Five years after Bruce Brown achieved wide success and critical acclaim for his surfing documentary about "the search for the perfect wave" titled The Endless Summer, he created what is generally thought by most knowledgeable people to be the most entertaining and true to life motorcycling movie ever made, On Any Sunday (1971).
To call this film simply a documentary on motorcycle racing would do it a grave injustice. With cameras on helicopters and on the motorcycles themselves to capture the insanely dangerous nature of what it's like to ride "the mile," a dirt oval on which riders attained speeds of well over a hundred miles an hour on the straights and near triple digits in the turns, or the bone jarring and torturous intensity of motocross racing, or the unimaginable physical toll it must take to finish the Mexican 1000 (now called the Baja 1000, a 1000 mile race across the Baja California peninsula), after watching this movie you'll feel more like a participant than a spectator . . . at least I did.
Mr. Brown doesn't stop with dirt racing either. He'll take you from road racing with the A.M.A. (American Motorcyclists Association) to racing on ice in Canada with three inch spikes on all of the tires--a line from the movie comes to mind, "It would be like getting run over by a buzz saw, you've never seen grown men crawl so fast"--to The International Six Day Trials (now called the ISD Enduro), a six day off road race during which the rider cannot accept help from anyone and can only use what he has with him or on his motorcycle to fix any problems that may come up. On Any Sunday will take you all over the world and show you, as effectively as the medium possible can, what it's like to participate in these events.
The movie also shows, as I believe was Mr. Brown's intention, a side of the motorcycle culture that could not be more different than the outlaw/renegade perception that many Americans had of motorcyclists at the time. The stars of the film (including the legendary Steve McQueen, who financed the film) are portrayed as responsible hard working American citizens who love the feeling of freedom and the joy that riding a motorcycle gives them.
To call this film simply a documentary on motorcycle racing would do it a grave injustice. With cameras on helicopters and on the motorcycles themselves to capture the insanely dangerous nature of what it's like to ride "the mile," a dirt oval on which riders attained speeds of well over a hundred miles an hour on the straights and near triple digits in the turns, or the bone jarring and torturous intensity of motocross racing, or the unimaginable physical toll it must take to finish the Mexican 1000 (now called the Baja 1000, a 1000 mile race across the Baja California peninsula), after watching this movie you'll feel more like a participant than a spectator . . . at least I did.
Mr. Brown doesn't stop with dirt racing either. He'll take you from road racing with the A.M.A. (American Motorcyclists Association) to racing on ice in Canada with three inch spikes on all of the tires--a line from the movie comes to mind, "It would be like getting run over by a buzz saw, you've never seen grown men crawl so fast"--to The International Six Day Trials (now called the ISD Enduro), a six day off road race during which the rider cannot accept help from anyone and can only use what he has with him or on his motorcycle to fix any problems that may come up. On Any Sunday will take you all over the world and show you, as effectively as the medium possible can, what it's like to participate in these events.
The movie also shows, as I believe was Mr. Brown's intention, a side of the motorcycle culture that could not be more different than the outlaw/renegade perception that many Americans had of motorcyclists at the time. The stars of the film (including the legendary Steve McQueen, who financed the film) are portrayed as responsible hard working American citizens who love the feeling of freedom and the joy that riding a motorcycle gives them.