Smokey and the Bandit (1977)

The Bandit is hired on to run a tractor trailer full of beer over state lines, in hot pursuit by a pesky sheriff. - Christopher D. Ryan

Bandit and Cledus are two truck-driving southerners who accept a dare from big-shots Big and Little Enos to pick up a truckload of beer from Texas and return it to them within a specified amount of time. Picking it up is simple enough, but as they are leaving Texas, Bandit unwittingly picks up Carrie, a hitchhiking bride-to-be who just left her groom, Junior, at the altar. Junior, however, is the son of Sheriff Buford T. Justice. And when Buford and Junior discover what has happened, they go on a "high-speed pursuit" across the Southeast to catch the bandit.

In the summer of 1976 "Big Enos" Burdette, a flamboyant Texan aspiring to political office in Georgia, needs a vast quantity of beer for a rally, but the brand of beer he wants is Coors which at this time cannot be legally transported across the Mississippi, and at least one attempted shipment has already been intercepted by police. To get this job done, Burdette recruits modern day moonshiner Bo Darville, nicknamed Bandit for his previous exploits, for a hefty six-figure payment. Darville in turn recruits his pal Cledus Snow and his eighteen-wheeler for the job, entailing driving from Georgia to Texas, picking up 400 crates of Coors beer, and returning to Georgia, all in a span of twenty-eight hours. To draw off the heat of snooping state police, Darville will drive interference for Cledus in a hot Pontiac Trans-Am, the two of them maintaining contact via citizen's-band radios and the seemingly bizarre lingo used within. The trip to Texas and loading of beer goes without interruption, but the trip back to Georgia begins to pick up complications when Darville is stopped by a runaway bride, Carrie, who is fleeing a forced marriage to the son of a full-of-himself Texas county sheriff, Buford T. Justice. Sheriff Justice's pursuit of his prospective daughter-in-law soon becomes an interstate high-speed pursuit involving police from four states and also the intervention of varied interstate truckers aiding Darville and Cledus as they close on Enos Burdette's Georgia bash. - Michael Daly