Eric Red, author of the new truck-thriller novel White Knuckle, has written such vehicular-minded movies as Near Dark, The Hitcher and Cohen and Tate (the last of which he also directed). Now he takes the wheel of Flick Attack’s first-ever Guest List!
Big rigs, the tractor-trailer 18-wheelers we see rolling along the American highways, belong in movies. There’s something bigger-than-life about the huge, rumbling, mythic diesels driven by those modern day cowboys, The Men Behind the Wheel. It was a lifelong fascination with these giant trucks and the colorful world of truckers that inspired my new high-octane thriller novel, White Knuckle, a mystery tale about an FBI agent on a cross-country hunt for a prolific serial killer/interstate truck driver. It’s surprising more films aren’t made about the epic world of the long hauler, but several truck movies have delivered on the exciting cinematic dimensions of big rigs. Here are my personal top-five favorites:
1. Duel (1971)
The mac daddy of all truck movies. A businessman four-wheeler overtakes a big rig on the highway in his car and, for the rest of the film, the menacing truck tries to kill him. Directed by Steven Spielberg, this ultimate present-tense thriller has no subplot, has no character backstory and we never even really see the truck driver. It’s a pure linear exercise in vehicular cat-and-mouse ratcheting suspense, with the scariest tractor-trailer 18-wheeler in movies — more animal than machine.
2. The Wages of Fear (1953)
The genius of this French thriller, about four truckers in South America on a suicide mission driving two truckloads of volatile explosive nitroglycerin through the jungle, is that it’s a vehicular action movie that moves at 5 mph. That’s about as fast as the heroes drive, because one bump and they get blown up. Honorable mention to William Friedkin’s Sorcerer, the 1977 muscular Hollywood remake, with its astonishing sequence of a nitro truck crossing a collapsing rope bridge during a hurricane rainstorm.
3. White Line Fever (1975)
One of the few trucker movies about a long-hauler hero, this engaging, low-budget, populist flick follows an independent, blue-collar truck owner/operator played by Jan-Michael Vincent just trying to make a living, going up against a big trucking company’s goons trying to shut him down. The highway shoot-out, where Jan-Michael hangs off the back of his highballing big rig with one arm firing a shotgun and his other at the bad guys after him on the road, is one of the truck movie genre’s most iconic scenes.
4. The Road Warrior (1981)
As we all know, a gasoline tanker figures fatefully in this trend-setting, post-apocalyptic car action movie where good and evil human survivors fight for gas. The extended highway showdown, where Mad Max drives the tanker truck across the wasteland battling the pursuing horde of savage barbarians in their insane cars, is one of the most visceral, violent and spectacular vehicular action sequences ever filmed. Mel Gibson’s rugged, world-weary smile when he discovers the tanker’s true contents is one of my favorite movie moments.
5. Breakdown (1997)
A mystery movie with trucker heavies, it has two fantastically filmed tractor-trailer action sequences: one with hero Kurt Russell climbing across the bad guys’ speeding big rig beneath the trailer, and the other a climactic fight in an 18-wheeler dangling off an overpass. In writing White Knuckle, that was the truck action sequence I felt I had to outdo at the end of my book. You be the judge. —Eric Red