Convoy

Sam Peckinpah's happy-go-lucky ode to the truckers on the road--a sunny, enjoyable picture.

The narrative goes a bit over the top in the second half, but it's after a large dose of the best kind of escapist good humour.

At its best, the film finds Peckinpah moving into a new poetry of non-violence, of movement associated with explicit, actualized harmony, but the director doesn’t trust himself, mistaking change of form for impersonal commercial stewardship.

One good thing B-grade trucker movies have is a quality we can call non-intellectual honesty. As a rule, they have no pretentions to do anything other than amuse the viewer. Peckinpah tries to do more and fails. [03 July 1978]

Sam Peckinpah’s Convoy starts out as Smokey and the Bandit, segues into either Moby Dick or Les Miserables, and ends in the usual script confusion and disarray, the whole stew peppered with the vulgar excess of random truck crashes and miscellaneous destruction.

When a director as gifted, personal and eccentric as Peckinpah makes a film as gaseous and ludicrous as this, the temptation is to laugh, but the spectacle of his continuing skid is a sad one. [10 July 1978, p.83]

Sam Peckinpah's Convoy is not merely a bad movie, but a terrible movie. Anyone can make a bad movie--only a misguided talent can manage to be terrible. [17 July 1978, p.44]