“We should thank God for beer,” said G.K. Chesterton, a hedonist who always practiced what he preached over a beer or two. To Chesterton, the abuse of this divine gift was ungrateful and unnatural. “Drink not because you need it; that is rational drinking, which is the road to death and hell. Drink not because you do not need it; that is irrational drinking, which is the ancient health of the world.”
The 1977 Burt Reynolds classic “Smokey and the Bandit” is a kind of paean to beer and its irrational consumption. Big Enos Burdett could have afforded to fill his party guests with truckloads of domestic and imported beer. Instead, he insisted on hiring Reynolds and Jerry Reed to smuggle in 400 cases of Coors Banquet, a brand not legally available east of the Mississippi.
“In Yaba… downing the local lager is the townsfolk’s main pastime. Well, in addition to that, after a beer or two, they engage in a variety of other activities, including drunk fist fights, drunk kangaroo hunting, and drunk fist fights with kangaroos.”
The idea for the film came about when a friend sent a case of Coors beer to stuntman Hal Needham, who was in Georgia filming “Gator.” Technically, the beer was contraband: It was unpasteurized, making it difficult to transport long distances, and the Colorado-based company didn’t have a license to distribute it east of the Mississippi River. But notable fans like President Gerald Ford and Paul Newman didn’t hesitate to get their hands on the beer.
Needham thought this would make a good story, so he wrote the screenplay and showed it to his friend Reynolds, who disliked the dialogue but liked the primal conflict it depicted: man versus thirst.
And those are the only ingredients a great American car chase movie needs. As Big Enos would say, sometimes you just want to “celebrate in style.”
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“It could get a lot worse,” shrugs Clarence “Doc” Tydon (Donald Pleasence), the only medical practitioner in the tiny mining town of Bundanyaba in the Australian outback. “We might run out of beer.”
He’s talking to the protagonist of the 1971 cult film “Waking up in fear” A young schoolteacher named John Grant (Gary Bond) soon discovers upon arriving in Yabba that the townsfolk’s main pastime is binge-drinking the local lager – well, that, plus a whole host of other activities that take place after a beer or two – drunk fist fights, drunk kangaroo hunts, drunk kangaroo fist fights.
Grant is in town to catch a flight to Sydney, but a gambling gone wrong leaves him bankrupt and orphaned, and he begins to socialize with the locals, despite his contempt for their antiquated customs.
Thus begins the kind of weekend that many men vow to give up alcohol. Wake in Fright finds its characters trying to de-stress in a place where they can’t escape the scorching heat. The sweaty, dusty atmosphere is so effective that while you’ll crave a cold beer, you might also wonder if good water would be a better option.
