I can’t give a good explanation as to why, but over the weekend I happened to see that the 1977 classic movie Smokey and the Bandit was on some streaming service, so I put it on. I haven’t watched this movie in, oh, decades. I remembered the Trans Am, Sally Field, lots of automotive destruction, and a general confusion about what the hell was actually going on. It’s not that it was such a complex plot, but I was confused about the general motivation, for reasons we’ll talk about in a moment. But more importantly, what I noticed was something so wildly unexpected and exciting that I knew I had to share it with you, and only you, my treasured confidants.
What I noticed was what has to be the least-expected car to appear in Smokey and the Bandit. Least expected as in if you asked me to make a list of the cars I’d expect to see just hanging out in the background of this movie, this one would be way, way at the bottom of the list.
To get a little more specific, such a list of The Cars I Least Expect To See In Smokey And The Bandit would have a few parameters, specifically they would all have to be cars that were actually sold in the US market prior to the release of the movie in 1977. So that means nothing like a ZAZ Zaporozhets 965 or a Gurgel X-10. But that list would have anything that was actually sold in the US in at least some semblance of an official capacity.
Oh, and just in case you forgot about what the ’70s were like, here’s an oddly long-seeming trailer for the movie:
The ’70s were a weird time. The nation really had a fascination with CB radios and trucking for a while there, and it seemed like that’s all we wanted to watch for our entertainment, maybe until Star Wars showed us the possibility of space trucking and holographic CBs.
Anyway, back to the least expected car I saw in the movie. It’s in the background here, behind Buford T. Justice’s head:
Dammit, Buford, put your hat back on and move your head out of the way!
There we go. See it there? Just to the left of that Chrysler Cordoba? Really, it’s between two Chryslers Cordoba and a Chevy Monte Carlo, all of which were wildly common cars in the 1970s. But not that car. It’s a Citroën SM.
A Citroën SM?! What the hell is a Citroën SM doing in some random parking lot in Georgia? The whole movie was shot in the cities of McDonough, Jonesboro and Lithonia, Georgia, none of which I’d really have pegged as big markets for Citroën’s Maserati-engined GT car, even for the two of those towns that are part of the Atlanta greater metro area. And yet there she sits, proud and comfortable between those American personal luxury coupés.
In a strange way, that SM is kind of among similar company, also being a large-ish two-door car with a relatively large engine and a plush interior.
You can tell this is an American-market SM by the lighting setup up front there; America-bound SMs (which were sold here between 1970 and 1973) had quad round sealed beams, with a glass area in between them in which the front license plate could be mounted, like an exhibit in a museum vitrine, safe under glass. Since Georgia doesn’t require a front plate, this owner has a pair of fog/driving lamps in there.
The US-market lighting setup, as you see above, was not nearly as cool as the one the rest of the world got, which featured six composite headlamps under glass, the inner pair of which turned with the steering wheel!
So much cooler. Oh, and if you were in the French home market, you’d get them in yellow!
I’m still just amazed at the odds of capturing a wild, free-roaming American-market SM on camera back then. Only 2,037 were sold in the US during the car’s life, so that’s not many at all. And while there are no records still existing, most SM clubs and people who give a damn about this kind of stuff suggest that most went to California, then New York/Northeast, then a distant third place to Florida, Midwest, and so on. So, yeah, a Georgia-based SM in 1976 or so is a rare thing to see.
Oh, before I forget, let’s get to the confusing part of the movie’s plot: it all hinges on a sort of wager made by some weird rich brothers who dress alike, where they want the Bandit to get a truckload of Coors beer from Texarkana, Texas to Atlanta, Georgia in 28 hours, and if he can pull it off he’ll get $80,000, which in modern money comes to about $450,000 or so.
Here’s the scene, if you’re curious:
Now, I never really knew what the hell the big deal was about selling Coors west of Texas or why it was considered bootlegging or why it was worth all that money to smuggle Coors eastbound. But it was a thing! The Air Force used to airlift freaking Coors to Washington, DC for Dwight Eisenhower! It was smuggled from Colorado to North Carolina on a weekly basis for a while!
The reason was that Coors was unpasteurized and would spoil if left unrefrigerated for about a week. This, plus the fact that it was really a regional product meant that it just wasn’t sold east of Texas, and while it wasn’t exactly illegal to have or drink in states east of Texas, it couldn’t legally be sold there. I’ll admit, I’m not entirely clear if transporting 400 cases of Coors without the intent to resell it was actually illegal, but the movie needed it to seem that way, so there would be a plot, thin as it was.
The point is, they needed a reason for Smokey to chase the Bandit in his Trans Am. Which, by the way, was a ’76 car specially fitted with the front end of the ’77, which switched to those quad rectangular headlights. They used four Trans Ams in the shooting, and trashed them all.
I’ve had Coors before. It’s fine? I don’t really get why one would go through such absurd efforts to get Coors when a properly cold Schlitz is not all that different, really, but I suppose maybe the pre-pasteurized version had some special sort of magic.
Who knows? I just wouldn’t want to spill one in that amazing and improbable Citroën SM.
UPDATE: Commenters have already noted that Burt Reynolds has spent time around Citroën SMs before, like driving one in this bonkers chase scene from 1974’s The Longest Yard:
Beer had very different tastes in the 70s. Strohs. Schlitz. et al. Once AB started to dominate, the others changed their recipes to taste like bud. See movie Beer Wars.
Ah, the lure of the hard to get beer! I lived in Mexico when Corona was the hot ticket in California but considered mediocre south of the border. What was the exotic foreign brew in Guadalajara? Budweiser!
There was an odd Burt Reynolds movie on streaming the other day that I had never seen or heard of. It was called Gator and it also had Jerry Reed. The movie seemed to swap car chase scenes for boat chase scenes in the bayou. I’m sure if they let this theme ride Burt would have been staging chase scenes in spaceships eventually.
Air boat!
Gator wasn’t a bad movie. There was also a halfway decent TV movie with Jerry Reed and Tom Selleck called The Concrete Cowboys. It was like Smokey and the Bandit mixed with Simon and Simon.
My local Drive in The Mahoning Drive in Theatre is showing Smokey and the Bandit on Friday in 35mm. I’ll have to check it out.
In the late 70’s my long distance truck driver neighbor would always come back with a sleeper cab load of Coors! He never had trouble off loading the beer.
Two sites that discuss the locations utilized in the filming of Smokey & The Bandit in Georgia.
https://grahmsguide.com/smokey-and-the-bandit-filming-locations/
http://www.atlantatimemachine.com/smokey/28.htm
Fact: Smokey & The Bandit is the greatest movie of the 20th Century!
Word
Casablanca would like a word with you…
Yeah, sometimes demographics can be weird as heck. Sometimes it’ll be partly because of military bases in the vicinity where people would import foreign cars back home after having been stationed overseas, partly because of colleges in the vicinity where professors just gravitated towards relatively oddball cars, or partly a combination of the above. My hometown, a college town in East Tennessee, didn’t really have military bases per se but it did have plenty of college professors, lol, plus it had an oddly substantial contingent of extremely wealthy people, some of who liked to collect cars of all stripes (like,in a recent comment elsewhere on the Autopian I mentioned how I’d seen Ford Durangos *plural* despite only a couple hundred or so having been made.)
So when I first saw The Longest Yard on TV in the late 70s I actually knew about the Citroën SM because I had already seen more than one SM just tootling around when I was growing up.
My dad was a college professor (of course he had a very early Volvo 145 station wagon, with the ribbon speedometer, which he drove for a good couple of decades; he bought it new years before yuppies ever discovered Volvos, lol) and he taught city planning where he would take pictures of cityscapes & infrastructures around our town and use them in slideshows in class. The pictures he took in the 60s & 70s are delightfully full of seriously cool assortments of cars from all over the world in the background (or foreground.) A notable example is a couple of pictures of some old office buildings & warehouses which shows a late 1950s Mercedes-Benz SL roadster just randomly parked in the street in the foreground. Alas, the pics do not have enough resolution/detail for determining whether it’s a 190 SL or a 300 SL. However, I do know of someone in the same town who has a Mercedes-Benz 600 (best known as the Grosser like what Jeremy Clarkson & all too many despots had) so it wouldn’t be outside the realm of possibility that the SL in the pictures is actually a 300 and not the cheapass budget 190…
I can’t imagine there were ever too many Citroens sold in Eastern Tennessee although Jim Clayton Motors in Knoxville sold them around 1960 but by 1962 they were no longer a Citroen dealer. Then around 1970 a dealer in Oak Ridge became a Citroen dealer, maybe the scientists around there appreciated Citroen engineering.
A few years ago I saw a 1971 Rover 3500S sitting on the front line of a used car dealer between Lenoir City and Maryville that was filled with cars from the 70s and 80s, it looked like a used car dealer that time forgot.
I recently rewatched this after many, many years, and genuinely enjoyed the absurd plot and characters and watching the malaise-era heaps plodding around in their “high speed” pursuit. It says something considering how advanced filming and automotive technology has gotten and people’s creativity in coming up with new and fantastic ways to choreograph car chases (and crashes) that “Smokey and the Bandit” is still so entertaining.
That said, I could watch it a thousand times and still not have seen that Citroen SM. Torchy, you win the Car Spotting Olympics.
Forever.
I thought the SM might be a producer or director’s ride, but that’s just a guess.
High school buddy moved from CA to MA to open a pool installation and maintenance company. Every year they’d go back for an enormous pool industry convention. On the return trip, they’d stop somewhere in the Midwest and load both vans with cases of Coors then bust it for home. We all got our orders in every year. That Coors tasted great because smuggled booze always does.
I’m seeing Schlitz mentioned here and am wondering if anyone from NC remembers the brewery tour? I seem to recall as a kid getting a bank that was a replica of the can…does anyone else?
Burt drove an SM for The Longest Yard which was filmed in Georgia just a couple of years earlier. You have to wonder if it’s the same car. The Longest Yard car has the same lights.
Hmm, looking back at video of the chase, it’s clearly the wrong color. Ah well.
Still, small world. Two movies, two SMs, one Georgia and one Burt Reynolds.
Apparently there were two cars used for The Longest Yard – one is documented to have been restored after sitting for several years, and then written off immediately after restoration.
https://citroenvie.com/the-longest-yard-sm-outcome/
Burt Reynolds and Sally Field became a romantic item during Smokey and the Bandit’s filming, and that chemistry is apparent on screen.
Other Coors bootleggers included Dwight Eisenhauer, Gerald Ford and Henry Kissinger who all smuggled the product to Washington D.C. There is no record of Jackie Gleason pursuing those men.
To be fair, chasing Ford was kind of pointless, you just have to wait for him to stumble over something.
Transportation of alcohol across state lines in quantities greater than for personal consumption is bootlegging and is quite illegal in most states.
I wonder what defines “personal consumption”? If you go to DC and buy a case of…well, anything, you get a 10% discount, which basically amounts to a free bottle of whatever that case is. But if I tried to explain to someone that yes, it’s really just for me but spread out over several months since I don’t actually live in DC, I guess there would be questions…
My guess it is intentionally vague so that the cop gets to decide whether or not to mess with you. Just don’t act in a furtive manner.
It does look like VA sets a limit of 3 gallons which would be a case of 16 oz. bottles.
My dad used to do that a lot, not loving having to go to the VABC store to buy beer otherwise even though going to DC for beer meant, well, DC traffic. I don’t know if beer is available in grocery stores now or not; I imagine it is. I don’t drink so I’ve never bothered to look.
Now I’m trying to think of a Malaise era American blockbuster film that I would totally expect to see a Citroen SM in.
Corvette Summer?
Anything with Bridgette Bardot!
there was an SM in the opening Credits for recent version of the Running Man.
I would have expected them in the Pink Panther Movies and perhaps the Mission Impossible movies since I recall that TV Series as having a lot of odd ball euro cars at times.
Sorry, couldn’t see the cars because there was way too much Annie Potts to look at.
The first 10 minutes of the Longest Yard are a bit tough; right before he steals the Citroen, there’s a bit of domestic violence to kick off the movie. Oh, and that polyester leisure suit in Georgia must have been a bit swampy.
Things were a bit different in 1974.
Justice was chasing Bandit because Frog (Sally Field) jumped in his car and Junior (and his dad) wanted her back.
The Trans Am was to deflect any cop from the speeding truck full of contraband beer. (Speed limit was 55 back then)
Torch, does that help with the plot confusion?
This is the best movie, ever! The bad guys, the smugglers, are really the good guys and the good guys, the cops, are bad.
This was the number one movie until Star Wars came out a few months later
Coors is way better than Schlitz. Stroh’s is best of all.
I mean, to each his own, but the few times I’ve had Coors, it was like beer-flavored water.
Have you ever tried Blatz? It might be worth the experiment.
I remember an ad that – and this is halfway relevant due to the subject at hand – very quickly retold the story of “Flight of the Phoenix” except instead of building a new plane from bits of the old, the stranded crew and passengers take off in their barely-airworthy plane by stripping off every last gram of optional weight…so they didn’t have to dump the many cases of Stroh’s.
As the wreck lumbered into the sky, it appeared to be a flying carport lined with boxes of beer.
I feel like a lot of people here are confusing Coors Original AKA Banquet with Coors Light. If I’m not mistaken Coors Light didn’t exist at the time of this movie’s release and the OG is making a big comeback recently.
Banquet is a fantastic “heavy.” I do however enjoy an ice cold coors light when its hot out.
I’ve heard alongside Yuengling it’s one of the few mainstream ones actually considered pretty good.
It may also be worthwhile to not that beer in America was nothing like beer is today. I mean I wasn’t drinking beer until the 90s, but even then there wasn’t much like there is today. I’d ask my Dad about it, but he’s never been much of a drinker.
You know why Coors Light is like a couple having sex in a canoe?
They’re both fucking close to water.
I know this joke well, but with Heineken.
Except for Heineken it’s water that was recently used to bathe a skunk.
When I’ve heard that joke it was in reference to all American beer; told to me by a Swedish person. I had no idea the Swedes had such strong opinions on beer.
Ha, the second I saw that screenshot and the title of the article I knew what car you were referring to even before I saw the actual car in the photo.
Back when Coors started selling it east of the Mississippi, Coors was always shipped and stored cold, and in ’86 (IIRC) tasted much better than any other American beer at the time. So I would have understood the fuss once was old enough(ish) to have one.
That Citroen looks pretty good in a car chase in that there Longest Yard! I’ve never seen that movie (Burt was fine in the 1970s, but those kind of movies didn’t appeal to me, even as a kid) but of course I did see Bandit and enjoyed the car chases, Jackie Gleason, and (even though I wasn’t even ten years old) the sight of Sally Field’s cute round face and very 70s hair.
Maybe pre-Jimmy Carter Coors was better, but whenever I’ve had the misfortune to sample one, it’s been pretty mediocre. I have no idea why people make such a big fuss about it, or Bud Light, etc… Bland pisswater would be an accurate descriptor were I crude about it (which I apparently am).
I find Coors to be much sweeter than most other domestics.
RIP Schlitz, so I guess you’re gonna have to reach for a Coors now Torch!