A candid look at your favorite trucker movies.

Ask most highbrow movie critics to name the best trucker movie of all-time, and they’re likely to sneer in disgust. It’s a genre most latte-sipping movie reviewers love to hate.

We can take solace in the fact critics’ opinions are often refuted by the movie-going public. Independence Day and Forrest Gump are prime examples of award-winning films panned by many critics and embraced by audiences. Sometimes the elitists forget we like to be entertained.

This is not to say that all trucking movies deserve a pity party for being underappreciated. Some are simply bad. But many do warrant a certain amount of credit for not only being entertaining, but also spotlighting a slice of Americana.

Movies involving trucks and truckers are almost as old as the film industry itself. Many silent movie classics showcased working delivery trucks of the day, and you’ll even find an actor or two credited as a truck driver, like Charlie Hall in the 1929 Laurel and Hardy short, Bacon Grabbers.

Among the earliest notable movies with truck drivers as central characters were The St. Louis Kid (1934) with James Cagney and Patricia Ellis and the 1940 melodrama They Drive By Night, starring Humphrey Bogart and George Raft. The films were the genesis of the trucker-struggling-against-corruption theme that would serve as the plot of future trucking flicks.