
He and his trusty stead, er, bike board a ship headed for California. When 1967 rolls around, he thinks his Indian motorcycle – which he has had since the 1940s – is ready to travel to the Bonneville Salt Flats in Utah and participate in the annual Speed Week. The condition is so bad he’s instructed to take pills with trace amounts of nitroglycerine to keep it pumping. Way past sixty and nearing the big 7-0, Burt has a bad ticker. Their shared quality would be their love of adventure. Only Munro isn’t stoic like Hemmingway’s protagonists. Pistons that have been blown to smithereens are displayed on shelves as “Offerings to the God of Speed.”īurt Munro is the type of bloke Ernest Hemmingway would have wanted to have a drink with. Besides a bed, old tires, engine parts, and other pieces of equipment litter the place. A tool shed, which doubles as his home, is a workshop of contrivances.

He makes his residence in Invercargill, New Zealand. So, he has spent most of his life tinkering with his 1920 Indian motorcycle. For as long as Burt Munro could remember he wanted to go fast. It’s about an old codger, his motorbike and a dream.
#Worlds fastes indian dvd movie
It took many years before people would know just who is this crazy bugger.īased on one hell of a true story, The World’s Fastest Indian is not a movie about a Native American sprinter. But his canonizing didn’t happen overnight. For some it means having the testicular fortitude to do what the other guys won’t. Heroes come to fruition in different ways. Rated PG-13 (for brief language, drug use and a sexual reference). Besides telling a classic tale of individual triumph, THE WORLD'S FASTEST INDIAN offers a sociological look at the American West of the late 1960s, an iconic landscape peppered with colorful characters that include a wizened Native American and a generous drag queen, both of whom help the eccentric elder on his quixotic quest.Magnolia Films presents The World’s Fastest Indian. Through local support and innovative fundraising, Munro is finally able to afford the long nautical journey across the world to Mormon-land and, beating all the incredible odds, not only enter the race but break its records with a jaw-dropping speed of 201 miles an hour.

After racing his own times obsessively every day, he becomes determined to live out his dream of participating in the annual Speed Week motorcycle event at Utah's Bonneville Salt Flats. An active playboy, Munro is a lovable character in his small New Zealand town, an attractively unique old man with a zest for life and a love of his vintage motorcycle-a bright red 1920 Indian model. Hopkins's Munro is a rich and magnetic character, a man who wears his notable physical ailments (which include an embarrassing prostate condition and deficient eardrums) like quirky idiosyncrasies rather than debilitating defects. Here, with the help of the fine actors Anthony Hopkins and Diane Ladd, the director brings the story to vivid, dramatic life yet again, constructing a gripping and inspirational narrative. In the early 1970s, just a few years after Munro's incredible triumph, Donaldson directed OFFERINGS TO THE GOD OF SPEED, a documentary on the sensational senior. The life and triumph of Burt Munro, the elderly Kiwi man who, at the far from spritely age of 68, broke motorcycle racing records in Utah, has fueled director Roger Donaldson's creative energy for years.
