High-Ballin'

Better head for Rosie's Truck Stop Diner and order a king size stack of flapjacks! That'll give you a higher burst of energy than losing it from watching HIGH BALLIN'. It's got the right ingredients for a 70s trucker movie including some colorful comedy and a C&W music score with Jerry Reed singing the theme song. To my dismay, it has a terrible amount of substandard action. Few cars on the loose and big explosions do not help. A slippery snow setting makes this tough to get the best results out of a simple little basic chase film that carelessly becomes your simple little basic "Save me!" film. The climax is so nearly desperate that one will have in mind how mixed the entertainment gets. "Pickup" is a very appealing character at first, but she later starts going into an emotionally nervous and frightening breakdown, which brings to mind the harsh violence that can't control itself towards the end. The word "confusing" best describes the movie in general. There hasn't been any trucker films recently, but HIGH BALLIN' may show you its greatest weakness: how not to adapt as a well thought out action film. Just leave the tip.

If you think you might be getting into a jovial SMOKEY AND THE BANDIT type film thanks to HIGH-BALLIN's ad art, think again. What the film delivers is a dark, moody piece set in snowy Canada that doesn't seem to know what direction it exactly wants to go in. Reed plays Duke, an independent trucker who just happens to be next on the list of a bunch of local truck hijackers. Fonda is Rane, an old trucking buddy come to visit for a spell and ends up helping Duke take on the hijackers. Is it supposed to be a comedy? Well, there are some funny moments. Hard ass action flick? Well, there are some cool stunts. Romantic drama? Well, yeah, there are some tender moments. For some reason though, there is that aforementioned dark tone that somehow squeezes out any ounce of humanity and replaces it with an ominous aura that lays itself out on the characters and the landscape. Maybe it's 1970's Canada, as I got the same feeling watching Cronenberg's FAST COMPANY. It may sound as if I don't like this film but I do. It's different and odd, especially for it's genre. Definitely worth a look.

Peter Fonda is best known for his turn as Wyatt in 1969's Easy Rider. In that film he rides an iconic "Captain America" chopper, a customized Harley-Davidson Panhead from the 1950s with a stars and stripes paint scheme. It is a beautiful bike. In this film Fonda enters during the opening credits on a dreary day with a helmet on his head riding a very compact, vintage Indian Sport Scout. I think that director Peter Carter's contrast was intentional.

Duke Boykin (Jerry Reed) runs a trucking business. As the credits end, Rane pulls into a truck stop and meets up with Duke who is having a problem with his trucks getting hijacked by a group of thugs who use the guise of a stranded woman on the road to get the trucks to stop. Rane used to drive for Duke. Now Duke wants to get Rane back in a rig to help fight off these thieves.

One night after getting Duke to go home and sleep off his time at the bar, he notices a woman who was at the truck stop the day before. He finds out that Pick-up (Helen Shaver) is not a name for what he thinks it might be. Truckers pick up loads, and that is why she calls herself Pick-up. Rane and Duke pick up a load of stock cars and head for Green Bay (where I live). They pick up Duke's kid Tanker (Chris Langevin), who begged to go along for the ride. Duke says he just couldn't say no to the kid. (Sorry, Wisconsinites. No shots of Green Bay here. This whole film was shot in Ontario).

While navigating their trip they come across a detour that is not legit. The road they get detoured onto has a bridge that is too low for their load. Although they find a way to get past the bridge, they still end up being confronted by those thugs. A chase ensues. They get Pick-up on the CB. Rane gets creative as these thugs fire at them. This provides for a very entertaining chase scene, which includes fun performances from Reed and Fonda. I won't tell you how it ends, but Rane gets explosively creative. Of course, they will not get rid of these pests without some assistance from Pick-up.

How will Duke's business survive? He can't keep his farm at this rate. Rane has an idea. Roll a high one. All they need is a pitcher and a catcher. I'm not going to explain what that means, but it sets up the second half of the movie. I will say that it has something to do with running liquor. High-Ballin' is trucking term for making good time on the road. And you will have a great time watching this movie as its 99 minutes flies by. This movie beat the more successful trucking movie Convoy to the box office by a few weeks, which may have derailed its financial success a bit.

Peter Fonda and Jerry Reed make a great team in this well-made Canadian-filmed action flick, which is very much of it's era. Made during the height of the time (late-70s) when movies about 18-wheelers and CB radios were all the rage (you may remember Reed from another HUGE hit of that time, "Smokey & The Bandit"), "High-Ballin'" plays alot like a modern-day western, with Fonda riding into town after an extended absence to help his buddy and former road partner Reed, an independent trucker, take on hijackers who are trying to run him and other independents out of business and into work for a local trucking kingpin.

There's nothing too fancy about the straight-forward story, but there's excellent camraderie between Fonda and Reed, as well as good supporting work from Helen Shaver as a saucy female trucker/groupie, and Harvey Jason as the chief henchman of the trucking company kingpin, King Carroll. It was also interesting to see Carroll played as a man who, while playing a not entirely honest hand, doesn't necessarily want to resort to violence in trying to achieve his means. There are several impressively staged action sequences along the way, as well as some nice cinematography showcasing the snowy Canadian locations. Director Peter Carter keeps everything moving at an interesting clip.

"High-Ballin'" is no masterpiece for the ages, but it's an entertaining time-killer and definitely a movie of it's time.

Having spawned an entire exploitation subgenera of outlaw biker films with his excellent "Easy Rider," could Peter Fonda do the same for movies about eighteen wheels of justice? "High-Ballin'" actually beat "Convoy" by one month on it's release date for being the first movie action movie about truckers (although "Smokey and the Bandit" came out the year before), but it's a pretty silly inconsequential hixploitation flick, and Jerry Reed is really the main character here. Reed and Fonda have to fight off a bunch of trucker thugs hired by a local crime boss who wants to put independent truckers like them out of business. Helen Shaver and Michael Ironside, in his first named-character role (he plays Butch), also appear in the film. Overall, I enjoyed this dumb movie and so will others if you're a fan fo hixploitation/rednexploitation type of films (think good ol' boys fighting one another ALA "Gator" or "Walking Tall"), even if it's pretty routine and nothing all that memorable. "Smokey," "Convoy," and "White Line Fever" are all still better trucker films, but I was entertained by "High-Ballin'."