Fighter pilots have Top Gun, wrestlers have Vision Quest, boxers have Rocky, and basketball players have Hoosiers. So what do motorcycle riders have? Which is the movie for motorcycle riders? According to the New Zeland Herald, there is no single motorcycle movie that defines the genre.
The movies they listed include, of course, Easy Rider, The Wild One, The World's Fastest Indian, Electra Ride in Blue, Girl on a Motorcycle, Viva Knievel, On Any Sunday, and finally, The Great Escape.
Describing Easy Rider, the article mentioned "Although The Wild One brought motorcycles to the suburban masses it was Easy Rider that captured the essence of the open road - and all the 'stuff' around that."
I cannot state which movie is the best motorcycle movie of all time for the simple reason that of all these movies listed, I have only seen The Great Escape. For anyone who has not seen that movie, it is the one in which the great Steve McQueen escapes from a German POW camp and tries to ride his way to freedom. He does so by trying to jump over Germany Army barricades blocking his entry into neutral Switzerland.
That scene is probably the best moment of that great movie, and even though I have not seen the other movies, I would have a hard time believing any movie can top Steve McQueen riding his way to freedom.
My second place would belong to the Marlon Brando movie The Wild One. I have seen parts of that movie and I know enough of that movie to know the Brando in that movie was the great Brando, not the old and bored Brando we see in other movies.
So you tell me, what is the greatest motorcycle movie of all time?
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