Touch of Evel

Any day now, I shall be released. The final week of redneck cinema – well, this phase, anyway – has begun. I spent a big chunk of the weekend immersed in the loony world of Evel Knievel. Like most kids my age in the mid-70s, I thought Knievel was a real-life superhero - I collected all his press clippings, had the little toy stunt cycle, attempted daring backyard feats on my bicycle, etc. Looking back on it now, it’s kind of embarrassing that we all idolized a guy who was basically famous for bungling almost every one of his big jumps and virtually grinding his bones into dust in the process. But hey, it was the Seventies, we were young.

I dimly remember seeing the 1971 biopic Evel Knievel, probably a couple years after its initial release. At the time, I had no idea how ridiculous the casting was – George Hamilton as Evel? That’s like hiring Woody Allen to play Billy Carter. The movie itself is a little dull, but ahead of its time in its use of a fractured Pulp Fiction-like chronology. Of course, its use of this device is extremely haphazard and irritating, but it’s something, anyway.

Viva Knievel, on the other hand, is some kind of a camp classic. Evel as himself, Gene Kelly as his hooch-swilling mechanic, Marjoe Gortner as his junkie rival, Red Buttons as the corrupt promotor and Leslie Nielsen as the evil drug lord planning to smuggle a ton of heroin over the border in a replica of Knievel's trailer. Oh, and Lauren Hutton as the photographer who falls for Evel's reptilian charm. It's hard to pick just one highlight, but I think I'd have to go with Gene Kelly's freakout in the nuthouse after he's been doped up by the bad guys. All this and the finest collection of leisure suits ever assembled on the motion picture screen.

To top it all off, I’m reading “King of the Goons,” the lengthy article about the ill-fated Snake River Canyon jump and surrounding hoopla that Joe Eszterhas penned for Rolling Stone in 1974. Truly this was the epicenter of redneck Americana in the Seventies. Time stood still while some crazy shitkicker strapped himself into a homemade bottle rocket, blasted his ass into the middle of nowhere and somehow managed not to kill himself. Take that, Jackass!