part 3
. Also, a television movie was loosely based on the film called Bandit. The three movies introduced three generations of the Pontiac Trans Am (unlike the television movie version, in which the other Bandit drives the Dodge Stealth R/T Twin Turbo). The film was the second highest grossing film of 1977, beaten only by Star Wars.

Most of the movie centers on Bo "Bandit" Darville (Reynolds) and his partner Cletus "Snowman" Snow (Reed), with his Basset Hound named Fred, taking a shipment of Coors beer from Texarkana, Texas to Atlanta, Georgia. (At the time Coors wasn't available in the eastern US; it was illegal to ship it east of Texas. It is worth noting that Texarkana, Texas lies in Bowie County, Texas, which is a dry county. Texarkana, Arkansas is "wet", but Coors could not be shipped east of Texas. There was no Coors in Texarkana; the closest Coors would have been found in the small Cass County, Texas comunity of Domino.) Coors being illegal, it was necessary for the Snowman to drive the semi full of beer, while the Bandit drove the "decoy" car, designed to take the attention of the police away from the truck and its illegal cargo. The term "Smokey" refers to the state troopers, whose hats are similar to those worn by park rangers and thus the character of Smokey the Bear -- state troopers also being known as "Bears," as in the truck-themed song Convoy.

The trucking duo were promised $80,000 (roughly $250,000 in 2006 dollars) from Big and Little Enos Burdett (Pat McCormick and Paul Williams) if they could make the run in 28 hours. Along the way, Bandit picks up Carrie (Field), whom he nicknames "Frog" because "you're always hopping around," and because he'd "like to jump like a frog," and finds himself being pursued by Sheriff Buford T. Justice (Gleason). Carrie had run away from her wedding to Justice's son, Junior, (Henry) and so the plot gets going when Buford is told Frog got into a Trans-Am.

The movie then depicts a high-speed chase, with Justice's police car steadily falling to pieces as he and a cast of many police in several states attempts to chase down and arrest Bandit and Snowman and retrieve his prospective daughter-in-law. Bandit and Snowman are greatly assisted by a number of colourful characters met along the way, many of whom they contact through CB radio.

Television censorship

When Smokey and the Bandit first aired on American network television in the early 1980s, censors were faced with the challenge of toning down the raw language of the original film. For this purpose, they overdubbed dialogue deemed offensive, which was (and remains) common practice. Unfortunately, the original actors were unavailable, therefore substitutes were used. In the case of Jackie Gleason's character, a voice actor with a noticeably higher voice was used and in some scenes in both this film and the TV version of Part II, a considerable amount of Gleason's dialogue was re-recorded by this uncredited actor. The most noted change made for network broadcast was the replacing of Buford's often-spoken phrase "sumbitch" (a contraction of "son-of-a-bitch"; usually in reference to the Bandit) with the nonsense phrase "scum bum". This phrase achieved a level of popularity with children. The TV prints of the first two Bandit films are still shown regularly on television, although a few TV stations aired the unedited version in recent years.

It is believed the uncredited voice actor is Henry Corden, who is best known for doing the voice of Fred Flintstone in the 1970s and 1980s.

At one point in the film, Sheriff Justice tells his son, "There is no way that you could have come from my loins. When we get back home, the first thing I'm gonna do is punch your mama in the mouth!" In other words, somebody that dumb couldn't be his son, therefore his wife was cheating on him. In the TV version, the line is changed to "...from my genes." But while the sexual reference was changed, the censors chose to leave the Sheriff's confession of intent to commit spousal abuse in the movie.

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Movies - Smokey and the Bandit

Television censorship

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