This is a classic movie blog, you know, so it’s supposed to be about classic movies. But there are different ways of defining “classic.” Personally I’m drawn to the definition offered up in a recent Frazz comic strip, that classic is defined by how it takes to forget something. But there are other definitions, too—and it’s worth remembering that “classic” doesn’t always mean “classy.” And that sometimes movies can be thoroughly entertaining and worthwhile without being classic. Because, let’s face it, Peter Yates’ 1976 Mother, Jugs, and Speed is not going to find itself on just about anyone’s roster of “classic films,” but it’s a surprising gem worth revisiting. It’s also not likely to turn up on TCM anytime soon, which is a shame, because it may have been too quickly forgotten for how well it works.
Let’s get the dismissive pish-shaw stuff out of the way first: yes, that’s one sleazy title. And yes, the film is full of breast and dick jokes to justify that title. It’s a comedy about the misadventures of a group of ambulance drivers (including Bill Cosby, Raquel Welch, Harvey Keitel, and Larry Hagman).
As premises go, it’s not what you’d use to anchor a movie today—it’s more of a sitcom premise. And sure enough, the film uses that premise as a framework for a series of blackout gags of the ambulance drivers getting into various situations with drunks, junkies, fat people, pregnant women, etc, interspersed with scenes of character development set in their rigs or back at the company headquarters. Typical set-up for a weekly workplace comedy, a la Taxi or Barney Miller or M*A*S*H or Cheers.
The blackout gag structure is fast-paced, slapstick-heavy and punchline-driven—which is where we make our first detour to notice the names in the opening credits. Yes, executive producer Joseph Barbera is the Joseph Barbera of Hanna-Barbera fame. This is one of his rare non-animated credits, but the occasionally cartoony nature of the thing shows his hand anyway.
But don’t get me wrong—if you come into this expecting a live-action cartoon with Bill Cosby and a bunch of slapstick you’ve come to wrong movie. There’s some of that here, to be sure, but it’s leavened with something entirely else—a real sense of drama and grit, with some shocking violence.
Time to check out another name on the credits—screenwriter Tom Mankiewicz, better known as the scribe behind Roger Moore’s 1970s James Bond films. And then we’ve got Peter Yates, director of Bullitt, The Deep, Breaking Away… by now you should be recognizing that we’ve got a weird set of ingredients going into this. A potential clash of creative visions, maybe? No—just a particularly singular recipe, that mixes comedy and drama in unexpected ways.
Take for example the early comedy-heavy scenes of the first third.
Larry Hagman plays a boorish clown of a driver, whose egotism, sexism, and greed combine with professional incompetence and bad luck to produce all manner of comic disasters. Contrasted with him is Bill Cosby, the suave, uber-confident, ultra-competent superman. A constant source of wisecracks, and wisdom, he’s the Groucho Marx figure. Hagman is the butt of every joke—Cosby is the joker.
So far, so good—and fairly predictable. Hagman seems the sort of character that any self-respecting sitcom would cast as a reliable laugh-magnet; Cosby seems like the kind of charismatic star that could anchor an entire show by himself (no surprises there). But those early assessments start to crumble as the film unfolds—
Gradually it becomes clear that Hagman isn’t a funny buffoon, he’s a horrible human being and a criminal. We’ve been laughing at him, but bit-by-bit we get indicted by that laughter and forced to rethink what we’ve been seeing. Similarly, the crude nickname “Jugs” and breast-focused attention on Raquel Welch seems aimed at some low-brow guffaws at first, until the film asserts her as an independently-minded hero—as if the entire movie glowers at the audience, “eyes up here mister!”
And then there’s Cosby himself—whose smart aleckry and anti-authoritarian defiance is revealed to be a defense mechanism against the dehumanizing horrors he sees on his job. His jokes are a sort of psychological chain-mail for dealing with death and injury—they call it “gallows humor” for a reason.
The comedy has a grim underbelly. What started off like sitcommy shenanigans turn out to pivot on real moments of human suffering, and our comfort zone gets chipped away as we watch.
But along with that, we are encouraged to re-evaluate the characters and see them as people. Characters who are introduced as one-note stereotypes turn out not to quite be what we pegged them. And no one is a villain—there are antagonists, sure, but even Hagman at his most enraged and dangerous never fits the “villain” role. It’s a film about tolerance.
To some extent that attitude is plainly political. This is a Women’s Lib picture, you see, about Welch’s character’s struggle to be accepted as a professional. She has to be vastly more talented and capable as any of the men around her to be thought of as anything other than a set of curves.
And then there’s race—or rather, there isn’t. I mean, race is part of the storyline, but not in the way you’d expect. There is a rival ambulance company that is black-owned and operated, so our mostly white heroes are in constant conflict with their black counterparts. But while this is explicitly discussed as a racial conflict, it doesn’t remotely feel like one, and is resolved when the two firms merge and happily work alongside each other without a trace of racial tension.
Furthermore, while most of the protagonists are white, there’s Bill Cosby. He’s openly acknowledged as their best driver—and he uses that position of superiority to be constantly mocking, defiant, and confrontational to all the other characters.
Mind you, it’s not that Cosby’s aggression is racial aggression—his mockery and defiance is nothing more than Hawkeye Pierce would do on a weekly basis on M*A*S*H to nobody’s discomfort. And his self-confident my-way-or-the-highway attitude was no different from Fonzie’s. But it’s not like in 1976 there were very many examples of a large imposing black man with an Afro talking back to his white employers, his white co-workers, white policemen, white lawyers, and white political leaders—much less many examples of such stuff being pitched to white audiences as genial entertainment, devoid of any racial edge.
A few months ago I posted about Richard Pryor in Silver Streak—and watching Pryor’s films it’s notable how defanged he was. Pryor was Gene Wilder’s recurring co-star, and the racial confrontation that seethed under his surface was always kept contained and neutered on screen. And then here’s Bill Cosby—nobody’s idea of a firebrand—playing a loud and proud character that Hollywood would never have given to Pryor.
For all its bawdy humor and knuckleheaded crudity, Mother, Jugs, and Speed earns a measure of lasting respect for the respect it shows its characters. It indulges in a host of stereotypes to make the point, but in the end it’s a vision of an America where color, sex, and sexual orientation need not be barriers between us. We’re all in this together. Might as well enjoy a beer, crank up the siren, and laugh, because it beats the alternative.
