Viva Knievel!

Quite some time ago, TCM ran a day of movies starring sports figures playing themselves. I've already done posts on Crazylegs (football player Elroy "Crazy Legs" Hirsch) and The Jackie Robinson Story. Next up is a delighfully bad movie from the 1970s: Viva Knievel!.

For anybody too young to remember, or if anybody from outside the US doesn't know (I'm not certain how far Knievel's fame extended), Evel Knievel was a motorcycle stuntman who was famous for doing all sorts of insane jumps, with things like jumping over a dozen cars being mild. The most audacious and famous was an attempt to jump over the Snake River canyon. Back in the 1970s, ABC's Wide World of Sports showed all sorts of niche "sports" including things like Knievel's jumps, which is how he became famous.

Unlike the two other films I mentioned above, Viva Knievel! is not a biography, but a fictional film with Knievel playing himself as the protagonist. The movie opens with some image enhancement, as Knievel goes to an orphanage to deliver gifts to inspire the little boys there, one of whom thinks he'll be able to walk again thanks to Knievel. Oh my, the tropes are going to be laid on thick here. Cut to the "real" world, where we're introduced to Evel's manager Ben Andrews (Red Buttons) and his mechanic Will Atkins (Gene Kelly, a couple of years before Xanadu). They're helping Evel prepare for his next stunt.

Will is the subject of several subplot tropes. One is that he used to be a stunt rider himself, until he turned to the bottle after the death of his wife. She died in childbirth, and he blames the kid for it. That kid, Tommy, is now "graduating" from elementary school, and Evel has arranged to spend the summer before junior high reuniting Tommy with Will.

And then there's a rival rider, Jessie (Marjoe Gortner). He's being supported by Stanley Millard (Leslie Nielsen), but that's really a front. In fact, Millard is a drug lord, and is hoping to lure Evel down to Mexico to do a jump so that Millard can sabotage the jump, kill Evel, and then steal Evel's custom-built semi to drive it back to the States. Well, not Evel's semi, but a nearly exact replica that will be used to smuggle drugs, since nobody is going to suspect the late Evel of smuggling drugs in his truck. Eventually, Evel and his crew do go down to Mexico to do the jump, but Evel eventually saves the day albeit with a lot of complications and stunts along the way. He even gets to redeem himself by performing the jump that was sabotaged the first time.

Viva Knievel! is frankly a terrible movie. But it's a fun terrible. The plot is frankly ridiculous; Evel can't act (although at least he's only playing himself); and the messaging is incredibly heavy-handed. One wonders how a cast with as many names in it got themselves roped into this. (One name I haven't mentioned yet is Lauren Hutton as a photographer.) Kelly, I suppose, was nearing the end of his career, while Nielsen hadn't yet had the second-act career revival that Airplane! was going to bring him a few years later.

So, definitely watch Viva Knievel! if you get the chance.