The trucking film genre is apparently vast, although I suspect a great deal of the canon (I use this term verrrry loosely) suffers from the ‘straight-to-late-night-television’ effect and remains largely unwatched today.

Last night I was doing some trucking research for my novel-in-progress when I came across an online reference to the 1975 song “Convoy” by C.W. McCall. I may be wrong, but I think my dad had this one on 7-inch vinyl.

“Convoy” was a piece of novelty genius, the kind you’d see marketed by K-Tel, and features some choice citizen band (CB) radio talk, a spoken word narrative and a rousing chorus about “a li’l’ old convoy rocking through the night”.

The 1978 film Convoy (free to watch on the Internet Archive) was inspired by the events described in the song: namely, an ever-expanding group of truck drivers, led by one ‘Rubber Ducky’, embark on a protest convoy “across the USA”.

I had exceedingly low expectations of this movie. Given the attention span required to enjoy the original song is less than 250 seconds, I fully expected to hit the eject button on my virtual video recorder within a few minutes of the film’s opening.

However, I managed to make it through the whole 1:55:00, despite some obvious plot and continuity issues, dated stunts and sound effects, and a strong suspicion that this was not in fact a serious piece of art.

To be frank, it’s hard to believe Convoy ever made it to the big screen, although Wikipedia reliably informs me that the film “grossed $4 million in Japan in its first 9 days”, and earned a total of $45 million in North America alone. So there’s that.

Anyway, I enjoyed the improbability of the chemistry between a youngish Kris Kristofferson (who plays lead trucker Rubber Duck) and the smouldering Ali MacGraw, a photographer who might as well be Hejira-era Joni Mitchell.

I also appreciated the radical consciousness of including not one but two Black characters, including Madge Sinclair as a trucker named Widow Woman, and stand-up comic Franklyn Ajaye as Spider Mike.

In fact, one of the film’s most moving sequences occurs when Spider Mike leaves the convoy to attend the birth of his child but is captured and brutally bashed in a Texas police cell, then left there as ‘bait’ for the rest of the crew.

The convoy decision to free Mike by force anyway leads to a surprisingly political verbal showdown between Rubber Ducky and his antagonist, the slightly over-the-top Sheriff Lyle “Cottonmouth” Wallace (played by Ernest Borgnine).

There are, or course, the usual chase scenes, plenty of helicopter shots of the convoy, and an obligatory trashing of a truckers’ roadhouse after Wallace threatens to arrest Spider Mike on a trumped-up ‘vagrancy’ charge.

In between, we get some almost touching insights into life on the road for the long-haul trucker, as well as glimpses of the grim underworld of American truckstops, including the reality of prostitution, drug use and police intimidation.

But my favourite scene of all involves a television reporter and film crew attempting to interview Kristoffersson/Rubber Duck (via portable CB radio) as he hurtles down an interstate in his ‘front-door’ 1977 Mack RS712LST.

It’s ridiculous but at the same time strangely comforting: the CB talk, the cross traffic, the sex in truck cabs, the 1970s police cars and hapless sheriffs all teleported me to the world of The Dukes of Hazzard, CHiPs and the rest.

As far as adaptations go, Convoy may not have had a great deal to work with but it certainly delivered exactly what the original song promised. And to misquote the charming but gruff C.W. MacCall’s chorus girls, “ain’t [that] a beautiful sight?”