Weeks ago, the cinephiles at Demaras Racing dug into the VHS vault to watch ‘Cannonball!‘ and ‘The Gumball Rally‘ from 1976, plus ‘The Cannonball Run‘ from five years later. The question was simple: what happened in the mid-1970s that inspired so many anti-regulation, anti-55-MPH road movies? And why, by 1981, had all that anger turned from rebelious movies into a comedy?
The original Cannonball Baker Sea-to-Shining-Sea Memorial Trophy Dash was not invented by Hollywood. Automotive journalist Brock Yates created the real cross-country outlaw race from New York to California while writing for magazine Car and Driver. The race celebrated America’s interstate highway system and challenged the notion that capable drivers had to crawl across the country under increasingly restrictive laws.
Freedom-loving motorists became increasingly angry in the ’70s as fuel-shortages killed the romance of the road trip, and mandatory catalytic-converters choked power from V8 engines. While ‘Cannonball!‘ and ‘The Gumball Rally‘ railed against the government, by the time Burt Reynolds appeared in this third film, the anger was gone. It was as though the public had accepted this sad new reality, and Hollywood had taken a once-political flashpoint and turned it into a comedy.
But this is not a movie about a bunch of actors standing around telling jokes—no ‘The Cannonball Run‘ is an ensemble cast of the coolest cars of the era.
The cars are the stars.
Burt Reynolds and his sidekick enter a heavily modified Dodge Tradesman van disguised as an ambulance. Their strategy is wonderfully crooked: emergency vehicles can speed, ignore traffic and scatter everyone ahead of them. All they need is a questionable doctor and a convincing patient to complete the illusion. It is less a racing machine than a rolling loophole.
In the film, Adrienne Barbeau and her blonde accomplice drive an iconic black Lamborghini Countach LP400 S. They’re more than eye-candy—they’re smart! Knowing every cop that pulls them over will fall in love at first sight with them, the ladies keep their licenses snugly in their bras. When the red and blue lights appear in the rear view, they unzip their body suits. By the time there’s a cop at the driver’s window, the girls are revealing more cleavage than the average male can handle!
Roger Moore plays a rich eccentric pretending to be Roger Moore pretending to be James Bond, but the real co-star is his right-hand-drive Aston Martin DB5. It arrives loaded with smoke screens, oil slicks and other secret-agent toys, turning the Cannonball into a Bond chase that somehow escaped onto an American interstate. Watch carefully and you’ll notice that there’s a different woman in his passenger’s seat in each scene.
Then there is the 1976 Chevrolet Chevelle Laguna S-3. It looks like a battered car in grey-primer, but it’s actually a NASCAR stock car. As the primer wears away, the race car livery shows through, revealing their trick. Its crew loads cases of Budweiser into the back before crossing the continent, making beer look like race fuel, ballast and survival equipment all at once.
The Japanese entry is even better: a 1980 Subaru DL 4WD hatchback, called a Leone in Japan, essentially the grandfather of today’s WRX. Driven by Jackie Chan, the Subie has an onboard computer, futuristic navigation, infrared night vision and a rocket booster. In 1981, the film imagined tomorrow’s rally-bred technological weapon as a humble Subaru hatchback with a space program. Forty-five years later, it still feels like somebody looked at a Subaru brochure and thought, “Needs more NASA.”
For viewers who’ve started collecting their pension, the movie includes familiar old-time crooners from the Rat Pack, Dean Martin and Sammy Davis Jr.—prototypes for the tuxedoed Michael Bublé. They’re competing in a red Ferrari 308 GTS while dressed as Catholic priests. The disguise is absurd, the Ferrari is impossible to overlook, and that contradiction is the entire joke.
That is the detour taken by ‘The Cannonball Run‘. While David Carradine in ‘Cannonball!‘ was angry, and all the characters in ‘The Gumball Rally‘ were rebellious, by 1981 that same outlaw race was being represented like a Saturday morning cartoon with a parade of ambulances, stock cars, gadget cars and a rocket-powered Subaru.
Did famed stuntman-turned-director Hal Needham and Hollywood sell out? Maybe. The grit went glitter, the protest gained Budweiser and Dr Pepper sponsorship, and the revolution became a party. Yet forty-five years later, ‘The Cannonball Run‘ remains enormously entertaining because it never pretends to be ‘Cannonball!‘ or ‘The Gumball Rally‘. The rebellion was sugar-coated, but it was still one hell of a ride.