No More Stops at the Choke and Puke: Jerry Reed is Dead
East bound and now put down…
For everyone of my generation, Jerry Reed, who died on August 31st, will be remembered as the Snowman from the Smokey and the Bandit films.
Hours of my life were wasted on the elementary school playground swapping back and forth between imitating him and Burt Reynolds as we improvised slightly less sophisticated versions of those films. At least the first two. In the third Reed WAS the Bandit in that one. It was utter shit though.
We shouldn’t forget though that Reed was a huge country star and killer guitarist. Hard not to like even if you despise country music as much as I do.
My memorial to Reed is not to recommend revisiting Smokey and the Bandit, but seek out a somewhat obscure 1980 film with Reed, Suzanne Pleshette and Dom DeLuise called Hot Stuff. This low brow undercover cop comedy does provide some good chuckles and I’ve always enjoyed it on the rare occasions I surf by it on cable. I’m not even sure if it ever made to DVD. The story is about Reed, DeLuise and Pleshette’s characters setting up a sticky cop sting operation by taking over pawn shop that traffics in stolen property.
The sting ends up with a police tactic that was really cool for its time: organizing a party of all the patrons and staging a mass arrest. This tactic has actually been employed by police departments before. Of course, in Hot Stuff, hilarity ensues. Well, maybe not all out hilarity, but still a fun film. That’s my personal “hats off” to Mr. Reed.
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