Primeau also passed my query on to a couple of his academic colleagues. In traditional road books this probably parallels the move from the Whitmanesque through kerouac and Blue Highways to the parody of Harrison’s Good Day to Die or Jim Dodge’s Not Fade Away to the road as a place where robbers, criminals and rapists lurk.” “No doubt there has been a slow but progressive shift away from the trucker as hero (with perhaps a very idealized, mythis meaning operating) to trucker as sinister, dangerous and all. I wrote to Ronald Primeau, author of Romance of the Road, to examine this shift and he agreed with me. #Rose marie hero mounty movie#But the truckers in the movie are all bad dudes. The heroes of this movie are Randy Travis (not a trucker and only along for the ride, an undercover FBI agent who gets killed in the process, and Swayze who, we are told, has given up trucking). Freightliners and Internationals are no match for Swayze’s Peterbilt and driving skills. Swayze’s Peterbilt (powered by a CAT engine, he tells us), pushes a truck up a hill when the bad guys try to box him in. The film has some spectacular stunts involving trucks. Meanwhile, the corrupt shipper of the load (played by singer Meatloaf) is attempting to hijack his own load. Swayze tries to quit the job after he discovers what’s in the cargo but his boss kidnaps his wife and daughter to get him to comply. He gets a job as a truck mechanic but he’s coerced into hauling a load of guns from Georgia to NYC. Swayze is a former trucker who had been released from jail after serving a term for vehicular manslaughter after falling asleep on the road. Black Dog, starring Patrck Swayze (1998), is a case in point. If anything, the media has latched on to negative stereotypes about the profession. Truckers are no longer heroes in the movies. Even Clint Eastwood as trucker got into the fray by teaming up with an orangutan to battle evil-doers in the industry (that man broke all the rules).īut somewhere along the way the blush went off the rose. In Convoy, Kris Kristofferson and Ali McGraw faced off against more corrupt police (the antagonist is Ernest Borgnine as chief county-mounty and he has the National Guard on his side) but this time they had help from a convoy of fellow truckers. Smokey and the Bandit pitted Burt Reynolds and Sally Fields against Jackie Gleason who played the local yokel sheriff. He also has to make a stand against law enforcement officials who are in the back pocket of the baddies. #Rose marie hero mounty drivers#White Line Fever starred Jan-Michael Vincent as Carroll Joe Hummer, an independent and unsullied owner operator who returns from Vietnam and then has to battle against a corrupt long haul industry that expects drivers to haul contraband and work long hours. #Rose marie hero mounty series#The CB radio craze was followed by a spate of Hollywood films and TV series (Movin’ On, BJ and the Bear) that portrayed truckers as good guy heroes who worked hard and fought for what was right and fair, often against unscrupulous trucking magnates and sycophantic cops. Things have changed a lot since the mid-70s when truck drivers were viewed as heroic figures.
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