Viva Knievel!

 

Like Satan's Cheerleaders, this was a movie in my personal bad-movie rotation that convinced me 1977 had something special. It's the only movie in which Evel Knievel, whose extraordinary popularity can't be conveyed or explained to today's audience, plays himself. Thus, it's the only movie that really captures him and his whole schtick, the event of jumping his motorcycle over things that made him beloved and famed. 

The cast of this movie includes Gene Kelly, Lauren Hutton, Leslie Nielsen (not yet a satirist), Red Buttons, Dabney Coleman, and a man named Marjoe Gortner who is a 70s rabbit-hole in his own right. (I don't quite know why these people agreed to the movie nor why the movie wanted them, because the script is crud and Knievel is such a draw that why bother?) The production threw around enough money to make the movie look pretty good; it's brightly lit and reasonably well-shot, with good stunts and locations. The music is delightfully silly and the plot is deeply stupid, something about Leslie Nielsen smuggling drugs from Mexico via killing Knievel and creating duplicates of Knievel's motorcycle and the semi he uses for his caravan. It doesn't work, in the end, but it also doesn't matter at all. The movie is a platform for Knievel to perform tricks and promote his personal philosophies: no drugs, keep your word, forgive and forget, do your own thing, wear a helmet. 

If you want a big ol' slice of 70s culture, it's hard to do better than Viva Knievel!. It's both juicy and dumb, remarkable for the enormous/fleeting fame and minimal charisma of its star, adding absolutely nothing to the enterprise of cinema and yet amazingly memorable. 

However, for the purposes of this project, it doesn't have a lot of the common qualities of the movies I've watched so far. No waterbeds, no casual sex, very little bad comedy, minimal CB exchanges (although there is trucking), no disco to speak of. No T&A at all (Lauren Hutton wears three bulky couture jumpsuits, in brown, blue, and pink). No infrastructure anxiety, no triumph of the common man nor doubt of the Establishment. It's all about Knievel. 

One final note: Some years ago, I went to a car show that happened to exhibit the Stratocycle designed for this movie, and I got a picture with it. Gene Kelly's very butt sat on this thing.