Coast to Coast (1980)

Absolutely Fantastic

A waste of 90 minutes of my life

The film makes a home in your brain and the only cure is to see it again.

A great movie, one of the best of this year. There was a bit of confusion at one point in the plot, but nothing serious.

Spotty road-comedy has Dyan Cannon escaping from the booby hatch and hitching a ride with trucker Robert Blake. He's rather charmed by her after the usual hysterical preliminaries; seems she's not so crazy after all, and is on the run from bounty hunters hired by her nefarious husband. Cannon's natural effervescence is always a treat, and Blake is surprisingly warm and personable, but Stanley Weiser's screenplay isn't much more than a doodle. Some big laughs, and it does improve after a very sloppy opening half-hour. Mario Tosi's vivid cinematography is very good, though Joseph Sargent handles the direction like a traffic cop. ** from ****

COAST TO COAST is an obscure big studio film few have seen or even heard of. It stars two actors who are short, jittery and have lotsa hair. In other words, it stars two Ewoks. OK, enough with the silliness. COAST TO COAST stars Robert Conrad and Dyan Cannon, who do look like Ewoks. Dyan does her usual nervous Blond ditz who talks a mile a minute, while Robert plays it light (for once) but is rarely convincing playing cute. Usually built like a Pit Bull, Conrad here looks chubby. His ultra tight jeans don't help dispel the weight gain.The story is about a trucker who...stop it there. A trucker? Oh it's one of those road movies made during the CB trend of the 1970s. It's a trend that truly belongs in the 70s and will most likely never resurface again until the end of time. The film itself is harmless enough so there's no point of really trashing it but needless to say, it's not really good. The story is obvious, never convincing and the two stars are not interesting enough to carry an entire film, as lightweight as it is. The film is not on DVD yet. I watched on video. I doubt it'll ever make it on DVD in the near future.

Flighty, but willful and endearing wealthy screwball Madie (a winsomely daffy and bubbly Dyan Cannon) escapes from an asylum she was put in by her cheapskate jerk of a psychiatrist husband. Madie hitches a ride with grumpy, rough-around-the-edges cowboy trucker Charlie Callahan (nicely essayed with scruffy, rugged grace by Robert Blake), a profane, surly, seriously down on his luck grouch who just recently got divorced and is up to his eyeballs in debt. Charlie grudgingly agrees to drive Madie from the Pennsyvania Turnpike to the California coast in his massive 30-ton, 13-gear Diesel behemoth, arguing with her every mile of the way and eventually falling for the sweetly ditsy lass. Spunky little old lady cop Maxine Stuart, her brawny goon partner Dick Durock, and overzealous truck repossessor William Lucking give chase. Directed with typical consummate adroitness by "The Taking of Pelham One Two Three" 's Joseph Sargent, with a slight, but efficient script by Stanley Weiser, a jaunty score by the ubiquitous Charles Bernstein, sparkling, polished cinematography by Mario Tosi, a flavorful country and western soundtrack, a pleasingly breezy and playful lighthearted comic tone, plenty of eye-catching scenery, solid cameos by Michael Lerner as an oily, patronizing shrink and "Assault on Precinct 13" 's Darwin Joston as a drunken trucker, and a terrifically dynamic, luminescent chemistry between the two well-matched leads, this fitfully amusing and good-natured tongue-in-cheek road movie romp possesses the right mix of silly charm and goofy laughs to qualify as a perfectly enjoyable piece of fluff.

As an overlooked movie when originally released, this is one of the better films to watch on video. It is also one of the films that gave HBO and the other movie networks great material to televise. Coast to Coast is a fun, timeless tale of two people out of their elements, bonding, and making the most of situations in the lighthearted, Hollywood manner everyone wishes could carryover in real life. This is a fancy feature to view along with Silver Streak and Mother, Jugs, and Speed. While it never reaches the violence displayed in those two pictures, Coast to Coast is a great flick to watch at home, on a date, or whenever you want to look at a film from the 1970s era.