The Film

Calvin Trillin is a man with an interesting job. He wanders all over the United States for the New Yorker magazine and files dispatches about what our fellow Americans are up to in Duluth, Altoona, Cincinnati, and all the Holiday Inns and Howard Johnson’s in between. At one time or another he has studied the life styles of Paul Anderson (world’s champion weight lifter) and Fats Cohen (world’s champion pizza eater, until a recent diet).

During spring vacation this year, he wandered down to Fort Lauderdale and Daytona Beach to check out the life styles of the college students who annually migrate there. In the course of his investigation he asked himself, he says, whether the time had actually come when one felt nostalgia at the sight of a Phi Delta Theta sweatshirt?

Like a lot of good observations, that one uses very few words to imply an entire state of mind. The whole world of the late 1950s and early 1960s (when Trillin doubtless saw many such sweatshirts, as well as garments bearing the emblem of the Betas, the Sigma Chis and so on) is supposed to have been rendered obsolete by the plague of war, assassination and social misery that has descended on us since.

And yet, if we can buy the Big Band Sound from Time-Life records and pick up reprints of old Liberty magazines at the newsstand, is it not permitted to feel nostalgic for the slightly more recent past of rush weeks, exchanges, pledge classes, chapter meetings? Just the other day, I saw a girl wearing a fraternity pin on her sweater, and the whole big 1960 thing about fraternity pins (and sweaters) came rushing back to me.

I mention this only because you will probably not fully appreciate Bruce Brown’s “On Any Sunday” unless such a sight brings memories rushing back to you. Brown’s movies are charming, infectious, clean-cut, and, enthusiastic as only a Rush Chairman could be enthusiastic, leading a line of jogging Actives down the steps of the House to shake hands with potential Pledges wearing new sport jackets and wing-tip shoes. That is why they are so much fun to see. They come from a world of innocence and simple physical pleasures.

Brown’s first film, which made him a great deal of money, was “The Endless Summer.” He took a 16-mm. camera and a crew of two on a trip around the world in search of something that was perhaps not of earthshaking significance, but wouldn’t bite you when you found it: The perfect wave. Along the way, he visited a great many waves that were imperfect for one reason or another, and we saw a lot of sun, sand, healthy bodies and spectacular surfing feats.

The instrument weaving all those waves and surfboards together into an enjoyable movie was the Brown voice which is youthful, unaffected and genuinely enthusiastic. “Boy! That was a big one,” he said about any number of waves, and the way he said it somehow made us agree that it sure was. Now he has made “On Any Sunday,” which does for motorcycle racing what “The Endless Summer” did for surfing and it’s enjoyable in exactly the same way.

You and I know that professional motorcycle racers must be a daring, violent and occasionally dangerous lot. But Brown sees them as basically having fun, and when we got a close-up of a national champion who has just completed a six-day race through rugged country terrain, Brown is likely to say: “Here he is now, still wearing that ear-to-ear grin.” And so he is. 

A lot more art goes into a film like “On Any Sunday” that might be apparent. It’s tremendously hard to get the footage, first of all; a surfer on a wave operates within a relatively small area, but a two-mile motorcycle race requires thousands of feet of footage from several cameras to be adequately covered. Brown has somehow accomplished this (with some financial backing from Steve McQueen, who turns up in the movie a couple of times). What’s better, having done it he doesn’t tell us about it.

Despite the work that went into his film, and despite the desperately difficult experiences that professional motorcycle racers endure, he somehow makes the whole thing seem informal, casual, relaxed. There is still some tension there, but it’s masked by that ear-to-ear grin, like the night luring rush week when you didn’t have to wear a tie because the Interfraternity Council had decreed a cookout.

Some men hunt the great white shark. Some men join roller derbies, while others go to the moon. Some men like to knit. Some are freefall parachutists. Some spend their lives searching for the perfect woman or the perfect movie or the perfect wave. With the possible exception of knitting, all of these endeavors involve an element of risk, either physical or psychological, to such an extent that the attainment of the end becomes less important than the excitation provided by the pursuit itself.

Five years ago Bruce Brown recorded one, round-the-world search for the perfect wave in “The Endless Summer,” which was a very beautiful movie to look at (especially from the relative safety of a cloudy smoking section) and—I’ve now come to think—much less simple-minded than it originally sounded. On the basis of his new film, “On Any Sunday,” a feature-length documentary about motorcycles and the men who ride them in apparent pleasurable competition, Brown stands in way of becoming the unofficial poet of the sports world. He not only records and shares with us the often extraordinary physical sensations experienced by the cyclists, but he also manages to suggest, in the absolutely flat language of the nonverbal participants, that the joy of the sport may also be the mask that hides a curse.

Like clean-cut, monosyllabic Flying Dutchmen, Mert Lawwill and Malcolm Smith, the professional cyclists whose exploits Brown follows through the film, lead lives of enchanted circularity: the winning of one event is not as much a goal as the preface to still another competition, and another after that. The monetary rewards are never great and, often enough, the prizes are simply trophies. At the end of one race in which death might not have been too far removed, Brown, as his own narrator, is likely to say with his unerring knack for the anticlimactic comment: “There stands Malcolm with a big grin.”Malcolm himself is likely to say: “That was really neat”.

It is not as silly as it sounds because the shape of the lives recorded by Brown are almost necessarily anticlimactic; that is, until someone gets hurt or (off-screen) killed. The movie itself is anything but anticlimactic. By putting his cameras on the cycles, Brown achieves audience-participation effects with speed that amount to marvelous delirium. The camera work is fancy, but it’s a fanciness for a specific purpose, and “On Any Sunday” is the first film I can remember in months in which I thoroughly enjoyed the slow-motion, the zooms, the helicopter shots, the superimpositions and all those other techniques that are the tired rhetoric of the narrative cinema. There is, I suspect, no other way by which to communicate the sense of the intoxication that is the real goal of the cyclists, and that can only be realized through the intensification of all the perceptions.

Brown records just about every kind of cycling competition there is, going from southern California to Spain and back again, catching drivers who insist on racing with broken legs, broken noses, and, in one instance, with a back broken six weeks before in an especially hazardous competition. “What kind of men are these?” Brown asks, and the answer comes not from what anyone says, but from the crazy, sensational motion of the film, which is, I feel, in its own way, a remarkable adventure, as simple and as unique to film as the picturization of movement.”On Any Sunday” which opened yesterday at the Murray Hill, was, I understand, financed by Steve McQueen, who also shows up in the film from time to time as the very creditable cyclist he is.