Up in Smoke (1978)

Up in Smoke arrived in 1978 as the feature debut of a comedy duo who had spent a decade refining their act on stage and on record, and it carries itself with the confidence of performers who already know where the laughs live. Lou Adler directs with the enthusiasm of a man who has never met a second take he liked. The plot, such as it is, moves from a traffic median arrest to a Tijuana upholstery shop to a Battle of the Bands at the Roxy, and the connective tissue between these episodes is largely smoke. It is a shaggy object. It is also, by the standards of its genre, an efficient one.

On the matter of casting, the film deserves a measured nod. A Chicano lead and an Asian-Canadian lead headlined a studio comedy in the late seventies, a pairing no marketing department of that era would have engineered on purpose. The Mexican-American world here (Tijuana, the INS, deportation, the relatives who summon immigration for a free ride to a wedding) is rendered as texture, not thesis. Nobody turns to the camera to explain what it means. The humor is ethnic in the way family humor is ethnic, which is to say casually and without a pamphlet.

Beyond that, the ledger is bare. There is no romantic agency for the women who hitch a ride, no environmental conscience, no economic grievance, no meditation on the body or the mind. The film's attitude toward authority is contemptuous but not ideological; the dream at the end of the road is a recording contract and a payday. The cops get stoned, the nuns drive off with a joint in the car, and nobody learns anything. That absence of instruction is the film's most distinctive quality. In an era that has forgotten how to leave a message out, this one simply refuses, and there is a strange integrity in the refusal.