The wildest race in movie history
The Cannonball Run is not a serious film, and it does not pretend to be one. It is a star-packed, high-speed comedy about an illegal cross-country car race from Connecticut to California, in which drivers use every trick, disguise and gadget they can think of to avoid the police and to beat each other to the finish line. The cast reads like a roll call of 1970s and early 1980s popular cinema: Burt Reynolds, Roger Moore, Farrah Fawcett, Dom DeLuise, Dean Martin, Sammy Davis Jr., Jackie Chan, and many more, all competing, cheating and crashing in a glorious, chaotic celebration of speed and star power. Peter Fonda appears, briefly but memorably, as the Chief Biker, the leader of a gang of motorcyclists who join the race and who provide some of its funniest and most anarchic moments.
Director Hal Needham, himself a former stuntman, understood that a film like The Cannonball Run lives or dies on its energy. He keeps the pace fast, the jokes broad, and the stunts spectacular, and he lets his stars play exaggerated versions of themselves. Roger Moore plays a man pretending to be Roger Moore. Burt Reynolds plays a charming rogue. Dom DeLuise plays a would-be superhero in a cape. Fonda, as the Chief Biker, plays a version of his own screen image, the biker leader, but with a comic twist. He is not the brooding rebel of Easy Rider. He is a tough, funny, slightly absurd figure who leads his gang with swagger and who treats the race as a party. His appearance is a wink to the audience, a recognition that Fonda’s biker past is now part of popular culture, and that he is willing to laugh at it.
Fonda’s role is small, and it would be wrong to pretend otherwise. He does not carry the film, and he does not have a complex character arc. He appears in a handful of scenes, rides with his gang, causes trouble for other racers, and provides a burst of biker energy whenever the film needs it. Yet his presence matters, because it connects The Cannonball Run to the history of the road movie. Without Easy Rider, there would be no Cannonball Run, no celebration of cross-country driving as freedom and fun. Fonda’s cameo is therefore more than a joke. It is a tribute, paid by one generation of road films to another, and Fonda plays it with exactly the right mixture of toughness and humour.
Speed, stars, and stunt work
The Cannonball Run was inspired by a real illegal race, the Cannonball Baker Sea-to-Shining-Sea Memorial Trophy Dash, which had been run in the 1970s by car enthusiasts who wanted to test how fast they could cross America. Needham, who had worked as a stunt coordinator on many of Reynolds’s films, turned that idea into a comedy, and he filled it with the kind of stunt work at which he excelled. Cars jump, crash, spin and race through traffic, and the film’s best sequences are those in which the stunts are allowed to speak for themselves. The humour comes from the drivers’ attempts to disguise themselves, from a priest and a doctor who are not what they seem, from a Japanese team with high-tech gadgets, and from a gang of bikers who seem to be having more fun than anyone else.
Fonda’s bikers fit perfectly into that world. They are not villains in the traditional sense. They are competitors, and their menace is comic rather than threatening. They ride in formation, they roar past other cars, and they treat the police as just another obstacle to be outrun. Their scenes are short, but they are memorable, because Fonda brings to them an authenticity that other actors could not. He had actually ridden motorcycles on screen, he had actually played a biker leader, and he knew how to sit on a bike, how to lead a gang, and how to look both dangerous and amused at the same time. That authenticity is why his cameo works. The audience recognises him, and the recognition is part of the joke.
The film was a huge commercial success, earning far more than its budget and spawning sequels, even though critics were less enthusiastic. It is easy to see why audiences loved it. It is fast, funny, starry and undemanding, a film to watch with friends, to quote, and to enjoy for its stunts and its cast. It is also a film that captures a particular moment in American popular culture, when the road movie, the car chase and the star ensemble comedy came together in a single, gleeful package. Fonda’s presence, however brief, is a key part of that package, a reminder of where the road movie had come from and how far it had travelled.
A cameo with history
For Peter Fonda, The Cannonball Run was a chance to have fun with his own image, and to work with friends in a film that did not ask him to carry its meaning. After the seriousness of The Hired Hand, the genre work of the mid-1970s, and the ups and downs of his career, a comic cameo in a hit film was a welcome change of pace. It showed that Fonda did not take himself too seriously, that he was willing to be part of an ensemble, and that he understood his place in film history well enough to play with it. He would later do something similar in Ghost Rider, another motorcycle film that winked at his past, but The Cannonball Run was the first time he had done it so openly, and so joyfully.
Watch The Cannonball Run for its speed, its stars and its stunts, and watch for Fonda’s Chief Biker as a piece of film history in miniature. He is on screen for only a few minutes, but those minutes contain a whole career: the biker, the rebel, the road, and the sense of humour that allowed Fonda to survive being a symbol. He rides in, he causes chaos, he rides out, and the film is funnier and richer for his presence. Sometimes, a small role can tell a large story, and Fonda’s Chief Biker is a perfect example.