Weekend Watch: Bandit's beer run and drunk kangaroo hunts

“We should thank God for beer,” said G.K. Chesterton, a bon vivant always ready to practice what he preached over a pint or two. For Chesterton, there was something profoundly ungrateful and unnatural about abusing this divine gift: "Never drink because you need it, for this is rational drinking, and the way to death and hell. But drink because you do not need it, for this is irrational drinking, and the ancient health of the world."

The 1977 Burt Reynolds' classic “Smokey and the Bandit” is a kind of paean to beer and its irrational consumption. Big Enos Burdette could surely afford to ply his party guests with a truckload of any number of domestic or imported brews. Instead, he insists on hiring Reynolds and Jerry Reed to smuggle in 400 cases of the one brand he can't legally get east of the Mississippi: Coors Banquet.

'In the Yabba ... pounding pints of the local lager is the townsfolk's main diversion. Well, that and the various activities one gets up to after a beer or ten, including drunken fistfights, drunken kangaroo hunts, and drunken fistfights with kangaroos.'

The idea for the movie was born when a friend shipped stuntman Hal Needham a case of Coors while he was shooting "Gator" in Georgia. Technically, the beer was contraband; because it was unpasteurized, it was difficult to ship long distance, and the Colorado-based Coors didn't have a license to distribute it east of the Mississippi. This didn't deter high-profile fans like President Gerald Ford and Paul Newman from getting their hands on it.

Needham thought it would make a good story and wrote up a script. He showed it to his friend Reynolds, who hated the dialogue but loved the primal conflict it explored: Man vs. Thirst.

And those are the only stakes you need for one of the great American car chase movies. As Big Enos says, sometimes you just want to “celebrate in style.”

Alamo Drafthouse

"It could be worse," shrugs Clarence "Doc" Tydon (Donald Pleasance), the sole medical practitioner in the tiny Australian outback mining town of Bundanyabba. "The beer supply could run out."

He's talking to the protagonist of the 1971 cult film "Wake in Fright," a young schoolteacher named John Grant (Gary Bond), who after only a short time in the Yabba has discovered that pounding pints of the local lager is the townsfolk's main diversion. Well, that and the various activities one gets up to after a beer or ten, including drunken fistfights, drunken kangaroo hunts, and drunken fistfights with kangaroos.

Grant's just in town to catch a flight to Sydney, but when a bad bet leaves him broke and stranded, he starts to mingle with the natives, despite his contempt for their backwards ways.

Thus begins the kind of weekend that makes many a man swear off the booze for good. "Wake in Fright" depicts its characters trying to blow off steam in a place offering no escape from the searing heat. The sweat-soaked, dust-caked atmosphere it creates is so effective you may find yourself craving a cold one, while simultaneously wondering if maybe a nice glass of water wouldn't be a better choice.