Chicago Tribune from Chicago, Illinois • 45

(Eltogo (Tribune Friday, February 11, 1972 Section 2 -9 rd--- Knievel: be breaks, but he bold 1 I J'' iff itiiisli not Evel Knievel, talking," he says, narrow-eyed. J. Foyt, John Glenn, these are people I respect and identify with Dick Mann Gene Romero. have the same attitude toward life. "Foyt said something to me once I really took a good, hard look at 'God put me here to be the best and to do the best.

When He takes me, I'm You can't ask for a better deal." See him, Evel Knievel, before he is taken from that motorcycle see him at the Amphitheater today, tomorrow, and Sunday. He digs life, and he digs death. Mary Daniels 3. 4 AMI Summer night, Southern fairgrounds: the loneliness of the long-distance flying motorcyclist. XVZOVZS REVIEW 'A Clockwork Orange in i in ian i mn i hi Trlbuna photo by Earl Gustle Evel Knievel: "What the hell, I'm tough." lowers, his victims are creepy, his parents'are saps, and the jailers, scientists, and government officials are wicked caricatures of officious people in command.

Alex may be sinister, but at least he's got style. This has to do, of course, with the way Kubrick presents Alex. More often than not, Alex's rampages seem like bittersweet fun. Kubrick may have thought that Alex's pleasure in what he does only 'makes him more heinous. It does, but the Kubrick method distracts the audience from what he is doing.

When we watch Alex sing 'Singin' in the Rain" as he kicks and clubs a man we By our avoiding social problems race and ecology, for example for so many years, the problems may have become too large to solve without scrapping some cherished element of the system. Some scientists question whether we have enough resources to simply maintain rotten old status quo. Maybe the choice is not between pollution and clean air, for example, but between the free-enterprise system and clean air? "A Clockwork Orange" is clearly on the side of the chaplain and, like all of Kubrick's films, against those people military generals, Teutonic scientists, government ministers who say to wig Van." Occasionally Alex engages in intercourse, but it's strictly a mechanical affair he understandably refers to as "the old in-out, in-out." During one not-so-special evening of mayhem, while Alex is bludgeoning a woman to death with a piece of erotic sculpture, Alex's fellow gang members conspire to get him arrested. They resent his making all of the gang's decisions. Alex is apprehended, convicted of murder, and sentenced to 14 years in prison.

While in jail, he hears of an experimental medical program that is supposed to permanently cure one of a wish to do evil. Alex volunteers to be a guinea pig, thinking that this is one sure way to regain his freedom. The medical program, de IS EVEL KNIEVEL really the El Cordobes of the motorized world, a matador on a motorcycle who has torn from life what he wants by becoming a jet-propelled death-wish? He is said to be the highest-paid "athlete" on earth today. And there's a mystique about him that draws fans as if he were a miracle-working holy man, a Rasputin, or a Houdini. Yet I've been told, by someone who says he got the truth from one of Evel's lieutenants, that "it is all a lot of b.

s. all very stylish, to be sure, but still b. That "there are a lot of people who can jump 19 cars; it's just that no one else cares to make a living at it." And that "he'll back out of the Snake River Canyon thing. He won't do it." It is very hard to tell what is stylish and what is stoic. You may have thought George Hamilton was slick as "Evel Knievel" in the film biography, but the former is to the latter as a windup toy is to one of the Harley Davidson 750 X-R's you can watch the guy ride at the Amphitheater this weekend.

Like a bullfighter Evel arrives for the interview, accompanied by an entourage. At first sight, he looks like a rock idol and carries himself with a Presley kind of greaser swagger. He is wheat-blond and toast-tanned, and the zipper of his rose knit sweater is unzipped halfway to his belt. After prying him from his bodyguards to take him to another floor for some photos, I learn he's very gentle, very nice, loves to talk about Evel, and that you do not open your own doors when you are with him. He says the movie is only "80 to 85 per cent" his story.

"I'm younger than George Hamilton," he adds. "I'd like people to know." And in truth, if he's had any head or facial injuries, he must have had a good plastic surgeon he looks younger and better than 33. 1 After the photos he wants to return to his buddies and the big, soft chairs "It might be easier for me to sit there." He had an operation six weeks ago, he explains, and "had 2Vt pounds of steel taken out of my body to make me lighter, so I can make a big, long jump at the Amphitheater. "I was made out of steel," he says. "Now I'm a normal mortal." He has had 11 major operations, he says-counting only those lasting five or six hours, not the two or 2V4-hour ones.

He has' broken everything in his body except his neck, and that includes his back, twice. Even his hand, on which he shows you the fresh operation scars and a 4.7-carat aond, looks like a glove flesh tn which all the bones have been crushed and shaken out, then replaced with secondhand parts. When I ask if the injuries don't make him think of chute, and the cycle may have its own chute. "We've already gotten 50,000 requests for tickets from California alone. I outdraw the Pro Bowl and the Super Bowl, and I'm only one man." HIS ego is as big as the Grand Canyon, which he originally planned to jump.

Altho backed by Howard Hughes money, he says, he couldn't get anywhere with the "liars and thieves" he had to deal with. So he's leased the Snake River Canyon "for several years." "No one besides me has ever jumped more than 19 cars," he proudly declares. "Sure, a lot of young kids come up to me and say 'I'm gonna break your record some of these I don't mind." He shrugs. "Nobody knows how far I can jump. "I used to get the jitters jumping two cars.

You hit that pavement, it smarts. I've busted everything except my neck." I know. Doesn't that give him second thoughts? "Oh, yeah, you get second thoughts when you get your hips shoved thru your pelvis and they're pumping stuff thru your nose to prevent clots. If nothing else, the food in the hospital is bad, and most of the nurses are ugly. He only jumps "10 or 12 times a year," he says.

The rest of the time? "I play golf a lot, fly my airplane, drink booze, chase broads." Asked what his wife thinks about the latter, he says, "I don't worry her about it." He's also tried sky-diving "It's a bore." What makes so many people come to see him? "I think, seriously, they've seen what's happened to me on television several times, and they come, some of them, a certain percentage, to see me get hurt. But the greatest majority of them get involved with the canyon thing "They want to see something really real. They don't want to see Batman or Superman. They want to see someone get out there and let it all hang out, but if I miss they want to be there too. "I'd rather not quit.

You don't know what I'll buy. I just bought my own golf course at home." Whereas "there were many nights I couldn't sleep thinking about checks clearing in the last town," he now has a good credit rating, has made "two to three million" in the last six years. "All my life I burnt my bridges down when I crossed them. There's a lot of people, even sponsors, who want me to back out of the canyon thing. But I won't.

If I live, I'll be that much better for trying. If I don't, I did what I said I would. "That Frank Sinatra, John Wayne thing at the end of the movie with a schmaltzy speech about Why I Do It it'll be run during Evel's shows is George Hamilton, WITH HIS latest film, "A Clockwork ''Orange," Stanley Kubrick has come back to Earth. And I think this information is important, because a lot of people may be disappointed in this brilliant motion picture in that it is not cut of the same magical cloth as Kubrick's "2001: A Space Odyssey." It is, in fact, quite similar to the wicked burlesque of his "Dr. Strangelove." Based on Anthony Burgess prophetic 1962 novel, "Clockwork" is a moral fable set in England in the very near future.

The society there and then is in the middle of a violent seizure. Teen-age gangs run amok, raping, stealing, and plundering at TRIBUNE MINIREVIEW Real horrorshow "A CLOCKWORK ORANGE" Produad and directed by SKnlty Kubrick, icrMnpltv by Kubrick bd on tho mvl by Anthony Burqiu, photo-oriilwd by John Alcott and Kubrick, ilictronlc music by Wilttr Cirloi, production dtilia by John Birry; Warnor Bros, raltast at tho Mlchaol Todd Tlwatar. Ritid (ptrsons undir II not admltlad. stopping awhile, he answers: "Oh, no-what the hell, I'm tough." In the horrendous -tumbling, battering fall he' took at Caesar's Palace, which was shown in the life story movie, he suffered "a cen-t a 1 protrusion fracture," which means his hips and his pelvis were kind of like whizzed thru a Waring blender. He was in intensive care 15 days, he drawls, and "33 days later I got in my Rolls-Royce and drove away." WHEN I ask why he does what he does, he gets testy: "People who don't do anything except live and breathe, they try and analyze people who do other things.

The best explanation of what I do is, 'Far better, it is to take a chance and risk life, even tho cheated by failure, than to live like those poor souls in the gray twilight who know no victory, no defeat, because they have tried I am not satisfied with that, but I temporarily retreat into talking about a lot of other things: Evel has half a dozen motorcycles with different engines, tires, parachutes. Ha designs them all, and the factory builds them. They are worth, 10 grand apiece! And he's only been in the jumping business six years. "I've done other things," he says like working in the Butte Mont. mines when he was 16, running on a track team, playing hockey, ski jumping.

"I was a thief and a cross-roadcr." He sold insurance for W. Clement Stone's company and takes credit for racking up 110 policies in one day in a Montana insane asylum. He still has the same wife he married 11 years ago, he notes. "She was kind of dumb. I had to kidnap her to get her to go out with me.

Her dad put me in jail." But, he admits, "if I was a father and had a daughter he has two boys and a girl and an Evel Knievel was after her, I'd put the bastard in jail too." The young Knievel, of German and Irish descent, was raised by his grandparents. His mother is in Hawaii and his dad in Montana "with other families." He tells some funny stories about the rattlesnakes and mountain lions and the chimp he has used in some jumping stunts. It seems like a good time to ask him about the Snake River Canyon Jump he has scheduled for Labor Day, 1972. "Tell everybody I don't think "I can do it on Labor Day." He points to my notebook. "I'm not doing it until I get damned good and ready.

If they can postpone the moonshot I can postpone this. The canyon is three-quarters of a mile across and 1,000 feet deep. I'd like to do a good job." He will ride something called a Sky Cycle X-2, Bteam-powered by artesian well water from Olympia, which will give it 1,800 to 2,000 pounds of thrust, according to static tests. He'll get off by para THI CAST Alaaamltr DLirt Mr. AltMttdar Chltf Ouard Dim Catlady Dr.

Brodsky Prison Chaplain MlnlHir Piychlafrlit Malcolm McOowell Patrick Moot Mlchatl Balai Warran Clarka Miriam Karlin Cart Duarint Oodtray Ouialay Anthony Sharp Paulina Taylor Y'-S-; finite: isi wo mil ii ataaf McDowell as Alex: malevolence matters. will. Old people are ignored and abused like like old people today. The government's only interest in its constituency is to keep it quiet. Drugs are freely dispensed in government-licensed saloons.

The young people speak in a language that is an amalgam of motorcycle-gang slang, gypsy babel, and Russian. To "tolchock an old veck and crast a malenky lomtick of his is to beat up an old man and steal a tiny bit of his money. The kids find that to be "real signed by a Strangelovian doctor with the name of Brodsky, is called the Ludo-vico Technique. It's just a fancy name for an aversion-therapy program that, thru conditioning, doesn't destroy Alex's impulse for evil so much as render him physically sick whenever the impulse arrives. The experimentation with Alex's brain is supported by the political party in power, a party that won election on a Law and Order platform.

If common criminals like Alex can be swiftly cured, party officials reason, the country's prisons and jails can be emptied and made ready for the more pernicious political radicals. The moral point of the movie, delivered by a bombastic chaplain, is that the Ludovlco Technique is immoral. It removes a man's free will. He cannot choose good or bad conduct, and it is choice, the chaplain says, that makes good conduct good. Intellectually, at least, that is what "A Clockwork Orange" is about.

I think if people have any difficulty picking that up, it is because a clergyman delivers the message; It has been a long, long time in the movies since a clergyman said anything that made sense. The point of the movie could hardly be more current: Some behavioral psychologists are arguing that our world has become too complex, its problems too great, to permit man to do whatever he wants as long as it doesn't hurt anyone else, More centralized power, more government control is needed, they ergue. It irynn attractive position. Common Man, "Leave everything to me." ONE of the costs of freedom, the film argues, is bad behavior. One of the questions the film asks is, "Is a scientifically induced peace any more attractive than animalistic warfare?" To make their case in the strongest way, author Burgess and screenwriter Kubrick picked a thoroly detestable young man as the Establishment's victim.

For, if we can pity rotten Alex's loss of freedom, maybe then we can learn to value our own. Well, now, is Alex, in the movie, really rotten? It is only on this point that the excellence of "A Gockwork Orange" can be questioned; otherwise it is a spectacularly acted, directed, and designed motion picture. Without question, even in the beginning of the movie, Alex is the film's most attractive character. lie is, as the minister says, "enterprising, bold, outgoing, and vicious." The supporting characters are oafs. His friends are fol- have two reactions: first that Alex is rotten, and second that Kubrick is clever.

The second reaction, in many but not all of the opening six violent scenes, gets in the way of the first. And tho it wouldn't be as much fun to watch, I wish for the sake of the film's argument that Alex's initial violence had been presented with more horror and less wit. In most of the writing about this movie, not enough credit has been given to author Burgess. His is an inspired novel, even more impressive when one considers it was written 10 years ago. The special language that Alex and his "droogs" friends employ, beautifully Integrated into the script by Kubrick, is of particular delight.

Kubrick's contributions are his wit and his eye. The wit, too much at times, Is as biting as in "Dr. Strange-love," and the production, while of another order, is as spcctaculnr as in "2001." Ceve fiiskcl 1 horrorshow," or real good fun. The protagonist of the st ry, superbly played by Malcolm McDowell, is one Alexander DeLarge, a 20-year-old gang leader who loves assaulting people and listening to classical music. Unlike another great Alexander, this one doesn't want to conquer the world, tho, I suppose, he could dig setting it on fire.

Alex prefers to get his kicks in the heads and groins of others and then retire to his parents garish apartment in Municipal Cellblock 18-A, to groove on the sounds of his "lovely, lovely, Lud- In the last photo of this sequence montage. Knievel has gotten nast 10 truck tractors without I breaking anything. But then there's the matter of landing..