It Ain't "Breaking Away"

If you've seen Breaking Away, you probably remember this scene:



Of course, some things that are funny in a movie aren't so in real life.  Certainly, Bryan Blair isn't laughing.

On the evening 22 February, he was riding his bicycle in Scottsdale, Arizona.  A man entered the roadway and stuck a long metal object into Blair's front spokes, bringing him and his bike to a dead stop.

Unlike our the protagonist of BA, Blair suffered wounds to more than his pride.  He didn't get up and ride the next day.  In fact, he never rode again:  After three weeks in a hospital, he died from his injuries.

The man who ended his ride, and his journey, fled the scene in a car.  The police, who had no idea of whether the attack was random or targeted, enlisted  the public's help.

Daniel James Hinoto

Through surveillance videos, eyewitness accounts and other tips, Scottsdale police investigators tracked down the man they believe to be responsible:  49-year-old Daniel James Hinton.  The other day, they arrested him.

He's been charged with second-degree murder. As we all know, life doesn't always imitate the movies.

Ride-along Cassidys

By now, you've heard that David Cassidy is gone.

Now, I am not going to idolize him.  Plenty of teen and pre-teen girls (and more boys than would care to admit it) did that back in the day, as we say.  And, as too often happens to young people who become famous literally overnight, it was--at least in some ways--his undoing.  Like Michael Jackson and others, he simply couldn't live up to the fame he achieved so young.  I don't think anybody could have.

I will admit that I watched The Partridge Family.  Everybody did.  At least, everybody I knew did.  Our Friday Night Lights, if you will, were TPF, The Brady Bunch, Room 222, The Odd Couple (still one of my favorites) and Love, American Style.  My parents, like many others, didn't really want their kids to watch that last show, but relented because it was, well, Friday night.

But no parent I know of ever tried to stop his or her kid from watching The Partridge Family.  I suspect that not all females who fawned, overtly or covertly, over him were under the legal voting age (which had gone from 21 to 18 during the time the show aired).  I also suspect the same could be said for his female fans--or his soeur d'ecran Susan Dey, a.k.a. Laurie Partridge.  She was, and is, pretty, though I liked her better years later, when she was on L.A. Law.

The Partridge Family and The Brady Bunch made their debuts the same month--September 1970--as All In The Family and The Mary Tyler Moore Show precisely because they weren't AITF and TMTMS.  If you were around then--or, even if you weren't--you know it was a tumultuous time.  The Kent State students were gunned down only a few months earlier; the Vietnam War raged on with no end in sight, like the protests it sparked.  The energy of the Civil Rights Movement inspired, in many ways, the Women's and Gay Rights Movements, which changed people's (particularly young people's) ideas about families and society.

All In The Family and The Mary Tyler Moore show reflected those changes.  The Brady Bunch did, in a different and less-threatening way:  Mike is widowed. (Carol is divorced, but that was downplayed.)  Moreover, Mike has boys and Carol has girls; the females take on the Brady surname when Mike and Carol wed.  Shirley Partridge, played by Shirley Jones, is also widowed.  And her kids, like the Bradys, are about as wholesome as can be:  Their hair might be long, but it is straighter than I ever could have been, and shiny.

That might have been the reason I never had a "crush" on David Cassidy--or, for that matter, Susan Dey (at least when she was on that show):  They were just a little too good, a little too cute, for my tastes, even in my jejune fantasies.  That, by the way is how I also felt about Paul McCartney, as much as I've always loved the Beatles.

Speaking of whom:  In the Partridge Family's heyday, David Cassidy's fan club had more members than the Beatles' and Elvis Presley's fan clubs combined.  I'm sure that none of the members cared that the show or the music (a bit about that later) were cheesy:  They, like much of the show's and "band's" audience, wanted to indulge in simplicity and innocence--or, at least, a fantasy of it.

I'll admit:  I can't hate someone who looks the way he does on an old three-speed (which, actually, wasn't so old back then).  Most of all, I can't hate someone who had Shaun Cassidy for a half-brother.

You might recognize that image even if you didn't see what it came from:  the ill-fated Breaking Away television series.  In it, Shaun takes on the role Dennis Christopher played in the film:  Dave Stohler, the young man who's marooned in Indiana with his obsession for bicycle racing and all things Italian.





I actually saw the TV series years after it aired.  It didn't take long, for only eight episodes were made.  The show had the misfortune of making its debut during the 1980-81 television writers' strike.  It normally takes a TV series at least a season--normally 24 or 26 episodes--or two or three to develop a following, even if it is based on a movie as loved by both critics and audiences as Breaking Away was.

So, a show featuring Shaun Cassidy never got the chance to  live up to the promise its predecessor generated--just as his half brother, as a thirty-something and middle-aged man, never could shine as brightly as his predecessor, if you will--the younger David Cassidy, a.k.a., Keith Partridge, did.

A "Breaking Away" Reunion

I'm not a religious person.  Not really.  I was raised a Roman Catholic and was--OK, here's my most shocking confession to date--an Evangelical Christian for a time, when I was in college.

Then I didn't go to church for more than three decades. (I went into churches, mosques, synagogues and temples to look at art, hear music and attend weddings, funerals and all of those other things most of us attend under duress.  That's not the same as going to church!)  Finally, about two years ago, after someone's suggestion, I started attending church again for a time.  I got over that.  Now here I am again, without religion.

I mention my history of faith--or, more precisely, lack thereof--because I still believe in the concept of sin.  To me, the US invasion of Iraq is a sin.  So is any other form of genocide.  I would add slavery and any form of personal mendacity (though I am not without guilt!) to the list.

Oh, and here are two other sins, at least in my book:  remakes and sequels.  At least, that's what they are most of the time.  Thankfully, no one has been depraved enough to try to remake Citizen Kane, The Godfather (The Godfather, Part 2 is one notable exception to what I've said about sequels), Casablanca, La Grande Illusion or Ladri di Biciclette.

Or Breaking Away.  At least, no one has mentioned the "r" word.  If anyone had mentioned it, surely it would have been heard at the Interbike show this week, where Dennis Quaid, Dennis Christopher and Jackie Earle Hayley--three of the four "Cutters" from the movie--reunited.  Daniel Stern, who played the goofy, lanky Cyril, was the only one missing.

Dennis Christopher at Interbike, 17 September 2015. Photo by Jason Ogulnik, published in the Las Vegas Journal-Review.

Although Quaid became, arguably, the most famous of the quartet, Christopher's character--the wannabe Italian bicycle racer Dave Stoller--is the most memorable of the film.  I'd daresay he's one of the most memorable characters in all of filmdom.

One way you know that Breaking Away is, in its own way, a masterpiece is that it resonated even with people who've never had any desire to ride a bike.  Some have compared it to Rocky (which, I think, is a better movie than most highbrow critics are willing to admit), but I think it's both sweeter and more complex.  For one thing, there are so many subplots--about social class, generational conflicts and about youthful dreams vs. parents' aspirations for their children.  It also showed, interestingly, Dave's parents rekindling their sexual lives in late middle age.  That might be an even more radical thing to include in a film today than it was in 1979, when Breaking Away appeared in movie theatres.

Steve Tesich is the screenwriter who wove all of those elements into what I believe to be one of the best screenplays ever written. How many other screenwriters have written something that became both a film and a movie, appreciated by film critics and movie reviewers as well as general audiences?

He died in 1996, at the age of 53.  Anyone who tries to remake Breaking Away will incur his wrath. (As if I would know about that!)

 

Holiday Cycles

Christmas will come exactly one month from today.

We and our bicycles must be ready for the holiday season.  Now, some of you might fret that spending time on such preparations will take time away from your cycling, or vice-versa.  Is there a suitable compromise?

I remember seeing a movie called "The Electric Horseman" in my youth.  Starring Robert Redford and Jane Fonda, it was like a lot of other movies that came out around that time:  The hero got as mad as hell and wouldn't let him--or, more precisely, his horse--take it anymore.  But what was supposed to be a journey of self-discovery turned into mushy, sentimental tripe about a romance between two characters played by actors who, while they looked good together, had absolutely no chemistry.

But I digress.  Not long before "The Electric Horseman" was released, the much better "Breaking Away" came to movie houses.  What if someone made a movie called "The Electric Cyclist"?  Would the title character look like the figure in the photo?

Before screening, the producers could have had a dinner with a platter that looks like this:

Note:  Photos originally appeared on CELL Bikes.

Bicycles Are For The Summer

Mention "bicycle movies" or "movies with bicycles" and the first ones that come to most people's minds are Ladri di Biciclette (usually translated as The Bicycle Thief, but is literally Bicycle Thieves) and Breaking Away.  Both, I think, deserve their reputations, although BA is a bit more of a "feel-good" film than LdB.  

I've seen both more than once.   Seeing either one reminds me of what Robert Graves said about Shakespeare:  In spite of all the people who say he's very good, he really is very good.  

Anyway, there's a lesser-known (at least here in the US) bicycle film that I'd like to see again. Las Bicicletas Son Para El Verano (Bicycles Are For The Summer), released in 1985, was directed by Jaime Chavarri and based an eponymous play written by Fernando Fernan Gomez.  I have not seen the play, but it was well-reviewed.  I imagine it deserved those reviews if the film is in any way true to it.

The play and movie take place during the Spanish Civil War.  Luisito, the son of upper-middle-class Madrilenos Don Luis and Dona Dolores (Sorry, my keyboard doesn't have accent marks or tildes!)  wants a new bicycle, in spite of having failed his exams.  However, the war forces his parents to delay the purchase of his bicycle and that delay, like the war itself, drags on longer than any of them expected. 

More than anything, it's a story of survival and adaptation.  In that sense, it has more in common with LdB than with BA, although the dreams and hopes of one of the characters are as central to it as they are in BA.  I'll try not to give too much away in saying that, in time, Luisito has to abandon not only his hope of getting a bicycle, but his education and his dreams of becoming a writer, much as his father did.  Meanwhile, Luisito's sister Manolita has to abandon her dreams of becoming an actress after having a baby with a soldier who dies.  

Also, the story reveals class resentments between the family and their neighbors and friends but how, ultimately, they have to rely on each other in order to survive the privations of the war and the subsequent Franco regime.

Those of you who are fans of Pedro Almodovar will be interested in this film because it features one of the early appearances of an actress who would later star in several of his films:  Victoria Abril.

I don't know when I'll get to see the play.  But I'm sure there's a DVD of the film to be had somewhere.  The first chance I get, I'll watch it.