Jonathan Kaplan's 'White Line Fever' is a bit of an odd beast. One the one hand, it's a pretty run of the mill, mid 1970s (exactly mid '70s) action film about a guy fighting the capital 'S' system. On another, it's a reasonably subversive (particularly for this sort of movie) movie that tracks the rise of a folk hero battling the capitalist stranglehold on the free market. Either of which could be perfectly fine films, but whichever way you want to interpret things, you are left with one huge question: exactly how many transitional scenes did they just forget the shoot (or, perhaps charitably, did they edit out)?

There's so much of this film that's just not there, which is extra weird because it's a pretty solid 90 minutes. Normally, I'd argue that this should be enough time, but frankly, I could have used another 20 minutes of 'something,' if only to bridge the sequences better. Maybe there's a longer cut? I mean, even reading the wiki plot synopsis, most of the first two paragraphs is either literally not in the film or represented only by still photography during the opening credits. It's wild.

Anyway, Jan-Michael Vincent is a self-employed trucker who needs work to make payments on his rig, the inexplicably named 'Blue Mule.' He tries to get jobs from twitchy Slim Pickins, who sports a Nudie Suit so tame I'm assuming it to have been a knockoff rather than an original, and who himself works for extra skeevy LQ Jones (you know he's sleazy 'cause of the way he ogles secretaries and has a mustache). As it all pans out, Jones works for a shipping conglomerate (I guess?) called the Glass House (and the only thing you need know about them really is the GH initials; more in a minute). Anyway, JMV (his character is named CJ) is married to Kay Lenz, a woman who doesn't want to have a kid as CJ is a trucker and likely won't be home much; unfortunately, that's pretty much all of her character, which is a drag as Lenz is the sort of actor I'd like to watch driving around in a truck (which, sorry, I can't say for JMV).

So, where were we? Right, JMV is trying to get work, but doesn't want to pad his loads with contraband like the unlicensed cigarettes that Jones & Pickins want him to haul. There's some squabbling with other drivers (who are less picky about illegalities), the highway patrolman apparently in their pockets (there seems to be exactly one cop, this one, on the highways of Arizona), an elderly (well, 51 year old) Black character named 'Pops' and who was a friend of JMV's dad (and who is on JMV's side in all this), and some pretty well filmed and kind of exciting stunt work involving the trucks (both driving them and running about on the tops of moving ones). And then suddenly, all the truckers everywhere have deified JMV (for his determination to not commit crimes and promote a form of unionization, I suppose?) while he was in prison, and so, once released, he drives the Blue Mule through large sculptural 'GH' (told you we'd get back there), in what purports to have been a very expensive stunt for the time, and then credits. Ok, there are some other scenes here and there, but nothing to actually explain quite how we started where we did and ended up where we are.

As a whiz-bang stunt, the truck vs sign thing is alright, I guess (it does pretty much look like the film's poster) but it really isn't enough to hang a movie on, tbh. It would have been rather more interesting to explore the obviously leftist sympathies of the plot's trajectory, but instead it sort of waffles about with endless (very) long shots of trucks in admittedly sometimes majestic landscapes and weird asides about Pops and his son & the one-sided relationship between JMV and Lenz (the conclusion of which is genuinely & bizarrely anticlimactic).

Jonathan Kaplan's 'White Line Fever' is a bit of an odd beast. One the one hand, it's a pretty run of the mill, mid 1970s (exactly mid '70s) action film about a guy fighting the capital 'S' system. On another, it's a reasonably subversive (particularly for this sort of movie) movie that tracks the rise of a folk hero battling the capitalist stranglehold on the free market. Either of which could be perfectly fine films, but whichever way you want to interpret things, you are left with one huge question: exactly how many transitional scenes did they just forget the shoot (or, perhaps charitably, did they edit out)?

There's so much of this film that's just not there, which is extra weird because it's a pretty solid 90 minutes. Normally, I'd argue that this should be enough time, but frankly, I could have used another 20 minutes of 'something,' if only to bridge the sequences better. Maybe there's a longer cut? I mean, even reading the wiki plot synopsis, most of the first two paragraphs is either literally not in the film or represented only by still photography during the opening credits. It's wild.

Anyway, Jan-Michael Vincent is a self-employed trucker who needs work to make payments on his rig, the inexplicably named 'Blue Mule.' He tries to get jobs from twitchy Slim Pickins, who sports a Nudie Suit so tame I'm assuming it to have been a knockoff rather than an original, and who himself works for extra skeevy LQ Jones (you know he's sleazy 'cause of the way he ogles secretaries and has a mustache). As it all pans out, Jones works for a shipping conglomerate (I guess?) called the Glass House (and the only thing you need know about them really is the GH initials; more in a minute). Anyway, JMV (his character is named CJ) is married to Kay Lenz, a woman who doesn't want to have a kid as CJ is a trucker and likely won't be home much; unfortunately, that's pretty much all of her character, which is a drag as Lenz is the sort of actor I'd like to watch driving around in a truck (which, sorry, I can't say for JMV).

So, where were we? Right, JMV is trying to get work, but doesn't want to pad his loads with contraband like the unlicensed cigarettes that Jones & Pickins want him to haul. There's some squabbling with other drivers (who are less picky about illegalities), the highway patrolman apparently in their pockets (there seems to be exactly one cop, this one, on the highways of Arizona), an elderly (well, 51 year old) Black character named 'Pops' and who was a friend of JMV's dad (and who is on JMV's side in all this), and some pretty well filmed and kind of exciting stunt work involving the trucks (both driving them and running about on the tops of moving ones). And then suddenly, all the truckers everywhere have deified JMV (for his determination to not commit crimes and promote a form of unionization, I suppose?) while he was in prison, and so, once released, he drives the Blue Mule through large sculptural 'GH' (told you we'd get back there), in what purports to have been a very expensive stunt for the time, and then credits. Ok, there are some other scenes here and there, but nothing to actually explain quite how we started where we did and ended up where we are.

As a whiz-bang stunt, the truck vs sign thing is alright, I guess (it does pretty much look like the film's poster) but it really isn't enough to hang a movie on, tbh. It would have been rather more interesting to explore the obviously leftist sympathies of the plot's trajectory, but instead it sort of waffles about with endless (very) long shots of trucks in admittedly sometimes majestic landscapes and weird asides about Pops and his son & the one-sided relationship between JMV and Lenz (the conclusion of which is genuinely & bizarrely anticlimactic).

Give us the three hour director’s cut. I need more than a couple nonconsecutive (possibly nonlinear?) days in the life of Carrol Jo to really judge his story.

Give us the three hour director’s cut. I need more than a couple nonconsecutive (possibly nonlinear?) days in the life of Carrol Jo to really judge his story.