According to my wife (whose mother managed a movie theater in Riga, Latvia), this film was a favorite with Soviet audiences, for its portrayal of corrupt government officials trying to take down the 'working-class' lead. Don't ask me how they got the rental on this one....
shareNot just in the USSR. But, they did not rent Convoy in the video rental places in Riga. No ordinary soul had a VCR in the Soviet Block anyway. The movie ran in the movie theaters in several countries of the Soviet Block in the early 1980s.
Convoy was one of the Hollywood movies carefully selected by government censors because it portrayed (a) poor hard-working American blue-collar class abused by their government, (b) a black guy beaten up by an American cop, (c) sleazy/corrupt American government officials. To your average communist government official in the USSR, Poland, Czechoslovakia or East Germany, this movie must have seemed like the ideal propaganda tool. However, they missed something. They missed the delicately portrayed upbeat counter-culture and opposition to "the system" that was so ingeniously infused into this picture by Sam Peckinpah. Coupled with the captivating music of Chip Davis, this was a movie that was hard to miss and hard to be liked by the young generation in the Soviet block of the early 1980s. I know that for I was one of them... Nobody ever said communists were smart...
I know they didn't have rental places back then...note what I said, "my mother-in-law ran a movie theatre." When I said "rental," that is the term for films that are sent movie theatres--they rent it from a distributor, as this wasn't "first run" and certainly not the primary release market.
[deleted]
Cool :)
shareSo it was Rubber Duck who brought down the Berlin Wall. You learn somethin' new every day.
----
A journey into the realm of the obscure: http://saturdayshowcase.blogspot.com/
They left the bear in the air. True story.
🇦🇺 All the little devils are proud of Hell.