Review of Smash-Up on Interstate 5

Satisfactory TV-made disaster-of-the-week, prevalent in the latter-half of the 1970s, begins on a July 4th holiday weekend in Southern California. Police sergeant Robert Conrad warns his men about the traffic on L.A.'s dangerous freeways: "Whatever could go wrong will go wrong"...and so it does. Buddy Ebsen and Harriet Nelson are loving oldsters (she has weeks to live); Vera Miles is a divorcée swept off her feet by romantic trucker David Groh; Scott Jacoby is a car thief hijacked by a fugitive couple (all are involved in the shooting of rookie cop Tommy Lee Jones, whose wife just had a baby); and Sue Lyon is a biker chick who, just hours before, attempted to engage her buddies in the gang-rape of Miles in broad daylight. They're all involved in a violent freeway pile-up which frames the movie in flashback mode. The action is well-filmed and edited, and the characters are surprisingly interesting if unsavory. Conrad keeps an amusingly cool head throughout and anchors the story with his macho charm.