On Any Sunday
Motorcycles, mud and McQueen. Is there any motorcycle film cooler than this?
Motorcycle racing has enjoyed a raft of excellent documentaries aimed at the layman in the last decade. From Mark Neale’s Faster, Fastest and the recent Hitting the Apex which celebrates MotoGP to Road and Closer to the Edge showing the gritty realism of pure road-racing, the sport we love has been given some real exposure in recent years.
All these fantastic films owe a debt to On Any Sunday. The 1970s documentary was the work of a visionary filmmaker Bruce Brown, a ‘dude’ who had previously only worked on a movie about his beloved surfing. I first saw On Any Sunday on a grainy, pirated VHS copy in the mid-1980s. As a 13-year-old loosely interested in motorcycles and bike racing, that film had an amazing effect on me. From the opening titles showing a horde of kids racing ‘bicycle motocross’ through all the disciplines shown in the film itself – including the king of cool Steve McQueen riding on the dirt – it proved to be an intoxicating mix. I was hooked on bike racing, and the tape was soon worn out.
If you’ve never watched it (and you really should) the premise behind On Any Sunday is simple: on any Sunday around the world you’ll find someone racing a motorcycle in one discipline or another. To make the movie, Bruce spent 1970 shooting more than 150 hours of film over disciplines as diverse as dirt-track, road-racing, desert racing, motocross, trials, hill-climbing and ice racing. What I love is the film’s sparseness. While the modern documentaries of bike racing will use voices talents such to add some gravitas to the images, On Any Sunday has director Bruce Brown doing the honours. Often he just lets a slo-mo of the Harley XR750 run and tell the story, or lets us see the offroad action in all its glory, just adding enough in his Californian drawl to keep us informed. Sometimes, as they say, less is more.
The film loosely follows AMA champ Mert Lawwill and FIM Gold Medal winner Malcolm Smith, but also includes Dave Aldana, Don Emde, Gene Romero, Dave Castro, Dick ‘Bugsy’ Mann, Frank Gillespie, Cal Rayborn and many others, covering all disciplines of two-wheeled sport. McQueen – a massive box-office draw in 1971 – only has a small role, albeit an important one. He helped fund the movie. A good move as – despite being made with a budget of a little more than $300,000 – the box office, video and DVD sales have seen a return of more than $25 million to date. Some of my money is in there too, as when the bootleg copy cried ‘enough’, I bought an original and have since updated to DVD and beyond. Watch it and you’ll understand why.
The film had a big impact at the time – it was nominated for an academy award in 1972 – but 45 years on and it’s legacy is still going strong, and that’s why there is such excitement surrounding the fact that four of its stars – Dave Aldana, Don Emde, Mert Lawwill and Gene Romero – are heading to the Carole Nash Classic Motorcycle Mechanics Show over the weekend of October 15-16 as the event’s guests of honour.
Watching the film recently, I realised that it hadn’t aged. Like the modern documentaries it shows a dedicated group of people blessed with incredible determination, humour and talent: the styles of clothing, length of hair and the motorcycles may have changed, but the spirit of the motorcycle racer has most definitely stayed the same.