Dual Exhaust

By JAY COCKS

On Any Sunday is a distinctly unconvincing celebration of motorcycle racing by Bruce Brown, who made the wildly successful surfing paean The Endless Summer in 1966. Brown's enthusiasm for his subjects is unbounded, and On Any Sunday shares with its predecessor a kind of gosh-all-fishhooks fascination with the rituals of sporting risk. But whereas The Endless Summer has marvelous scenery of rolling seas, On Any Sunday offers only roaring motors. For a very long 95 minutes, Brown unreels footage of racers: surging around a track or scrambling cross-country, gunning their motors to assault a peak in Utah or speeding--a thousand strong --through the Mojave Desert.

Packaged Audience. Brown is at pains to include every conceivable cliche of documentary film making. There is plenty of slow motion, a rash of feeble jokes (mostly involving riders taking a fall or splattering themselves with mud), and a musical score by Dominic Frontiere that sounds as if it were lifted straight out of some industrial short like The Glory of Tupperware. Brown solemnly informs us, via the sound track, how dangerous the whole business of bike racing really is, and his attitude toward such pros as Mert Lawwill and Malcolm Smith and talented amateurs like Steve McQueen is plainly, sometimes embarrassingly, adulatory. In the course of his narration Brown mentions that there are 4,000,000 motorcycle riders in the U.S., which gives him a neatly packaged audience who will presumably be more sympathetic toward On Any Sunday than many unconverted viewers for whom the machines might just as well be lawnmowers.

Almost anyone, however, might mildly enjoy Evel Knievel, a cheerfully silly motorcycle saga based on the life of a professional daredevil and his wife Linda (Sue Lyon). The movie is best when dealing with Knievel's early exploits: harassing the small-town Montana cops, riding into a dormitory full of giggling co-eds in pursuit of his girl friend, and stunt driving in a rundown local rodeo. Soon Knievel (played improbably but ingratiatingly by George Hamilton) begins to build quite a reputation for himself, and even becomes a sort of folk hero. Crowds turn out from all over the state--and, it is eventually implied, from all over the country --to watch his harebrained heroics. The film ends with him jumping over 19 cars on his chopper and promising an assault on the Grand Canyon. His death, he swears, will be "glorious."

Surprisingly for a film biography of a man who is still alive (the real Knievel performed in Madison Square Garden a month ago), the hero is portrayed as an egomaniac, a compulsive worrier and a shameless searcher after publicity. Marvin Chomsky's direction is pedestrian, but the script (by Alan Caillou, John Milius and Pat Williams) has some nice moments of quirky comedy, as when a fissure opens in the earth and a rather large automobile disappears without a trace. The film is good-naturedly skeptical and occasionally satiric about Knievel's exploits--in marked and welcome relief to the gushiness of Bruce Brown.

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