White Line Fever

Jan-Michael Vincent gives his usual forthright performance as an honest Arizona trucker (named Carrol Jo!) who refuses to transport stolen goods and is blackballed by the local racketeers running the produce-hauling industry; he's forced to take a load by force, but the head honcho calls out his goons to stop him. Meanwhile, back home, Vincent's wife just found out she's pregnant... Redneck thrills for the drive-in crowd has lots of wrasslin' and gun-toting action...and, if that's not enough, there's also Slim Pickens as a slimy worm in a white cowboy hat (who does get an outlandish exit!). Director Jonathan Kaplan barrels through his and co-writer Ken Friedman's screenplay without regard to logic or credibility, but fans of trucker flicks won't mind. Good supporting cast includes Kay Lenz, Don Porter, Martin Kove and Dick Miller, but L. Q. Jones offers nothing new in his repertoire as the slow-talking baddie. *1/2 from ****

Jan-Michael Vincent, at the peak of his charisma and movie stardom, registers strongly as good, honest young man Carrol Jo Hummer, fresh from a stint in the Air Force. He gets a loan, which he uses to pay for his own diesel truck, which he dubs The Blue Mule. Initially thinking of working for family friend Duane Haller (Slim Pickens), he ultimately decides to fight corruption in the transport business, making enemies out of slimy people like Buck Wessle (L.Q. Jones) and Cutler (Don Porter). Kay Lenz plays Jerri, the wife who stands by his side. The prolific director Jonathan Kaplan, who at this time was firing off one entertaining B picture after another, wrote the script with Ken Friedman. Like so many other young directors during the 70s, he'd gotten his start working for Roger Corman, and was able to hone his craft. Here he creates an adequately paced, sometimes pretty serious (but never overly melodramatic), gritty little movie. It gets a lot of mileage out of its time honoured premise of one good man at war with a corrupt system. Carrol Jo must do battle both on the road and off, and proves himself capable of handling himself in a number of scraps, which are often instigated by swaggering bully Clem (Martin Kove). The action in "White Line Fever" is well executed, and the photography, by Fred J. Koenekamp, is simply gorgeous. One sequence with Carrol Jo on the road as he makes his way to snowy Utah is breathtaking. This is overall very slickly made and engagingly written and performed. A bright-eyed and earnest Vincent is extremely well supported by the lovable Lenz, ever amiable Pickens, and an effectively sleazy Jones. The cast features other familiar faces such as the ever reliable Dick Miller, and R.G. Armstrong as a prosecuting attorney. Sam Laws, Leigh French, and Kaplan regular Johnny Ray McGhee also appear. Cinematographer Jamie Anderson ("Piranha" '78) has a rare acting role here as Jamie, and Ann Dusenberry of "Jaws 2" is seen briefly as a barmaid. David Nichtern does the flavourful score for this solid entry into the trucker cinema genre of the '70s. The ending is more low key than the viewer might expect, and may not be totally satisfying to some people. Seven out of 10.

This came out with the CB fad and is really a vintage film now. Is it a classic? Well, the truck driving scenes are classic. The other stuff like the plot and ending are apparently fabricated just so we could have a place for the great action. Where else can you see someone climb from the cab of a moving truck onto the van trailer's roof? Where else can you see a semi hit a bobtail truck tractor in the tandems and spin it off the road? Where else can you see a diesel truck burn? Where else can you see a truck tractor jump through the air? Jan-Michael Vincent shows us he can actually back a semi to a loading dock, too. White Line Fever gets the point across that truck driving is a great way of life. Then why was it so hard for him to make a living at it? Couldn't he just sign up with Mayflower Van Lines or something?

I saw this film years ago at the cinema. On the big screen it was fantastic and since then I have been waiting for it to be released on either video or DVD. Its a very simple story about a lone trucker. He's an honest man looking to make an honest living but ends up fighting the corrupt system, a true classic of the seventies. The acting is acceptable, the director resisted the temptation to over play the main characters role. The film rolls along at a fairly good pace and is for the most part quite believable, the finale has the hero driving his truck through a large sign in a highly symbolic gesture. If this film was to be remade today I am sure the acting would be much better, the action scenes much more explosive and I am sure it would have the standard sex scenes. However White Line Fever is a classic of its time and in my opinion a remake would never match the originals simple plot and drama without adding too many unnecessary distractions. There have been very few good trucking movies ever made, so hopefully this one will be re-released.

One of the earliest -- and hence best -- of a handful of 70's trucker movies, a once quite hot, but now hopelessly passé sub-genre which beget a mixed bag of films which includes the stellar Claudia Jennings vehicle "Truck Stop Women," the not half bad Peter Fonda pic "High Ballin'," the great'n'gritty overlooked sleeper "Road Movie," Sam Peckinpah's excruciatingly stupid "Convoy," the alarmingly atrocious Chuck Norris chopsocky turkey "Breaker! Breaker!," and the sturdy made-for-TV item "Steel Cowboy." Jan-Michael Vincent, whose career in the Me Decade was all over the map, peaking with "The Mechanic" and "Big Wednesday" and hitting a wonderfully wretched all-time low with the gloriously godawful post-nuke sci-fi atrocity "Damnation Alley," here gives one of his strongest, most convincing and engaging performances to date as Carrol Jo Hummer, an earnest, moral, youthful independent Diesel driver who finds out that his employers are crooked bastards who sell illegal contraband on the side. Greatly appalled by this discovery, Hummer decides to blow the whistle on the entire unlawful business, becoming a modern-day folk hero in the process and subsequently putting both himself and his plucky wife Jerri (a stand-out portrayal by the always fine and assertive Kay Lenz) in considerable jeopardy. Director Jonathan Kaplan, who was then on a real B-movie roll churning out such kick-ass exploitation flicks as "Night Call Nurses," "The Student Teachers," and "Truck Turner" on a regular basis, hits a brisk, solid groove at the very start of the film and masterfully sustains it to the thrilling end, expertly milking the forever effective and appealing "one lone little man against the big, bad system" populist hero subtext in Ken Friedman's tightly efficient script for maximum socko entertainment. Kudos also to the exceptional supporting cast ridden with familiar film faces: the late, great, ever-delightful Slim Pickens as corrupt truck stop manager Duane Haller, L.Q. Jones at his most sublimely slimy and serpentine as head heavy Buck Westle, Martin Kove as one of Westle's thuggish goons, R.G. Armstrong as a shifty, manipulative prosecuting attorney, veteran character actor Don Porter as the smug CEO who's running the whole no-count operation, frequent Kaplan pic co-star Johnny Ray McGhee as an angry black trucker, Sam Laws as McGhee's rascally lovable ol' coot pop, and the irreplaceable Dick Miller as fidgety, peppery gear-jammer R. "Birdie" Corman. Further enhanced by Fred Koenekamp's crisp, inventive cinematography, David Nichtern's stirring score, and Valerie Carter tearfully warbling the marvelously mawkish country-and-western weeper "Drifting and Dreaming of You" all of three times on the soundtrack, "White Line Fever" gets a hearty ten-four from your good buddy film critic as quintessential 70's drive-in cinema at its most bluntly exciting and unpretentious best.

After a promising start, "White Line Fails" fails to deliver the goods. It goes from one ridiculous situation to another. After the first fifteen minutes, nothing in this movie rings true. It's actually gets annoying after a while. The biggest crime this movie commits is that it wastes a very good cast. This movie does look good with terrific location photography. Other than that, "White Line Fever" is the pits. Honorable mention: a dreamy Kay Lenz.

This movie sucked production grade hole. It started to be about some in fighting among cheese ball truckers. It could have ended there. Instead, it becomes a romance story about the formation of a truckers union. One gets the distinct feeling the writer quit halfway through. This movie must have been a tax write-off.

First seen it when I was 8 years old at the drive inn theater. I'm now 43 and like it as much know as I did then. I think it has one of the most awesome stunts with a truck at the end. It just blows you away. Yep still a great movie.It made me want to drive a truck then and today I do.It's the classic battle of David and Goliath so to speak. They don't make movies like that anymore. where could you even assemble a cast like the one in this movie today. I never tire of seeing this one.It really tells a story that everyone can relate to. I simply think it should be considered a cult classic. I wish they could bring it back to the theaters. That stunt at the end was much better on the big screen.

Saw this movie when I was about 7 yrs old and thought it was one of the better truck movies of the 70's. Movies back then were all about stunts, and cool cars and trucks getting trashed big time. Everything else like story lines and character development just got in the way. This film had the best truck crash stunt ever, no special effects then, if you wanted to jump a truck 200 ft through a giant glass structure, you had to use a real truck and a real glass structure. There was a killer chase scene where the Blue Mule and an old Ford Louisville battle it out. The Mule T-bones the louie a beauty at full noise. The producers did a top job on getting the right looking truck for the movie, the Blue Mule was a sharp lookin rig, for a while there.

This film catapulted Jan-Michael Vincent to stardom level for awhile, and contained a lot of good, exciting action scenes as well as politically correct assessment of some of the problems of independent truckers at the time. Of course, it contained some action and fighting scenes that are somewhat unbelievable, but in the context of the story, they work. Kay Lenz is the believable, not too lovely hero's wife who downplayed her attractiveness displayed in later films. There are lots of eye-pleasing shots of trucks and highway mayhem, and, of course, from a trucker and real-life perspective, lots of technically inaccurate scenes, but, all in all one of the very best trucking movies ever made -- and I've seen 'em all! Good cast, good flick. This $2 million film went on to be a big grosser.