Payday is a 1973 American drama film written by Don Carpenter, directed by Daryl Duke, and starring Rip Torn as a country music singer.

Maury Dann (Rip Torn) is a successful country-western singer who travels around the Southern states in a Cadillac and gets himself into all sorts of adventures.

He meets a young girl named Sandy backstage and seduces her in the back of his car while her boyfriend and boss, Mr. Bridgeway, is looking for her.

Peter Schjeldahl of The New York Times called it "a brilliant, nasty little chrome-plated razor blade of a movie ... a 'road picture' that is not, for once, a sentimental odyssey, but rather a clear-eyed study of people whose lives are linked to the road, how they behave and what becomes of them.

"[2] Arthur D. Murphy of Variety called it "a topnotch melodrama which explores incisively one of the dimmer aspects of the backstage pop music scene.

"[3] Charles Champlin of the Los Angeles Times wrote, "While backstage dramas are nothing new and we have been shown the sneer behind the starry grin often enough, in 'A Face in the Crowd' and elsewhere, 'Payday' explores the Nashville-centered world of country with an easy authenticity which makes this nothing like a repetition of what has been before.