Credit for that goes to their matching blue suits, which tipped Williams off to the spirit of the enterprise he had joined. Williams's screen time in Smokey is relatively brief, but he makes an immediate impression as Little Enos Burdette, who sets the movie's cavalcade of car crashes in motion alongside his on-screen dad (and off-screen friend), Big Enos, played by Pat McCormick. If there was ever a film that acted as kind of a clubhouse for a time and place, it's Smokey and the Bandit.'

'Billy Bob Thornton once said that, in the South, Smokey and the Bandit is considered a documentary,' songwriter-actor Paul Williams tells Yahoo Entertainment with a laugh. It also became part of the pop culture firmament of the American South, where it's viewed as being more than just a smashing good time. Helmed by stuntman-turned-director Hal Needham, Smokey and the Bandit sped to a mighty $126 million, lapping the domestic gross of Steven Spielberg's Close Encounters of the Third Kind.

Forty-five years ago, Smokey and the Bandit went head to head with Star Wars over the long Memorial Day weekend, and while George Lucas's space opera emerged as 1977's biggest hit, audiences happily went ' East Bound and Down' with Burt Reynolds's boisterous bootlegger over and over again. Han Solo may be the galaxy's best smuggler, but back here on terra firma, no one outraces the Bandit. Pat McCormick and Paul Williams as Big Enos and Little Enos in Smokey and the Bandit.

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