Word: cb
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...open road, down which escape always seems possible, has become a featureless eight-lane interstate, with a Smokey Bear lurking at every cloverleaf. For those people, fantasies of the free life live on in country music, which shamelessly romanticizes the road, and its Truckey cowboys in the CB subculture, with its arcane patois, so useful in frustrating authority figures like the highway patrol...
...players: Bob Rizzo (QB), John Spagnola (34-catch SE), John Pagliaro (987-yard TB), Rick Angelone (FB), Bill Crowley (LB), Paul Denza and Bob Skoronski (DTs), Kurt Nondorf (CB). LAMBERT TROPHY 1. Colgate (8-0) 66 1/2 pts. 2. Penn State (8-1) 651/2 3. Pitt (7-1-1) 57 5. Yale (6-2) 49 6. Brown (6-2) 37 7. Army (6-3) 28 8. B.C. (5-3) 27 9. Rutgers (6-3) 19 10. Dartmouth (6-2) 15 Harvard...
...handle" in CB parlance is the name by which a broadcaster identifies himself on the air, and what the movie seems to be saying is that one should use some care in picking it. There is a tendency to act out, first in fantasy, then in reality, the sort of life suggested by one's handle. In effect, a CB rig offers a form of power to the powerless of our society, a way for them to make themselves heard in a world that does not pay them much heed. This is what has become of the Middle Americans...
...especially true of the family whose story forms the core of the film. There is an old man (Roberts Blossom), a senile mumbler who springs to youthful life when he is gossiping with truckers; his caretaker son (Paul Le Mat) who sets himself up as a kind of CB vigilante, policing those who abuse CB privileges; an athletic-coach brother (Bruce McGill) who hates both of them and anonymously threatens vengeance on them; a schoolteacher (Candy Clark) who has had it off with both of them, but who turns out to be the aforementioned dirty talker and is sexually alive...
...film's chief flaw is that it veers suddenly from the grim direction in which it seemed to be heading and brings all the CBers together in a reconciliatory effort to rescue the old man. The sequence is an obvious effort to regain the sympathy of the CB audience, showing them as socially useful citizens, but they?and everyone else?will have long since discerned the movie's true view of their world. The question is whether the rest of the world will care enough about this milieu to become good buddies with a curious and very original movie. -Richard...