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The first thing coming out of Bandit’s (Burt Reynolds) mouth in 1977’s Smokey and the Bandit is a delighted laugh. It’s an early encapsulation of his good-time personality; his radiant sense of fun is his defining trait. The task he’s given at the beginning of Smokey and the Bandit by a couple of rich Texans in matching blue suits (Paul Williams and Pat McCormick) would hit practically anyone else’s ears like a nightmare packaged in an offer. Would this legendary local trucker be willing to bootleg some 400 cases of Coors Light from Texarkana back to Atlanta in less than 28 hours? But to Bandit, the ask — sugared by $80,000 — sounds more like a thrilling adventure, the supposed impossibility of it only making it more appealing. He knows only he could pull it off, and his confident grin makes you believe in him. 

Bandit agrees to the offer after getting his prospective employers to agree to pay him just a little more than their initial offer; he enlists his longtime “business” partner Cledus (Jerry Reed) to commandeer his prized truck (which has a brazen Old West-style painting of a masked robber sticking up some stagecoach passengers) while he serves as a “distraction” in a following-along muscle car. Whenever Cledus is in danger of getting pulled over, Bandit will intentionally floor it. (Bandit, impressively, is a master driver great at getting the cops off his tail.) 

The job in its opening stretches is mostly without trouble, save for the occasional out-of-service bridge or cop-car blockade being sped toward. But then Bandit unwisely lets a runaway bride, Carrie (Sally Field), hitch a ride with him after nearly running into her with his car. The man Carrie has dumped happens to be the son of the Texas sheriff Buford T. Justice (Jackie Gleason), who has big-cat determination to get his paws back on her for his comically passive son. 

Smokey and the Bandit, which was stunt coordinator Hal Needham’s first movie as a filmmaker, is little more than its central trio eluding both Justice and the many other policemen failing to stop them. What takes this very funny, effortlessly thrilling movie higher — what’s certainly most helped it endure as an all-time-great chase movie — is the cigarette-voiced, mustache-twirling villain performance from Gleason and the breezy chemistry of the natural-together Field and Reynolds (who’d for a few years be an item because of the movie).

Like any long road trip, it’s the company that either can make the journey feel surprisingly short or double the time. It’s fun to spend these few hours with Smokey and the Bandit’s ensemble; they have a way of making 900 miles go by with the ease of a quick trip to the grocery store, with Needham’s efficient handling of the action keeping the film’s momentum barreling along. I haven’t seen the sequel, though it’s no surprise the consensus is mostly that it fails to recapture the good times of the original. No road trip poised as a do-over will ever quite recreate the pleasures of the first time.