Ed Wood's When the Topic is Sex: "Trucking's a Ball" (1974)

Ed Wood wrote about truckers? That's a 10-4, good buddy.

NOTE: This article continues my coverage of Ed Wood's When the Topic is Sex (BearManor Media, 2021).

The article: "Trucking's a Ball." Also known as "Truckin's a Ball." Originally published in Fantastic Annual (Pendulum Publishing), 1974. Credited to "Dick Trent."

Excerpt: "The girls will stick out a thumb on the highway, but it will not be directed at the comforts of some late model automobile with the neatly dressed, freshly shaved driver behind the wheel. In fact, the girls won't even put a thumb out to those men. It is only when the roar of the truck comes along that their thighs begin to quiver and their titties begin to rise and fall rapidly under their sweaters or blouses."

Only in the 1970s: C.W. McCall.

Reflections: Are you old enough to remember trucker-mania? In the 1970s, the long-haul trucker briefly became a pop culture icon in America, inspiring movies, TV shows, toys, and even pop songs. When else could "Convoy" by C.W. McCall have topped the charts? The timing of this phenomenon actually makes some sense, if you put it into its proper historical context. In the wake of the Vietnam War and the Watergate scandal, we Americans were deeply distrustful of authority, and truckers seemed like antiestablishment heroes we could root for. They lived by their own rules, often enraging the cops in the process, but they weren't wimpy, peace-loving hippies. They were rough, tough dudes who could handle themselves in a fight.

It's only natural that Ed Wood wrote an article about truckers, but as usual, he had his own particular spin on the subject. "Trucking's a Ball" is not really about truckers, per se, but about the women who obsessively follow truckers around for sexual reasons. Ed has given this matter a lot of thought and pinpointed the exact reason that the ladies love trucker drivers: the smell. As he writes: "It's the man smell. The tough, rough man smell that seems to come off to them as all male . . . and these girls want only that . . . all male." This is one of those days when I'm glad When the Topic is Sex isn't a scratch-and-sniff book.

There's an odd double standard at play here when it comes to personal cleanliness. Ed had nothing but contempt for hippies and wrote often about how filthy they were, both in their clothing and their bodily hygiene. (It's almost never a good sign when a character in one of his novels is wearing dirty jeans.) But he lionizes those same exact qualities in truckers, even pointing out that truckers will wear "the same underwear" for days on end. Why is it okay for truckers to be slobs but not hippies? Maybe it's because truckers are at least contributing to the economy, while hippies probably aren't.

Going into more detail than anyone might want, Ed writes that a tucker's feet "are encased with grime in the heavy socks and boots he's worn for hours on end." That reminded me of a line from Glen or Glenda (1953). "His feet encased in the same, thick, tight-fitting leather that his shoes are made of." That must be one of Ed Wood's weirdest motifs: "encased" feet. 

Speaking of motifs, Ed Wood often used the curious term "pink clouds" to describe the pleasurable sensations that a woman might experience while having sex or taking drugs (or both). I first encountered it while reading his 1967 novel Devil Girls. He uses it here, too, in a passage about what it's like to have sex in a truck while it's actually in motion! Naturally, this requires two truckers: one to make love, another to drive. Ed's imagery is almost hallucinogenic: 

And as they will tell it, this is one of the really great sensations of intercourse . . . when the roar, the throb, the rhythm of the motor comes tearing through every fibre of their bodies, that's when they have intercoursed themselves right up onto pink cloud number nine . . . and it is strange when you hear all these girls telling about the smelling man, the worst of the lot, they have had, yet at all times when they speak of reaching their climax they refer to it as some sort of pink . . . cloud . . . heaven . . .blanket . . . surf . . .always pink . . . and pink in any other terms might be thought of as all the clean things in the world.

Along with those references to pink clouds, Ed makes sure to mention the odor of the truckers, too. He really thought this was a major selling point for women. Maybe there should have been a cologne for men who wanted to smell like a trucker. Eau de Diesel Fuel or something.

Incidentally, "Trucking's a Ball" is yet another article that I had already reviewed on this blog. I first discussed this article back in 2020, just weeks before the pandemic began. And now here we are, finally emerging from the shadow of COVID-19 after two brutal years, and I'm still writing about this ridiculous Ed Wood trucker article. The more things change, huh?

Next: "What Are Little Girls Made Of?" (1971)

Ed Wood Wednesdays, week 94: "Trucking's a Ball" (1974)

The kind of lovely lass that any long haul trucker might meet along the way.

Fans who know Edward D. Wood, Jr. through his relatively innocent early films may tend to think of the man himself as purely a relic of the 1950s. File him alongside poodle skirts, tail fins, hula hoops, and Davy Crockett hats. The 1994 biopic Ed Wood reinforces this quaint, cozy image. The film's timeline is deliberately vague, but its action is largely confined to the 1950s, while the B&W cinematography gives the entire production the glow of Eisenhower era nostalgia. In this way, naïve Eddie is preserved in amber, like those insects in Jurassic Park.

But those who followed the man's career into the 1960s and '70s understand that, whether he wanted to or not, Ed Wood was forced to adapt to the rapidly evolving world around him just to stay employed. The times, they were a-changin', and they certainly didn't make an exception for Eddie. And so, in Ed Wood's later work, you'll find hippies, LSD, women's libbers, scuzzy biker gangs, miniskirts, antiwar protesters, acid rock, etc. All the signposts of those turbulent times.

And now we come to this week's article, another supposed "non-fiction" job for which Eddie clearly did no research. It's his wild take on one of the most memorable fads of the 1970s. Really, you can't get much more 1970s than what follows.

Vintage trucker magazine from 1972

The story: "Trucking's a Ball," originally published in Fantastic Annual (Gallery Press, 1974). Anthologized in Short Wood: Short Fiction by Edward D. Wood, Jr. (Ramble House, 2009). Credited to "Dick Trent."

Synopsis: Women's tastes have changed over the years. While they used to prefer neat, well-groomed young men, now they search out hairy, smelly roughnecks for companionship. In particular, they are attracted to long haul truck drivers. When hitchhiking, young women will often disregard late model passenger cars and wait instead for a trucker to drive past in his big rig. Some ladies are so anxious to get close to truckers that they'll even take jobs as waitresses in truck stops.

Ladies seek these truck drivers out solely for sex, rather than money or marriage. Many of these horny truck drivers are married, but they're away from home so long that they must fulfill their sexual desires somehow. And that's where these women enter the picture, gladly servicing the men and even staying with them on the road for hundreds of miles. The author cautions against too much hanky panky while driving, however. Better to find a rest stop along the way.

Wood trademarks: Supposed reportage of changing sex habits in America (cf. "College Cherries," "College Interview"); lots of ellipses (Ed's trademark punctuation); dubious euphemism for sexual intercourse (in this case, "getting your gun off"); anti-hippie sentiment (cf. Death of a Transvestite, "The Devil Collects His Dues"); reference to feet being "encased" (cf. Glen or Glenda); "quiver" (cf. "Insatiable," "Calamity Jane," "The Unluckiest Man in the World"); girls' sweaters (cf. Glen or Glenda, many stories in Blood Splatters Quickly and Angora Fever); "pink clouds" (cf. "Tears on Her Pillow," "Never Up - Never In," Devil Girls); use of color pink in general (cf. "2 X Double"); tongues (cf. "Tom of Finland's Circus," "The Responsibility Game," "Cease to Exist"); "manhood" (cf. "The Last Void," "Cease to Exist"); naughty pun in the title (cf. "Missionary Position Impossible," "Captain Fellatio Hornblower").

Excerpt: "This is the kind of girl who honestly believes that any well dressed, cleaned up man is built like a small child. The only men left in the world who is built big enough to satisfy them is the trucker. And it isn't only his penis that they long for. It's the man smell. The tough, rough man smell that seems to come off to them as all male… and these girls want only that… all male."

Reflections: There had been songs and films about long haul truckers since at least the late 1930s, most of them portraying the profession in a sympathetic light, but the trucker didn't truly assume the role of pop culture icon until the 1970s. That's when "Convoy" by C.W. McCall topped the charts, movies like Smokey and the Bandit and White Line Fever appeared in movie theaters, and prime time played host to rambunctious shows like B.J and the Bear and Movin' On. For a few years there, truckers were hot. There were even board games and action figures for the kids!

Who knows, in retrospect, why these fads occur? It was really the convergence of many factors. In films and songs of the era, truckers were often shown to be at odds with the police, so they had an air of anti-authority cool to them. But they were in the transportation business to make money, so they weren't some unpatriotic commies. As Ed Wood points out in this article, truckers were expected to be grungy and hairy in appearance, but they were also tough and physical, not like  those namby-pamby pacifist hippies on college campuses. I think it's significant, too, that truckers had their own culture that was separate and distinct from that of the mainstream. Truck drivers had a rich variety of slang, for instance, as lovingly depicted in "Convoy," plus their own hangouts and fashions.

Typically, Ed Wood focuses on the sexual aspects of the phenomenon. Always obsessed with gender roles, Eddie depicts truckers as hyper-masculine -- a new paradigm, in fact, for sheer manliness. It's only natural that sexually active young women will all but fling themselves at every 18-wheeler that comes into view. What's semi-miraculous here is that Ed does not judge these lusty trucker groupies who hop from driver to driver in search of pleasure. They're just going after what they truly want. And what's so wrong about that?

Hey, it's my second thing for Splitsider!

My latest piece for Splitsider is about trucker tapes.

Just a little heads up, in case you somehow missed it. The website Splitsider, which is about the world of comedy, ran another one of my articles. This one is called "The Raunchy, Underground World of Trucker Tapes," and it's the fruition of a long-time obsession of mine. I've gotten some nice comments about it online through Twitter and Facebook, which is gratifying. I don't know how I became interested in trucker comedy, probably because of a few scattered references to "filthy trucker tapes" on MST3K. But I knew I wanted to turn it into an article when I started looking into the career of a comic named Gene Tracy, aka "Mr. Truckstop." There are hours and hours of this guy's stuff posted to YouTube, and I've spent way too many late nights listening to it -- not as comedy, really, more as sociology. I think one thing which fascinated me was the fact that Tracy's audiences were rowdier than what you'd normally expect on a comedy album. You get the sense that any one of his gigs could have turned into a knock-down, drag-out melee at a moment's notice if, say, somebody spilled his beer on somebody else's shoes. In other words, there's a danger to those performances. But I was also interested in the fact that truckers have their own little universe of comedy stars, performers virtually unknown to the rest of the world.

Mill Creek comedy classics #72: "Mr. Wise Guy" (1942)

Fun fact: Mr. Wise Guy is #398,346 of the 800,000 movies made by The East Side Kids.

The flick: Mr. Wise Guy (Monogram Pictures, 1942) [buy the set]

Current IMDb rating: 6.8

Director: William Nigh (Zis Boom Bah, A Bride for Henry; sadly, not Bill Nye the Science Guy)

"Big Boy" Williams

Series regulars: 

• Leo Gorcey, Bobby Jordan, Huntz Hall (all in Clancy Street Boys)

• David Gorcey, Gabriel Dell, Bobby Stone, Ernest Morrison (all in Smart Alecks)

Other actors of note: 

• Billy Gilbert (Peck's Bad Boy with the Circus, The Villain Still Pursued Her)

• Douglas Fowley (Money Means Nothing)

• Joan Barclay (Flying Wild)

• Guinn "Big Boy" Williams (perennial sidekick in Westerns; Errol Flynn's best friend; nicknamed "the Babe Ruth of polo"; appeared in The Alamo, The Comancheros, A Star is Born, etc.)

• Warren Hymer (Capra's Meet John Doe and Mr. Deeds Goes to Town)

• Ann Doran (Rebel Without a Cause, Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, His Girl Friday; dozens of TV credits ranging from Bewitched to The A-Team )

• Jack Mulhall (first actor to ever play a dual role in a talking picture; also appeared in Around the World in 80 Days, The Man with the Golden Arm, much more)

• Benny Rubin (Zis Boom Bah)

• Joe Kirk (Smart Alecks)

• Dick Ryan (ex-vaudevillian; appeared in Hitchcock's Strangers on a Train; guested on The Andy Griffith Show, Ozzie & Harriet, Rawhide, and more)

Bad girl Ann Doran

The gist of it: Dock worker Bill Collins (Fowley) has been drafted into the Army, but he's worried that his younger brother, Danny (Jordan), might get into trouble and wind up in reform school without supervision. But Danny and the rest of the East Side Kids are then framed for a truck hijacking and wind up in the very same hellish reformatory where Bill had once served as a guard. Visiting the old place, Bill is happy to see that some improvements have been made under the new warden (Mulhall), and he begins a romance with one of the institution's kinder employees, Ann (Barclay).

But an abusive guard named Miller (Ryan) still works there and takes an immediate dislike to the boys, especially the nervy, confrontational Muggs (Gorcey), whom he calls "Mr. Wise Guy." Then Bill himself is framed for a murder actually committed by the same group of crooks responsible for the earlier hijacking: ringleader and escaped con Luke Manning (Williams), gun moll Dorothy (Doran), and fumbling sidekick Knobby (Gilbert). As Bill waits in the death house, Muggs and the gang cross paths with tough fellow inmate Chalky (Stone) and the sadistic Miller, who is eventually fired for his violent treatment of the kids. On the day of Bill's execution, Bobby miraculously spots a bit of evidence in a newsreel which exonerates both his brother and the East Side Kids, too. So the boys break out of the institution and confront Knobby and Dorothy, who had  been secretly conspiring against Manning and were planning to sneak off with his lottery winnings.

My take: The justice system in the East Side Kids universe is an absolute disgrace. From the earliest moments of Mr. Wise Guy, the Kids are being hassled by the cops and accused of crimes they didn't commit. Whenever characters in these movies avoid arrest, it's by pure luck. And when they are arrested, their so-called trials by jury are mere formalities. The verdict is always guilty, though I can't imagine what evidence beyond that of the circumstantial variety is available. We never get to see the inside of a courtroom in an ESK movie, just the screaming headlines in the newspapers. Monogram is too cheap and lazy to even spin the papers (which might take an extra 20 seconds); they just zoom in on the articles.

Pretty early on in Mr. Wise Guy, you can see an obvious cost-cutting measure when the same prop newspaper is used to cover two different plot developments. That would be fine, if the second crucial headline didn't give away an upcoming plot point. Because of that phony paper, I knew the Kids were going to be sent up the river for hijacking a truck wayyyyy before that actually happens in the movie.

That second headline hasn't happened in the movie yet.

By the way, I must point out that this is the third "truck hijacking" movie I've reviewed in this series, and they've all been from Monogram Pictures. The others, in case you were interested, are Money Means Nothing (1934) and The Gang's All Here (1941). Must've been a specialty of the house. None of these flicks have been especially interesting or involving, and Money Means Nothing in particular was a chore to sit through.

Mr. Wise Guy is about average for an ESK flick. I can only assume it was made very quickly and very cheaply, rushed into theaters and then quickly forgotten. It moves along at a good clip and never gets too bogged down in any particular plot points to become boring. Yet again, the Kids spend only the first few minutes of the film on their home turf before the script transplants them to another surrounding.

Is it funny: I can't remember laughing too much during Mr. Wise Guy. I'm kind of back-and-forth on the humor of the East Side Kids, though. I guess if you're in the mood for them, Leo Gorcey's wisecracks and Huntz Hall's stupidity might really strike you as being hilarious. If you're not, watching them is like being cornered by clowns at a birthday party who caper and frolic for you whether you want them to or not. The weird thing about this movie is that the plot is actually kind of heavy and depressing, what with poor Danny worried sick that his brother's going to the electric chair. This material sits uneasily with the Bazooka Joe-esque shenanigans and puns of the East Side Kids. In culinary terms, this film is a peanut butter and tuna fish sandwich.

My grade: C

P.S. - Ernest "Scruno" Morrison is back and brings with him the usual assortment of racial/racist schtick. It starts early, too, with Muggs referring to Scruno as "our blackout warden" in the opening scene (a really weird, extended monologue in which Muggs flirts with a store mannequin). And there are chicken and watermelon jokes, too, plus a scene in which Morrison runs wide-eyed with fear at the very sight of a gun. Still not as bad as Boys of the City, though.

Mill Creek comedy classics #20: "The Gang's All Here" (1941)

Either that gunman is gigantic or Jackie Moran and Marcia Mae Jones are tiny in The Gang's All Here.

The flick: The Gang's All Here (Monogram Pictures, 1941) [buy the set]

Current IMDb rating: 6.3

Director: Jean Yarbrough (Freckles Comes Home)

Actors of note:

• Frankie Darro (voice of Lampwick in Pinocchio; played Robby the Robot in Forbidden Planet)

• Mantan Moreland (Freckles Comes Home)

• Keye Luke (the old Chinese man in both Gremlins movies; played "number one son" in the Charlie Chan series, much more)

• Marcia Mae Jones (The Way We Were, Heidi, Imitation of Life)

• Jackie Moran (Gone with the Wind; played Huckleberry Finn in The Adventures of Tom Sawyer; Russ Meyer's Wild Gals of the Naked West)

• Robert Homans (The Grapes of Wrath, The Maltese Falcon)

• Laurence Criner (Freckles Comes Home)

The gist of it: A large number of "accidents," some fatal, have been plaguing a certain trucking company. Now, Pop Wallace (Homans) is having trouble finding anyone to drive his trucks. Nervy pipsqueak Frankie (Darro) and his lazy, bug-eyed black sidekick Jeff (Moreland) answer Pop's newspaper ad. He's reluctant and highly skeptical, but he gives them the job anyway because he's desperate. Meanwhile, Pop's pushy, demanding daughter Patsy (Jones) is always hounding her grease-monkey boyfriend Chick (Moran) to be more of a take-charge kind of guy... a real go-getter, like Frankie. The so-called accidents are intentional sabotage by a gang of crooks who have forced Pops to be part of their scheme, and it isn't long before Frankie and Jeff find themselves in real trouble.

Keye Luke

My take: If you hear the term "trucker comedy," you're liable to think of mudflaps, CB lingo, and the music of Waylon Jennings and Merle Haggard. But The Gang's All Here is from an earlier era, before the big rigger enjoyed his brief heyday as an anti-establishment, good ol' boy hero in the 1970s. The song "Convoy" wouldn't be written for a few more decades yet. The rigs ain't all that big in this flick, and the drivers aren't transporting anything cool like dynamite or beer, just "perishables" to a Fresno grocery store.

The film actually works a little better as a crime thriller than a comedy. If you'll notice, a lot of the folks from Freckles Comes Home are reunited here, and like that film, The Gang's All Here -- an utterly meaningless title, by the way, unless it's an oblique reference to the film's many gangsters  -- features more murder and mayhem than you'd normally expect from a comedy. The first few minutes, in fact, are nothing but trucks being run off the road and tumbling down cliffs, followed by a montage of headlines about the drivers who have been killed and maimed. It's a weird start to a supposedly funny film, but it does lend a sense of real urgency to the plot. Frankie and Jeff really are in trouble!

I should mention, by the way, that Mantan Moreland's character in this film is scarcely more admirable than his one in Freckles Comes Home, except that Moreland does eventually become sort of valuable to Frankie as a sidekick. But Moreland subserviently refers to his friend as "Mister Frankie," and once again, the movie stops dead so that he and Laurence Criner (whose character is embarrassingly named "Ham Shanks") can do little comedy bits that emphasize Moreland's dishonesty and Criner's stupidity. Not a proud moment for humanity.

But there's hope elsewhere in the film! Keye Luke, the incredibly prolific character actor, plays a Chinese-American character who speaks English fluently and is portrayed in an entirely flattering and positive light. You could even argue that his character is the real hero of this movie. That genuinely surprised me.

Lampwick: Still terrifying.

Is it funny: It's not overly funny, no. It's not a total washout as a comedy, though. Marcia Mae Jones is somewhat fun as the mouthy, never-satisfied Patsy. What Chick sees in her (other than her chipmunk-cute looks) is beyond me, but she's more interesting than the bland love interests in a lot of these movies. The cowardice and laziness of Mantan Moreland's character make him a relic of a bygone era, but the man clearly had a flair for comedy. His timing and delivery are impeccable, even when the material he's given isn't up to snuff.

And then there's the ostensible star of this flick, Frankie Darro, probably best known for traumatizing generations of children as the voice of Lampwick in Disney's Pinocchio. His transformation into a donkey remains terrifying, over 70 years later. His character here, also named Frankie, is a loudmouth whose braggadocio is undercut by his small stature. You know how little dogs are often the most aggressive, challenging much larger dogs to fights they can't possibly win? That's Frankie Darro -- a yappy little Chihuahua who goes around snapping at pit bulls. As someone whose family has always had dogs, I found that rather amusing.

My grade: B-

P.S. - Mantan Moreland and Laurence Criner won't be up for any NAACP Image awards for this film.