This 1976 sequel to Burt's successful good-ole-boy movie WHITE LIGHTNING doesn't represent its star in peak form--as actor or director. (The picture was uncreditedly co-directed by James Best, star of several Sam Fuller movies; he didn't learn much from the old man.) But it's memorable for one reason only--for the guy who, for my money, takes the cake for Greatest Character Actor of the Seventies Gone to Waste.
Jerry Reed is best known for his novelty songs and his appearances in bumptious comedies like HOT STUFF (opposite Suzanne Pleshette and Dom DeLuise). But look at his chillingly suave downhome hit man in Michael Ritchie's THE SURVIVORS, or his magnificent performance here, and you see the man who should have had Tommy Lee Jones' career.
As Bama, a dirt-poor boy made good as a pimp and a gangster, Jerry Reed has the kind of unnameable connection with the audience that other singers-turned-actors like Sinatra and, on occasion, Willie Nelson had. His Bama never lets you forget the tin-shack fate he overcame through a life of peddling sin: he's like the redneck star of his own blaxploitation movie playing in his head. The smoothie charmer who can turn sadistic-violent on a dime is as ripe an opportunity for ham as they come, but Jerry Reed is genuinely seductive and chilling--and Reynolds hands him scene after scene to steal. The guy was a great actor--and he never got the chances that a similar (and less varied) actor like Charles Napier got.
If someone's reading this has the opportunity--give the guy a job.
