Review for Honky Tonk Freeway

Introduction

Hollywood’s love affair with the road has long been documented. Ever since the advent of the road movie, filmmakers have taken to giving their characters, literal as well as metaphorical journeys. When you have a country as vast and as varied as the US, you’re going to want to show it off. Then again, with Westerns full of cattle drives north from Texas, homesteaders making their way west across the Rockies to the fertile lands of Oregon and California, maybe filmmakers didn’t even need the roads to make their road movies. But the love for tarmac and the internal combustion engine is a whole other thing, and then in the seventies and eighties, came the comedies. I loved those movies, mostly because they had Burt Reynolds in, but also for the fantastic stunts and the larger than life characters. I spent more time that I feel comfortable discussing engrossed in the Smokey and the Bandit pictures, the Cannonball Runs, and God help me, even The Gumball Rally. I thought I had seen them all. As so often happens, I haven’t even scratched the surface of the genre, and I hadn’t even heard of Honky Tonk Freeway.


I should have heard of Honky Tonk Freeway, directed by John Schlesinger, with music from George Martin and Elmer Bernstein, and starring a veritable ‘who’s who is that face, I know him from something?’ of the 1980s. It was at that point the most expensive comedy made in Hollywood. The reason I’ve never heard of Honky Tonk Freeway is that it was also an utter flop in Hollywood. But you know, if I threw every film that flopped out of my collection, I’d cut it in half. That’s reason enough to give Honky Tonk Freeway a try.


The small town of Ticlaw, Florida is an up and coming tourist destination, on the strength and willpower of its mayor, priest, and hotel manager Mayor Kirby T. Calo. It’s even got a safari park, and a water-skiing elephant (if it can learn how to water-ski), and now that the freeway is being constructed past the town, a major artery into filling up the town’s coffers. All it needs is for an off-ramp to be sited near the town, and it will be gold rush fever...


What kind of world is it where even a well paid bribe doesn’t get you the off-ramp that you need! Not that the mayor and the good people of Ticlaw have given up. They’ll come up with whatever scheme it takes to keep their town prosperous, and get the off-ramp they need. And heading south to Florida and Ticlaw from all four corners of the United States are all manner of strange characters, nuns, a nymphomaniac, sanitation workers turned bank robbers, an inappropriate children’s storywriter, a hooker and her pimp, a retired couple, conscientious car thieves, an all American family in an RV, and a singing truck driver hauling the lions and rhino needed to fill the safari park.

The Disc

Honky Tonk Freeway gets a perfectly serviceable 1.85:1 anamorphic transfer, relatively free of dirt and print damage aside from the odd fleck. It has the discreet level of film grain that you would expect, but is otherwise clean and stable. You get a DD 2.0 English audio track, which has a fair bit of separation to it, the dialogue is clear, the film’s music comes across well and the action has sufficient impact. All that’s missing are the subtitles.

Extras

The disc presents its contents with a static menu. From there you’ll find the original theatrical trailer, the teaser trailer, and a 3-minute slideshow image gallery.

The real juicy stuff is in the form of a pdf file on the disc, which recreates the film’s 16 page press book. This is full of stills and promotional imagery, as well as a written account of the film’s making, actor and crew profiles, as well as text interviews with the same. It’s well worth taking the time to read.

Conclusion

William Devane is the best thing about this film. He plays the larger than life Mayor Calo, with all the energy and enthusiasm that you need to be drawn into the film. Unfortunately, he’s the only good thing about the film. It’s a comedy about the love affair with the road, but it isn’t a comedy where you see a lot of the road, in terms of car chases and stunts. This is a movie that focuses on the characters that make use of the mass transit arteries that run through the United States, all manner of strange people who need to get from A to B, and the odd encounters they have on the way, and it’s also about the need to keep a town’s economy alive by getting a convenient motorway exit nearby.


I referred to the old Westerns when thinking of where the road movies come from, and this is another variation on an old tale, that of the railroad. Towns would lobby for stations nearby, for people to come and go, for goods to flow in and out, to keep the threads of communication open with the outside world. Those towns that didn’t get railways would soon become ghost towns, as people left, and the money ran out. This is the same thing, only moved forward a hundred years to the age of the automobile and the freeway, where easy access to a main road could mean life or death for a tourist town.


Now if the film had just been about this, it would have been a lot easier to get into, there could have been a more coherent and intelligible story distilled from the script. Instead, Honky Tonk Freeway is a series of vignettes, character studies of all these varied people heading towards Ticlaw by road, as well as the story that unfolds in Ticlaw. The thing is that none of these characters are really that interesting; they don’t get the development they need to hold the attention, to make you care about their journeys and what they go through. It’s just a brief moment of silliness with one character, before moving on to the next to see what daftness they are up to, before moving again.


There are moments that are inspired in this film, such as an absurd extrapolation of the drive through culture, which sees one character visit a drive through bank, followed by a drive through crematorium. But such surreal moments are few and far between. I kind of liked Honky Tonk Freeway, it sort of entertained me, I might have given a noncommittal chuckle at times, and it didn’t quite bore me. You won’t mind watching it, but it won’t make a lasting impression either.