After having trouble getting anyone in the industry to take it (or him) seriously, Needham reportedly passed his first-draft screenplay, allegedly written on memo pads, to his longtime friend Burt Reynolds, who deemed it to be the worst script that he had ever read. The film was the brainchild of Hal Needham, a top film stuntman who conceived of the project as a way to make his directorial debut. That’s simply not true-as dumb as it is, it does have a certain charm that helps move it along while (mostly) overlooking its shortcomings. That said, I would never refer to Smokey and the Bandit as a “guilty pleasure,” because that would suggest that I feel some degree of embarrassment over my admiration for it. On the other, it’s a film that’s entertained me mightily over the years and still does. On the one hand, the film is an undeniably puerile conglomeration of noisy car crashes and jokes that were on the retrograde side even back in the day.
I have spent the last hour or so trying to figure out a way into this piece commemorating the 45th anniversary of Smokey and the Bandit, a goofy exercise in hicksploitation that exceeded all expectations to become one of the biggest hits of 1977.
Hal Needham’s good-old-boy romp is still as silly and dumb and charming as it was nearly a half-century ago.
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