I can’t give a good explanation as to why, but over the weekend I happened to see that the 1977 classic movie Smokey and the Bandit was on some streaming service, so I put it on. I haven’t watched this movie in, oh, decades. I remembered the Trans Am, Sally Field, lots of automotive destruction, and a general confusion about what the hell was actually going on. It’s not that it was such a complex plot, but I was confused about the general motivation, for reasons we’ll talk about in a moment. But more importantly, what I noticed was something so wildly unexpected and exciting that I knew I had to share it with you, and only you, my treasured confidants.
What I noticed was what has to be the least-expected car to appear in Smokey and the Bandit. Least expected as in if you asked me to make a list of the cars I’d expect to see just hanging out in the background of this movie, this one would be way, way at the bottom of the list.
To get a little more specific, such a list of The Cars I Least Expect To See In Smokey And The Bandit would have a few parameters, specifically they would all have to be cars that were actually sold in the US market prior to the release of the movie in 1977. So that means nothing like a ZAZ Zaporozhets 965 or a Gurgel X-10. But that list would have anything that was actually sold in the US in at least some semblance of an official capacity.
Oh, and just in case you forgot about what the ’70s were like, here’s an oddly long-seeming trailer for the movie:
The ’70s were a weird time. The nation really had a fascination with CB radios and trucking for a while there, and it seemed like that’s all we wanted to watch for our entertainment, maybe until Star Wars showed us the possibility of space trucking and holographic CBs.
Anyway, back to the least expected car I saw in the movie. It’s in the background here, behind Buford T. Justice’s head:
Dammit, Buford, put your hat back on and move your head out of the way!
There we go. See it there? Just to the left of that Chrysler Cordoba? Really, it’s between two Chryslers Cordoba and a Chevy Monte Carlo, all of which were wildly common cars in the 1970s. But not that car. It’s a Citroën SM.
A Citroën SM?! What the hell is a Citroën SM doing in some random parking lot in Georgia? The whole movie was shot in the cities of McDonough, Jonesboro and Lithonia, Georgia, none of which I’d really have pegged as big markets for Citroën’s Maserati-engined GT car, even for the two of those towns that are part of the Atlanta greater metro area. And yet there she sits, proud and comfortable between those American personal luxury coupés.
In a strange way, that SM is kind of among similar company, also being a large-ish two-door car with a relatively large engine and a plush interior.
You can tell this is an American-market SM by the lighting setup up front there; America-bound SMs (which were sold here between 1970 and 1973) had quad round sealed beams, with a glass area in between them in which the front license plate could be mounted, like an exhibit in a museum vitrine, safe under glass. Since Georgia doesn’t require a front plate, this owner has a pair of fog/driving lamps in there.
The US-market lighting setup, as you see above, was not nearly as cool as the one the rest of the world got, which featured six composite headlamps under glass, the inner pair of which turned with the steering wheel!
So much cooler. Oh, and if you were in the French home market, you’d get them in yellow!
I’m still just amazed at the odds of capturing a wild, free-roaming American-market SM on camera back then. Only 2,037 were sold in the US during the car’s life, so that’s not many at all. And while there are no records still existing, most SM clubs and people who give a damn about this kind of stuff suggest that most went to California, then New York/Northeast, then a distant third place to Florida, Midwest, and so on. So, yeah, a Georgia-based SM in 1976 or so is a rare thing to see.
Oh, before I forget, let’s get to the confusing part of the movie’s plot: it all hinges on a sort of wager made by some weird rich brothers who dress alike, where they want the Bandit to get a truckload of Coors beer from Texarkana, Texas to Atlanta, Georgia in 28 hours, and if he can pull it off he’ll get $80,000, which in modern money comes to about $450,000 or so.
Here’s the scene, if you’re curious:
Now, I never really knew what the hell the big deal was about selling Coors west of Texas or why it was considered bootlegging or why it was worth all that money to smuggle Coors eastbound. But it was a thing! The Air Force used to airlift freaking Coors to Washington, DC for Dwight Eisenhower! It was smuggled from Colorado to North Carolina on a weekly basis for a while!
The reason was that Coors was unpasteurized and would spoil if left unrefrigerated for about a week. This, plus the fact that it was really a regional product meant that it just wasn’t sold east of Texas, and while it wasn’t exactly illegal to have or drink in states east of Texas, it couldn’t legally be sold there. I’ll admit, I’m not entirely clear if transporting 400 cases of Coors without the intent to resell it was actually illegal, but the movie needed it to seem that way, so there would be a plot, thin as it was.
The point is, they needed a reason for Smokey to chase the Bandit in his Trans Am. Which, by the way, was a ’76 car specially fitted with the front end of the ’77, which switched to those quad rectangular headlights. They used four Trans Ams in the shooting, and trashed them all.
I’ve had Coors before. It’s fine? I don’t really get why one would go through such absurd efforts to get Coors when a properly cold Schlitz is not all that different, really, but I suppose maybe the pre-pasteurized version had some special sort of magic.
Who knows? I just wouldn’t want to spill one in that amazing and improbable Citroën SM.
UPDATE: Commenters have already noted that Burt Reynolds has spent time around Citroën SMs before, like driving one in this bonkers chase scene from 1974’s The Longest Yard:
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