Citizens Band

This quite funny but nevertheless deep film, along with the great 'Melvin and Howard' can be viewed as part of the ongoing saga of Paul Le Mat, the guy who played the hotrodding eternal teenager, John Milner, in 'American Graffiti.' Le Mat is perfect for these films because he embodies a uniquely American mixture of down to earth hipness, non-cynicism and hard edged goodwill. He is somewhere between Audie Murphy and Steve McQueen with some touches of Elvis and Jerry Lewis thrown in. Demme uses him as the springboard for his explorations of what's authentic and non-cynical in ordinary American life.

All the events in 'Citizen's Band' are connected by the CB radios all the characters use. This allows for events that happen to characters far apart from each other (such as the bigamist trucker and Le Mat), to become connected into the snapshot or slice of life that becomes the film. The characters don't have to necessarily all run into each other, even though some of them do. Oliver Stone's supercynical and ridiculous 'Talk Radio' features a similar set-up. In fact, there, we never actually have to meet any of the on-air personalities.

Demme uses an Altman type setup to show how vast an area of 'craziness' the term 'normal people' covers and how all this can be non-cynical in nature at least as often as it is cynical.

Another example of a movie featuring independent stories that find a connecting point, "Handle With Care" (or "Citizens Band") puts its own twist on the genre by having the stories connect through the use of CB radios by the main characters.

As with almost any movie of this type, some of the stories are better than others. The story featuring "Spider" (Paul Le Mat) as a sort of CB super-hero who makes sure that people don't abuse the airwaves was a bit silly, and reminded me a lot of the old '70's TV series "Emergency," combined with a bit of "Batman" - without the costume. Like the paramedics of "Emergency" kept responding to largely unrelated emergencies with at best only a loose thread holding every episode together, Spider similarly dealt with an injured trucker (Charles Napier) and a pilot forced to crashland on a highway, and - like the Caped Crusader without the cape - he took on a boy who used the radio for underhanded purposes, a neo-Nazi who spread hatred and a radical Catholic priest who was trying to convert listeners. The best story was of that rescued trucker, who turns out to be a bigamist and who has to deal with both wives coming to see if he's OK. That story was also responsible for most of the humour in the movie, and was, I thought quite well done. Spider's dysfunctional family, and the sexual CB fantasies of "Warlock" and "Electra" were other connecting stories.

It was an inconsistent movie - some stories were very good and very funny, some were quite dull to be honest. It's worth no more than a 5, but in fairness it's a 5 that's worth watching.

Paul Le Mat lives in the small town Union, Nebraska in a kind of junkyard owned by his dad Roberts Blossom. He operates a CB citizens rescue service that helps motorists in need, and he's becoming increasingly annoyed with CB users who are breaking the rules ... cluttering channels with nonsense and refusing to give up channels in the case of emergencies. He sets out to track them all down and put them out of commission.

Blossoms is a retired trucker, who disconnected and drinks heavily, but tends to come to life when talking to his old friends on the CB. Le Mat had been dating Candy Clark, but she left him due to his resistance to moving away from Blossoms. He commits to moving out and tries to get back with her, not realizing that she has been secretly dating the local high school coach Bruce McGill ... Le Mat's brother.

Meanwhile, trucker Charles Napier crashes his truck outside of town and has to camp out in Union while he heals and his truck is getting fixed. He calls his wives ... one in Dallas and one in Portland (Ann Wedgeworth and Marcia Rodd) ... to tell them he'll be laid up for a while. Unfortunately, both come to town to see him and become aware of each others' existence.

Jonathan Demme's first studio film bears some resemblance to a Roger Corman outing. It's not wildly different in tone from one of Corman's car chase comedies like Ron Howard's "Grand Theft Auto" (released the same year) and it has a definite exploitation element with it's tapping into the CB radio craze.

It's ultimately not much like a Corman film, and it really points in the direction his career will be heading. The sprawling, character rich script by Paul Brickman (who will go on to write and direct "Risky Business") plays a bit like a Robert Altman film with the misanthropic streak replaced by a deep humanism. The "bad guys" in this film ... Harry Northrup's neo-Nazi, Ed Begley, Jr.'s radio preacher, McGill's deeply jealous brother ... are all redeemed to some degree by the film's end, and it ultimately feels like a statement about how maybe we all can just get along. Even the Napier bigamy plotline is resolved in a surprising way with the help of Napier's prostitute friend Alix Elias (to whom the film takes an equally nonjudgmental view of).

Given the CB craze's similarity to internet culture, it's interesting what a really positive stance this film ends up taking, with everyone's ability to adopt different identities being looked at them being allowed to become who they really are.

I still enjoy this movie even though some parts are slow and seem to drag on a bit. I really wish they would release it to Blu-Ray or DVD, I have a VHS copy but would prefer a DVD or Blu-ray copy. I did see it on Netflix a few months ago. When I watch this movie it brings back memories. I live in a very small town where there isn't much to do, back in the late 80's and 90's the only thing that interested me was getting on Citizens Band radio. I would always look forward to the weekends so I could get on my base station at home or get in my truck and drive around and talk for hours and hours. My friends and I would do the dumbest things on the radio like dead keying on channel 19 just to irritate everyone. We would use linear amplifiers with our base stations and mobile radios so it would be near impossible for anyone in the area to be heard. We did so many stupid things on the radio back then that it would take far too long to list everything. We would also track people down by using the signal strength meter on the mobile radio to find out where people were broadcasting from so we could get their home address if they were on a base station or find out what type of vehicle they were driving and write down their license plate number and make and model of their vehicle. Now days citizen band radio isn't very popular. I always wanted to see an updated version of this movie but I know it wouldn't be very popular now days. I guess the closest thing would be the movie Joy Ride (2001).

This here is a forgotten little movie about a small town that communicates less than amicably via CB radio. I don't say that it's a forgotten little gem, like it would've been expected of me to say after 'forgotten little' because it's not really a gem. That's not to say it doesn't attempt some interesting things, and occasionally succeeds. At the center of the story, I think, is a young guy who repairs said radios and volunteers with a monitoring organization and acts as a sort of community FCC, busting everyone's balls on the somewhat taboo things they talk to each other about on this sort of walkie-talkie sort of system. Everyone's anonymous, it's very rare that this stickler of a guy can deduce who is who when he hears them and objects, and what it makes me think of as a young guy myself, watching it on a library VHS in the year 2010, is an earlier, unofficial form of social networking that is ubiquitous nowdays. MySpace, Facebook. REACT International is like a poor Mormon in a room full of rich atheists now.

Citizens Band is interesting because it was made in 1977 and I'm watching it now. Other than that, it's decent, but nothing really pops out at me. I stand by my claim of an uncanny parallel between the abuse of a citizens-band radio and the online networks of the information age. Look at what these characters do! Calling themselves by monikers on the airwaves such as Chrome Angel, Dallas Angel, Papa Thermodyne, Hot Coffee. Isn't that what we did for years on MySpace before we got sick of it and gravitated toward Facebook and started using our real names? At its core though, Citizens Band, or Handle With Care, as it is known in a further edited version, is a B comedy about an assortment of deadpan screwballs. That's not bad at all. Don't get me wrong. It feels like an Altman film in ensemble, in situations, in the depiction of a fully realized world of people, and certain plot strands are kind of novel and fun for that reason, such as when two women meet on their way to the same town, and find out they have more than a lot in common. Demme never looks down on his working class characters, displaying instead a compassion and empathy. Even a polygamist trucker, our young protagonist who in this day and age would probably be written off as a McCarthy or Murdoch sort of oppressor, and even his controlling, competitive older brother.

Having seen Demme's later work, from the 1980s and his obvious crowning achievements later on, I suppose I expected more of his love of music as well, and there is very little. But who am I to criticize a filmmaker at the start of his career, making B films and exploitation films, trying to get started, feeling out his strong suits and his weak ones? The reasons why an above-par director could've made a sub-par film is often because he has yet to discover the sources of his passions, the key to his craftsmanship. Citizens Band is one of those sub-par films by one of those above-par directors. And don't miss Bruce McGill in his first film. That's right, pre-D Day!