When I was a child, Burt Reynolds was a superstar. I had been amazed at the rumours that he’d almost been cast as Han Solo in Star Wars and naturally assumed that therefore he was one of the coolest people on the planet. And then I saw 1977’s Smokey and the Bandit on television and had it confirmed for me in no uncertain terms.
Here was a guy who exuded a spirit of not giving a goddamn in every second he was on screen, driving a fast car with a madly-cute woman and being besties with a truck driver who monologued at his dog all the time.
In other words, it was perfect.
Reynolds left us on Thursday night US time, felled by a heart attack. And it’s left an unfillable gap, because while he essentially played the same role all the time, there was no-one that came close to matching him for it.
And he clearly knew that, and chose his projects accordingly. That’s why Smokey and the Bandit 1 and 2, Cannonball Run and Hooper are all muddled up in my head – a mess of car chases, 80s hair and wry quips in films which were all significant hits many years apart and are still basically the one long run from the law.
I mean, this. THIS.
And there will be other tributes which celebrate his performances in, say, Boogie Nights, which should really have been his John Travolta-style career rejuvenator. Or his dramatic turn in the massively influential suspense-drama Deliverance.
Or they’ll celebrate the way he’d become more a throwback reference to a very seventies kind of masculinity than an actual actor in recent years – although he also did both, as per his appearance as himself in the animated series Archer.
With tears, we assume.
But for me he’ll always be jumping a Trans Am over a creek with a remarkably calm Sally Field by his side.
And let’s be honest, isn’t that how we’d all like to be remembered?
Farewell, Mr Reynolds. You’ve taken that final moustache ride to the sky.
