Once having registered that Sergio Corbucci’s The 8 Wheel Beast is a dreaded juggernaut, and that what we’re in for is a story of Italian long distance lorry drivers and not a horror movie, one settles back to travel hopefully and learn something about life on the roas between Milan and Warsaw. What we get is a flashy consignment of traditional tough-guy cliches delivered by a disenchanted, middle-aged Northerner and his loudmouthed young Sicilian co-driver. They drink and fight and fornicate their was across Europe and then buy their own vehicle as a way of settling down. As independent operators they come into conflict with their former comrades (whom they betray in a strike), dishonest merchants and the mafia, and finally end up saving their truck in a cliff hanging scene that might have earned the title ‘The Dole Queue of Fear’. The gap between Corbucci’s meretricious movie and Bicycle Thieves is more than six wheels and 25 years.
Philip French, The Times, Friday, Jan 16, 1976
[note: this is Corbucci’s Il bestione (or The S Wheeled Beast as IMDB would have it!)