The Devil at Your Heels
Devil at Your Heels, traces the trials of stuntman Ken Carter who attempts a death-defying aerial jump in a car. Not content with a normal jump, Ken Carter attempts a jump from Canada to the USA. This feature-length documentary shines a light on the intense preparation that led to Carter’s first attempt to jump a car across a mile-wide stretch of the St. Lawrence River – a 5-year period during which the dare-devil raised a million dollars, erected a 10-storey take-off ramp and built a rocket-powered car. Winner of the Canadian Screen Award for Best Feature Length Documentary at the 4th Genie Awards in 1983.
Long before the modern era of highly sanitized, corporatized extreme sports, there existed a wild, grease-stained epoch of spectacular, suicidal ambition. Captured with unparalleled observational rigor by director Robert Fortier and produced by the legendary National Film Board of Canada (NFB), The Devil at Your Heels (1981) is a seminal work of documentary cinema. Following Canadian daredevil Ken Carter as he spends five agonizing years attempting to jump a rocket-powered Lincoln Continental across a one-mile stretch of the St. Lawrence River, the film transcends its biographical premise. It metamorphoses into a profound, existential meditation on the American (and Canadian) Dream, standing shoulder-to-shoulder with the greatest cinematic explorations of megalomania and tragic folly.
The Herzogian Hubris of the Daredevil Auteur
To watch Ken Carter meticulously orchestrate his own potential demise is to witness a figure carved from the same mythological granite as the protagonists of Werner Herzog’s finest fever dreams. Carter is the spiritual cousin of Brian Sweeney Fitzgerald in Fitzcarraldo or the doomed Timothy Treadwell of Grizzly Man—a man whose grand, irrational vision blindingly obscures the sheer impossibility of his task. Fortier’s lens captures Carter not merely as a stuntman, but as a thwarted auteur whose canvas just happens to be a launch ramp and an 8,500-pound luxury sedan strapped with hydrogen peroxide rockets.
The film meticulously chronicles the gap between Carter’s supreme, intoxicating confidence and the undeniable laws of physics. As we watch his bank accounts drain and his mechanical failures mount, Carter’s relentless optimism borders on a manic delusion. Fortier allows the daredevil’s charisma to wash over the viewer, invoking the same psychological tension found in Paul Thomas Anderson’s character studies of deeply flawed, driven men. Carter’s Lincoln Continental becomes an absurdist chariot, a vessel for a man trying to outrun his own mortality.
Direct Cinema and the Anatomy of Spectacle
Aesthetically, The Devil at Your Heels is firmly rooted in the tradition of Direct Cinema, utilizing the NFB’s pioneering verité techniques to capture the grueling banality that underpins moments of extreme danger. Fortier avoids heavy-handed narration, allowing the absurdities of the situation to unfold organically. The camera lingers on the faces of nervous investors, exhausted mechanics, and the bemused locals of Morrisburg, Ontario. Through this structural patience, the film shares DNA with the institutional dissections of Frederick Wiseman and the eccentric portraits of Errol Morris.
Furthermore, the documentary serves as a searing critique of Guy Debord’s Society of the Spectacle. The bloodthirsty anticipation of the crowds, the media circus, and the ABC Wide World of Sports television executives hovering on the periphery all underscore a dark voyeurism. Fortier subtly indicts the viewing public—and by extension, us, the cinematic audience—for our complicity. We are gathered to watch a man achieve the miraculous, yet we are equally, morbidly invested in the very real possibility of his explosive destruction.
The Existential Void of the One-Mile Jump
The climax of The Devil at Your Heels delivers one of the most astonishing and anti-climactic twists in documentary history—a narrative rug-pull that even a seasoned screenwriter would hesitate to invent. When the jump is finally executed not by Carter, but by his disillusioned friend and backup driver Kenny Powers (resulting in a disastrous, back-breaking crash mid-flight), the film shifts from a study of ambition to a devastating portrait of impotence and stolen destiny.
This tragic denouement elevates the film from a mere sports documentary to a piece of high cinematic tragedy. The sight of the rocket car plunging into the muddy waters of the St. Lawrence evokes the existential dread of Michelangelo Antonioni’s The Passenger—a stark realization that after years of preparation, the defining moment of a man’s life can be snatched away in an instant, leaving only the void. Fortier’s masterpiece remains a vital, haunting artifact of the Evel Knievel era. It is a cinematic triumph that unmasks the fragile, deeply human desperation hiding behind a fireproof suit and a daredevil’s smile.
