James Dean looks on somewhat bemused as Jim Backus (Mr. Magoo among other roles!); possibly extolling the virtues of wearing a frilly and flowery pinafore. Jim played Frank Stark, Dean's anguished character Jim's father. "You're tearing me apart!!"
Lovely Thunderbird sits waiting for a twist of the throttle. Fancy a ride up to the Observatory?
The actor Ryan Phillipe with his black Bonneville.
Taylor Kitsch aboard an ebony Bonnie too; with camera. The link?
They both star in the film 'The Bang Bang Club' about a group of photojournalists in South Africa during the demise of apartheid; a period on unrest, violence and their pursuit to stand witness to it for the world.
Kevin Carter
The savage and iconic picture that Kevin Carter took in 1994 that gained him a Pulitzer Prize; A starving Sudanese child slumped in the sun while a vulture looks on. Sadly he took his life a few months after that unable to take the horrific images he'd wintessed from famine and war zones.
The Welsh band Manic Street Preachers had a song 'Kevin Carter' from their award winning 1996 album: "Everything Must Go".
...another hit of theirs is 'Motorcycle Emptiness' a great early nineties rebel song from their debut album 'Generation Terrorists'. Inspired by SE Hinton's book 'Rumble Fish' it was made into a cult youth/counter culture film by Francis Ford Coppola starring Mickey Rourke and Matt Dillon.
Johnny Strabler taking a laid back approach to life as the Black Rebels Motorcycle Club leader in the classic biker picture The Wild One. A movie loosely based on the events of a fictiionalized hell-raising by a motorcycle gang in Hollister CA in the early Fifties. A Time magazine article spread the word about the Bad-Boy image of bikers that still lives to this day; helped with a not too bad part of Brando in the lead role.
Atop his Triumph Thunderbird 6T, this film andoubtedly promoted the popularity of Triumph motorcycles in the US when they, along with BSA, were the dominant world force of motos. A reign that would last two strong decades until the Japanese bikes came along. His white t-shirt, askew cap, black leather jacket, engineer boots and turned up jeans and surly sideburned appearance became the image of the rocker-rebel for generations.
Another action guy used to hauling around on or being seen with British Iron is Brad Pitt. Obviously at one with the cool value offered by this great marque. Here he is in the retro-life Benjamin Button.
The silver blue Thunderbird coloured Tiger with nacelle headlight is a beaut!
Trying on the McQueen mantle of two wheeled freedom.
In the satirical movie Shampoo Warren Beatty plays a womanizing hairdresser haring around Beverly Hills on his Triumph Tiger; his Mason Pearson hairbrush sticking out of his back pocket. Julie Christie & Goldie Hawn play the love, or more accurately sex, interest. Nevertheless he looks cool on the 500.
n.b. this was a pre-Princess Leia debut role for Carrie Fisher with a very Lolita-esque character.
You can keep yer Nimbus 2000! Get on yer bike and ride! This here's Tom Felton; known to folk as the sly bleach headed young Draco Malfoy. Good black & white photography with a 60's look to it: looks like 'es ready to ride down Carnaby Street.
A McQueen film from '66 was The Sand Pebbles; seeing him play a gunboat engineer, Jake Holman, parolling the Yangtse River in the twenties amidst the turmoil of a chinese revolution. He received his only Oscar nomination for this role.
Here's a great shot as the actor relaxes with co-star Richard Crenna, who played the 'boat captain. Steve atop a fresh loooking Triumph, Crenna a rickshaw.
Here's where a certain Norton motorcycle changed world affairs; in 1952 a young medical student Ernesto Guevara and his friend Alberto Granado travelled the length of South America witnessing the poverty, exploitation, and economoc extremes that changed the course of his life indefinitely. Their steed, a 1939 500cc model was named El Poderosa "The Mighty One",
El Poderosa (copy)
Norton 16H 500cc Side Valve Single
The iconic Alberto Korda photograph 'Guerrillero Heroico" of Che which became THE defining image of the Twentieth Century.
A wonderfully evocative movie "The Motorcycle Diaries" based on his autoboigraphical book of the same name, starring Gael García Bernal as Che and Rodrigo de la Serna as Alberto. A Norton featured as the third main character.
What could be more hip than these three tootling about the set of The Great Escape on this German Rig. McQueen 'Hilts' driving; Garner 'The Scrounger' pillion and Coburn 'Sedgwick' sitting lazily in the chair. Director John Sturges looks on.
