The Cannonball Run (film)
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| Cannonball Run | |
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| Directed by | Hal Needham |
| Written by | Brock Yates |
| Starring | Burt Reynolds Dom DeLuise |
| Distributed by | Twentieth Century Fox |
| Release date(s) | June 19, 1981 |
| Running time | 95 min |
| Language | English |
| IMDb profile | |
The Cannonball Run is a campy, slapstick comedy movie released in 1981 that starred Burt Reynolds, Roger Moore, Dom DeLuise and Farrah Fawcett. Hal Needham was the director and had an uncredited role as an emergency medical technician. The premise is very similar to the earlier Cannonball and The Gumball Rally (both 1976). It also has two sequels, 1984's Cannonball Run II and 1989's far less well known and less successful Speed Zone! (also known as Cannonball Fever).
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[edit] Plot details
[edit] The Basis
Reynolds and DeLuise play has-been race car driver "J.J. McClure" and his mild-mannered mechanic "Victor Prinzi" (with a superhero alter ego, "Captain Chaos") who run the Cannonball in an ambulance, a heavily modified Dodge Tradesman van which was actually used in the original running of the Cannonball. In an attempt to appear legitimate to law enforcement, Victor hires "Doctor Nikolas Van Helsing," an inebriated physician of questionable skill played by Jack Elam. They kidnap attractive young photographer "Pamela Glover" (Farrah Fawcett) nicknamed "Beauty" to be their "patient." Though Beauty protests her apprehension at first, she eventually comes around to the idea of being a participant in the race.
The movie is loosely based on the Cannonball Baker Sea-To-Shining-Sea Memorial Trophy Dash, an actual cross-country rally from the Red Ball Garage in New York City to the pier at Redondo Beach, California organized by automotive journalist Brock Yates.
[edit] The Race
The actual race itself does not begin until roughly halfway through the movie. It begins in Connecticut, where each competitor lines up to take a ticket which will indicate the time that it was taken, which at the end of the race will be put through a slot which would record the time.
Shortly into the race, the Lamborghini Babes get pulled over for going at the impressive speed of 160 mph (250 km/h) on the Connecticut Turnpike. However, they use their sex appeal on the male cop to be let free. Additionally, the Japanese team and their computerized Subaru turn off the lights of their car, and with a silenced engine are completely invisible, as they travel with night vision goggles at 120 mph. In New Jersey, the ambulance is pulled over for speeding (120 mph) despite having emergency-signaling flashing lights. However, with proper excuses of saying the patient cannot be flown they are let free.
Meanwhile, the businessman Mr. Foyt gets left behind from the ambulance, and in light of it makes an attempt to stop the race. Doing so, he ends up at an airport where he is locked in a telephone booth by a van before narrowly escaping. Later in the race, in Missouri, the Preacher in his Ferrari devises a plan to get the ambulance in trouble by pretending to give a blessing. After much negotiation the ambulance driver approves it, and the so-called "blessing is given" while one of the tires gets popped. The ambulance later gets its revenge by luring a cop to pull over the preachers in their red Ferrari for supposedly causing someone to end up in the ambulance for "flashing".
A short time later, Mr. Foyt establishes his roadblock in an attempt to stop the race. However, the racers all manage to get around, with the Ambulance devising a particular plan by getting a rig to carry it through while it is covered up in green tarp. The roadblock also fails when Mr. Foyt accidentally puts the van in gear, and causes a police car and itself to be blown up.
Getting into the desert west, the Japanese team is misled by their computer technology, which indicates they are in Santa Fe, New Mexico while really entering El Paso, Texas. Then, an array of traffic stops occurs, first being Roger Moore and his Aston-Martin. However, he circumvents the ordeal by sending a wave of smoke at the police car followed by an oil slick, causing it to spin off the road. Next, the Lamborghini Babes get pulled over again but are let off again. Eventually they encounter a female cop and finally get a ticket. The Sheik is pulled over for 230 km/h (140 mph), and gladly signs the ticket despite its vast worth. He then drives away and continues speeding, eventually pulling into a Mexican restaurant to pick up an order that he made by phone. Lastly, the GMC truck is attempted to be pulled over, but its driver claims how he doesn't have any brakes, and is nontheless allowed to continue. However, they soon find out that they really don't have brakes, and wind up jumping over the train tracks and train ahead.
Late in the movie (in the desert of southeast California), the entire racing body is stopped after they come to a dead-end in the road, which is only soon to be replaced. During this time Jackie Chan gets involved in a karate-style fight and his partner nearly leaves him behind after the road re-opens.
The end scene shows virtually everyone in a neck and neck race for the finish. Just meters away from the end, the drivers abandon their cars and go on foot. Captain Chaos supposedly gets to the finish podium first, but fails to turn in his ticket to rescue a dog that's fallen into the water. The Lamborghini girls are declared winners, as one of them manages to take advantage of the Captain's distracted state, and "clocks in".
[edit] Cast
Cannonball Run had its share of stars. Among them:
- Dean Martin and Sammy Davis, Jr. respectively as aging and perpetually inebriated ex-Formula One driver "Jamie Blake" and Las Vegas gambler "Morris Fenderbaum" who run the race in a Ferrari while disguised as Catholic priests. Jimmy "The Greek" Snyder played their bookie.
- George Furth played "Arthur J. Foyt." Despite sharing a name with racing legend A. J. Foyt, Foyt is an anti-automobile fanatic who tries to have the race stopped. Instead, he winds up in a number of hilarious predicaments. No one seems to remember his name at first, and are usually reminded a second later ("Mr., Uh..." "Foyt!")
- Roger Moore played "Seymour Goldfarb, Jr." as a self-parody of his role as James Bond. Goldfarb is a character who thinks he's Roger Moore and who therefore stylizes himself as James Bond. His car is an Aston Martin DB5 like the one in the original Bond films. Molly Picon portrayed his mother, who referred to her son "as if he were some goy movie star named Roger Moore". Also, one of the many women that rode with him in the car mistook him for George Hamilton.
- Jackie Chan played the driver of the Japanese entry, a Subaru that was constantly getting lost despite all the high-tech gadgetry aboard. Michael Hui played the Japanese engineer and navigator.
- Jamie Farr appeared as "Shiek Abdul ben Falafel," a wealthy Arab determined to win the race even if he has to buy it. Bianca Jagger makes a brief appearance as his sister. Farr's racer is a Rolls-Royce Silver Shadow. This character is the only one to appear in all three films in the Cannonball Run movie continuum.
- Terry Bradshaw and Mel Tillis are a couple of "good ol' boys" driving a thinly-disguised Chevrolet Malibu NASCAR stocker, one painted like Donnie Allison's NASCAR racer from 1979.
- Adrienne Barbeau and Tara Buckman appeared as "Marcie" and "Jill", Spandex-clad "hotties" in a black Lamborghini Countach. That same Lamborghini was used in the opening credits of the movie as it was being pursued (unsuccessfully) by a Nevada Highway Patrol car. Valerie Perrine has an uncredited role as a state trooper who successfully stops the duo later in the film (as the only female officer to pull over the duo, she was immune to their feminine wiles). (Though their character names were not mentioned during the story, they are mentioned in the end credits. Their character names, however, *are* mentioned in the sequel, though the parts were re-cast)
- Peter Fonda had a cameo role reprising his character in Easy Rider. The appearance of Fonda and his motorcycle gang during a halt in the race caused by a road closure was the perfect excuse to cut Chan loose in a kung-fu fight sequence.
- Bert Convy played wealthy but bored executive "Bradford Compton" who planned to run the Cannonball by motorcycle with the help of an old friend, "Shakey Finch" (played by Warren Berlinger), once the world's greatest cross-country motorcyclist. The two planned to disguise themselves as newlyweds, presumably to try and make themselves appear legitimate. However, his friend had gained a great deal of weight over the years forcing them to ride a "wheelie" all the way across the continent.
A "cult classic" today and fairly well-received by the public (but savaged by critics), Cannonball Run sparked a sequel, Cannonball Run 2 which reprised most of the original cast. It would also be Dean Martin's final film before his death.
The film continued director Hal Needham's tradition of showing bloopers during the closing credits (a practice he started with the Smokey and the Bandit films). Jackie Chan (who admitted he did Cannonball Run II to fulfill his contract with Warner Brothers) says it was this film that inspired him to do the same at the end of most of his movies.
[edit] Trivia
- A scene where the ambulance is stopped by law enforcement for speeding to California since the patient was "unable to fly" is based on an actual event.
- In this movie Jackie Chan tried to break into the American market once again, but failed. The mainstream Western market wasn't ready for Hong Kong action movies yet.
- Although the movie script describes Jackie Chan and Michael Hui as Japanese, they spoke Cantonese during the whole movie. The only time that we hear Japanese language is when the Japanese TV show presenter is interviewing these two characters.
- The opening sequence showing the famous 20th Century Fox logo was specially animated for the movie. It starts normally, but then an unseen crash takes out one of the spotlights and winds the fanfare music down. A rally racer zooms around the front of the logo and parks inside the "zero." A police cruiser then zooms around, crashing into two more spotlights in the process. The anthropomorphic rally racer peeks out from it hiding place, looks around, then beeps his amusement and laughs in Reynolds' high-pitched "trademark" laugh.
- The stop-motion animated series Robot Chicken once featured a segment parodying race movies called "3 Fast 3 Furious", in which Reynolds and DeLuise cameoed as the voices for look-alike characters in a nod to their Cannonball Run roles. The episode specifically parodied Cannonball Run director Hal Needham's trademark of running a blooper reel alongside ending credits; in this case, the bloopers were animated clips set to multiple takes of DeLuise flubbing one of his lines.
- Dom DeLuise's character, Victor Prinzi, is named after Vic Prinzi, a friend and former college football teammate of Burt Reynolds at Florida State University.
- The movie contains several references to one of Burt Reynolds other hits, Smokey and the Bandit also directed by Hal Needham. In one scene, Reynolds, when trying to decide on a form of transport, considers that they "...could get a black Trans-Am", before deciding that "...nah, that's been done". Also, one of the racers is driving a black Trans Am and is wearing the "Bandit" jacket that Burt Reynolds wore in Smokey and the Bandit II, which also co-starred Dom DeLuise.
- Scriptwriter Brock Yates (who also played the role of the organizer stating the rules of the race right before it started) originally had Steve McQueen in mind for the lead role of JJ McClure, but he died right before the movie began production, so Burt Reynolds was chosen instead.
- With the many James Bond references, and Roger Moore driving a silver Aston Martin, it is reported that Moore was subsequently forced to sign an agreement to prevent him ever making such Bond references in a non-Bond film.
