The hippie and the redneck can be friends: two worlds collide in film and music.

• Author: Walker, Jesse
• Position: Culture and Reviews - Hick Flicks: The Rise and Fall of Redneck Cinema - Book Review

IF YOU'RE A cultural historian, a movie geek, or just looking for an excuse to spend three hours watching TV, here's a video double feature you should try. First watch the premier pot-smuggling flick of the 1970s, Cheech and Chong's Up in Smoke. Then pop in the decade's most famous film about Coors smuggling, Smokey and the Bandit. When you're done, try to figure out just how the good ol' boys and the hippies, two American tribes who were supposed to be sworn enemies, wound up flocking to such similar movies. The stories aren't twins--the heroes of Up in Smoke are too stoned to realize they're ferrying illegal cargo or that a smokey is on their trail--but if you catch them in the right light, they look like brothers.

These days it's widely recognized that it was the 1970s, not the '60s, that marked the real cultural revolution in the United States. The earlier decade might have seen America's traditionally tiny bohemia become a mass phenomenon, but it was in the '70s that the wave crashed, breaking down the boundaries between the rebels and the mainstream. One sign of this was a burst of creativity in Hollywood, where figures who spent the '60s soaking up the counterculture and making low-budget exploitation features--Francis Ford Coppola, Martin Scorsese, Jack Nicholson--used their new freedoms and their unorthodox training to transform the face of American film.

Meanwhile, other hands kept turning out those exploitation movies. In the new book Hick Flicks: The Rise and Fall of Redneck Cinema (McFarland), Scott Von Doviak gives us an entertaining and illuminating look at their world. "While blaxploitation pictures ruled the urban grindhouses, providing heroes and myths for those trapped in the inner cities," he writes, "hick flicks dominated the drive-in circuit, bringing their own set of archetypal figures to flyover country." Von Doviak, who covers film for the Fort Worth Star-Telegram, has cast a wide net; he ends up discussing everything from early B movies to 21st-century fare, from backwoods creature features to art-house documentaries. But the heart of his book is the 1970s, and the soul is movies about outlaws driving cars or trucks, ideally with a load of illicit spirits.

I can't endorse every opinion Von Doviak espouses. Notably, he fails to appreciate the peculiar charms of Sam Peckinpah's Convoy, surely the only film that is simultaneously a Christian allegory, a vaguely anarchist political fable, and a feature-length...