The Devil at Your Heels (1981) 102m.
You might think this documentary is a put-on after the first ten minutes - the kind of thing stunt-comedian 'Super Dave' Osborne might come up with - but it's further endorsement that truth is stranger (and funnier) than fiction. Star of the show is 'Mad Canadian' daredevil Ken Carter, whose speciality is jumping cars. His dream is to go one better than Evel Knievel's famous leap over the Snake River Canyon and build a ramp and car that will enable him to jump the St Lawrence seaway from the USA into Canada. He should have just used the Ambassador Bridge. The events that we watch unfold become a comedy of errors on a scale so monumental it practically lobbies for a renaming of Murphy's Law in honor of Carter.
The pitfalls Carter experiences are best left undisclosed here, but his quest is a captivating story. A great cast of 'supporting characters' drift in and out of the film, all promoters or stunt performers (including Knievel himself) with their own opinions of Carter and his harebrained stunt. Taking central place among them is Carter himself, congenial all the while (compare him with fellow stuntman Ken Powers near the film's end) and maintaining an optimistic perspective while he suffers one setback after another. Carter remains equanimous throughout the entire project, proving that he is either a nice guy or just plain nuts (he's probably too fixated to get genuinely angry). Born to hustle, he shares with his adrenaline-hooked buddies an unfortunate tendency to deliver one clumsy aphorism or mixed metaphor after another - even his last words are a misattribution of a Crosby, Stills and Nash song - but at least this proves that Carter is the kind of everyman that we could easily root for.
The preparations for the costly stunt stretch out to months, then years. Like Carter, we too never know what is around the corner, and become just as frustrated as the players in the film who keep waiting for something to happen. Film-maker Robert Fortier wrings every last drop of expectation out of us, serving up one false alarm after another (the use of music is very effective) until the tension in the film's final reels is unbearable. Guaranteed to produce laughs and gasps from the audience, there's no reason why this obscure gem shouldn't become a regular on the festival circuit. Don't even try to guess the real-life twist ending!
sburridge@hotmail.com
Get Your Private, Free E-mail from MSN Hotmail at http://www.hotmail.com.
The review above was posted to the
rec.arts.movies.reviews newsgroup (de.rec.film.kritiken for German reviews).
The Internet Movie Database accepts no responsibility for the contents of the
review and has no editorial control. Unless stated otherwise, the copyright
belongs to the author.
Please direct comments/criticisms of the review to relevant newsgroups.
Broken URLs inthe reviews are the responsibility of the author.
The formatting of the review is likely to differ from the original due
to ASCII to HTML conversion.
Related links: index of all rec.arts.movies.reviews reviews