One of the great curiosities of late Twentieth Century American cinema was the monster success of THE CANNONBALL RUN in 1981. A lesser example of a no-longer-popular subgenre—the car chase comedy—with a cast of now dead and/or forgotten stars, humor that seems aimed at a six-year-old mentality and stunts that have long since become passe, it’s most interesting as a relic from a past era that was much different, and not necessarily better, than our current reality.
The pic’s basis was the Cannonball Baker Sea-To-Shining-Sea Memorial Trophy Dash, an underground, and illegal, car race that commenced in 1971 and concluded in ‘79. Its starting point was the Darien, CT based Lock, Stock and Barrel restaurant, and its finish line the Portofino Hotel in Redondo Beach, CA.
The event was enormously fascinating to Hollywood, and initially dramatized in the 1976 low budgeters THE GUMBALL RALLY, directed by Charles Bail, and CANNONBALL!, directed by Paul Bartel and co-scripted by future mega-producer Don Simpson. Of the two films the former is disposable fluff, while the dark and atmospheric CANNONBALL! is of some interest.
Following up his Roger Corman backed feature DEATH RACE 2000 (1975), Paul Bartel offered up desert settings (CANNONBALL! is supposed to have a cross-country scope yet was filmed almost entirely in Southern California) that are quite (unintentionally?) atmospheric. The ever-present sound of gusting wind fills the quiet scenes, and David Carradine (a returnee from DEATH RACE 2000) delivers a memorably brooding turn as what passes for a hero. Also featured are Bartel regular Mary Woronov, Gerrit Graham, Robert Carradine, Belinda Balaski and, in small roles, Bartel’s fellow Corman vets Allan Arkush, Jonathan Kaplan, Joe Dante and Martin Scorsese.
THE CANNONBALL RUN, released by 20th Century Fox, functioned as a rejoinder to CANNONBALL! in more ways than one. Bartel’s film was bankrolled in part by the Hong Kong based Shaw Brothers, whose chief rival was Golden Harvest—the major backer of THE CANNONBALL RUN. As with the rivalry overall, Golden Harvest won out quite handily, with THE CANNONBALL RUN grossing a cool $72 million ($250 in today’s dollars) on an $18 million budget, a far cry from CANNONBALL!’s $1.5 million haul, and the $4.5 million brought in by THE GUMBALL RALLY.
Burt Reynolds, Dom DeLuise
THE CANNONBALL RUN was put together by producer Albert S. Ruddy (1930-2024) and stuntman turned stunt coordinator turned director Hal Needham (1931-2013). With SMOKEY AND THE BANDIT, a 1977 comedy that pivoted on car chases and the charisma of its star, Needham’s longtime cohort Burt Reynolds (1936-2018), Needham scored a massive hit. He followed it in 1978 with the similarly oriented HOOPER, another Burt Reynolds vehicle, and in 1979 with THE VILLAIN, the TV movie DEATH CAR ON THE FREEWAY, SMOKEY AND THE BANDIT II in 1980 and two TV pilots.
With THE CANNONBALL RUN, Needham reportedly mined his actual experience in the 1979 Cannonball, which he claimed to have raced with Brock Yates, who was credited with writing the script. Their alleged mode of transportation: an ambulance, complete with a doctor in tow and Yates’ wife as a “patient,” which gave them an excuse to speed.
Sammy Davis Jr, Dean Martin
In the movie the ambulance is manned by Reynolds (who maintained, after headlining a string of car chase comedies, that he “wasn’t going to drive a car in a movie over 35mph” but had his mind changed by a $5 million salary), essaying his standard disaffected tough guy schtick, and Dom DeLuise as a misfit who doubles as a superhero named Captain Chaos (a plot point that’s every bit as imbecilic as it sounds). Needham’s longtime actor pal Jack Elam plays the along-for-the-ride goofball doctor and Reynolds’ then-GF Farrah Fawcett a kidnapped tree hugger (don’t ask) who assumes the role of patient. Also featured, in a cast that when listed in the opening credits was known to draw applause in movie theaters, are Dean Martin and Sammy Davis, Jr. as fake priests, Roger Moore as “himself” (i.e. a rich punk who closely resembles Roger Moore), Jamie Farr as a Sheik and an uncredited Valerie Perrine as a chesty cop.
Tara Buckman, Adrienne Barbeau
The film appears to have been conceived along the lines of HOOPER, which according to Needham offered “unlimited stunt opportunities…Because there didn’t have to be any continuity (the film) would have every stunt I could dream up.” This means a plethora of vehicular acrobatics, with cars crashing through windows and into swimming pools, and spinning out in a manner that in 1980 seemed quite spectacular (with a spinning police car featured quite prominently in the trailer), as well as a motorcyclist completing much the run on a single wheel and a plane landing in the middle of a street. There’s also a large-scale brawl, courtesy of a Peter Fonda led biker gang that takes on the cannonballers. Of course nobody gets seriously hurt in this fight, just as everyone somehow emerges unruffled from the many vehicular crashes.
Cannonbal Lamborghini
As with SMOKEY AND THE BANDIT and HOOPER, this is a film that revels in its perilously lightweight, just-for-fun aesthetic. That aesthetic extended behind the scenes, with Needham making sure to play up how much fun everyone had making the film via an end credits blooper reel (something Needham claims to have pioneered). As Adrienne Barbeau, playing one of a pair of jumpsuit-wearing, Lamborghini driving hotties (the other played by Needham’s then-GF Tara Buckman), said of the experience, “I was intent on creating a character—everybody else was just having a good time.”
One cast member who didn’t have an especially good time was Jackie Chan, contractually obligated to appear in the film (and its sequel) by Golden Harvest. Chan, a massive star in Asia, appeared with Michael Hui, Golden Harvest’s other major draw, in a tricked-out Subaru; Chan and Hui actually received top billing in Japan, where the film was a sizeable hit (although it bombed in their native Hong Kong). Chan described the on-set atmosphere as “Very Hollywood, in the bad sense of the word,” although he was admittedly inspired by the end credits blooper reel, which became a Chan movie staple.
Jackie Chan, Richard Kiel
Inevitably a sequel followed, in the form of the Warner Bros. distributed CANNONBALL RUN II (1984). By then, alas, Needham’s Midas touch had been tarnished irrevocably by two sizeable flops: the sci fi actioner MEGAFORCE (a summer of 1982 release that didn’t exactly match BLADE RUNNER, THE ROAD WARRIOR or E.T.: THE EXTRA-TERRESTRIAL) and the unfortunately monikered 1983 NASCAR comedy STROKER ACE (a title that became a popular 1980s schoolyard insult). CANNONBALL RUN II didn’t do much better, amassing an unimpressive $28 million gross against a $20 million budget.
That the usually unflappable Needham lost control of the project is evident in the bloated 108-minute runtime, a far cry from Needham’s standard 90 minutes. Here we get an unfocused slog that often forgets it’s a car chase movie; it takes 45 minutes for the race to get underway, and a great deal of that race is depicted via a cartoon, while the film doesn’t end so much as cut off with an unsatisfying and inconclusive freeze-frame.
A large part of the problem appears to have been the top heavy cast, which ate up a not-inconsiderable portion of the budget. Included are many of the actors from the first film (Reynolds, DeLuise, Farr, Elam, etc.), along with Shirley MacLaine, Marilu Henner, Jim Nabors (as a character named “Homer Lyle”), Richard “Jaws” Kiel, Telly Savalas, the orangutan from EVERY WHICH WAY BUT LOOSE (1978), Catherine Bach and, in his final appearance in a feature film, Frank Sinatra.
Needham claimed to have filmed a “meaningful scene alongside the road” with Reynolds and MacLaine, all the while assuring his crew that said scene was “never gonna be in the goddamned film anyway.” A similar treatment could have stood to be applied to the rest of the cast (particularly Tim Conway and Don Knotts as goofball cops who have a painfully unfunny tete-a-tete with the primate) and the film as a whole.
If anything, CANNONBALL RUN II gave me a new appreciation for its predecessor, and that dynamic repeated itself with 1989’s non-Needham affiliated SPEED ZONE, which was initially titled CANNONBALL RUN III (and is known in some territories as CANNONBALL FEVER). When its distributor Orion Pictures was unable to get Burt Reynolds to return they renamed the film and presented it as a standalone comedy that had me missing CANNONBALL RUN II.
The sole returnee is Jamie Farr as the car racing Sheik. The rest of SPEED ZONE’s cast is filled out by John Candy as a nerd who somehow finds himself driving with a hot blonde (Donna Dixon), Peter Boyle as an overzealous police chief determined to put a permanent end to the race, Melody Anderson, Matt Frewer, Tim Matheson, Tom and Dick Smothers and, in a cameo, Alyssa Milano. If there were any laughs I missed them, and even the stunt work (the one area in which Hal Needham, for all his faults, could always be counted on to deliver) failed to make much of an impression, as the direction by Jim Drake (1944-2022), whose other credits include POLICE ACADEMY 4: CITIZENS ON PATROL (1987), is thoroughly lackluster.
Not that Hal Needham was doing too well himself. His final films as director included the BMX themed RAD, the WWE cash-in BODY SLAM (both 1986) and several made-for-TV SMOKEY AND THE BANDIT prequels, none of which attained a fraction of the success of his earlier films. Burt Reynolds likewise underwent a downturn in his career, which outside an Oscar nominated turn in BOOGIE NIGHTS (1997) never regained the momentum it once enjoyed. The tipping point for both men? THE CANNONBALL RUN, which marked a last hurrah before their fortunes went south, a not-inappropriate state of affairs given the film’s “qualities.”