The Wild Angels (1966)

Just what is it that you want to do?

Late 1965, and Roger Corman is miserable. The Tomb of Ligeia, the last of the Poe cycle, had been a disappointment, and Corman felt like he was spinning his creative wheels. “AIP wanted me to do more, and I said no, I want to do something in the streets and something contemporary.” He also wanted to do something bigger, so he did what any ambitious filmmaker would do: he accepted a contract with Columbia Pictures.

But working with a major proved frustrating. For a director who regularly made more than three movies a year, getting just one project off the ground seemed impossible. Corman’s ideas were dismissed; the studio alternatives were too “ordinary”. Then, in January 1966, Corman stumbled across a copy of Life magazine featuring a photograph of a Hell’s Angels funeral. Knowing Columbia would reject the idea, he asked for a leave of absence and returned to AIP.

“I was drifting further from the Hollywood mainstream,” said Corman. “My filmmaking instincts, like my stance in politics, were growing more radical.” There was nothing more radical than the Hell’s Angels: they represented a true alternative creed based on the disenfranchisement of the working class. And unlike the beatniks who came before, the Angels had no pretensions towards art. They were full-throttle id. Which made them perfect fodder for an exploitation picture.

Corman engaged the services of his go-to screenwriter Charles B. Griffith, and the pair trawled biker bars for stories, but the resulting script lacked the younger touch. Enter Peter Bogdanovich: “[Corman] paid me $300 to rewite. And I did a complete rewrite – a ‘page one’ rewrite. About 80% of the script, I re-did.”¹

And yet, for a movie that supposedly came directly from true stories and went through two screenwriters, very little actually happens in The Wild Angels. The wonderfully named Heavenly Blues (Peter Fonda), the leader of the San Pedro Angels chapter, attempts to help old buddy Loser (Bruce Dern) recover his stolen motorcycle, last seen somewhere near Mecca. Loser has temporarily settled with his common-law wife Gaysh (Diane Ladd) into a life of blue-collar poverty, but is keen to get back to the gang life. In Mecca, a brake pedal is found, a Mexican gang pummelled, and the police called. In the ensuing chase, Loser is shot in the back and arrested. After Gaysh pleads with Blues to do something, the Angels bust their buddy out of hospital, but Loser dies shortly afterwards. A grief-stricken Blues arranges for the gang to escort Loser’s body back to his hometown of Sequoia Grove for a proper funeral, but the tension between the eulogising preacher and the restless gang results in a drink- and drug-fuelled orgy of violence. Gaysh is raped, the chapel is trashed, and the gang are set upon by locals at the cemetery. As the police move in, Blues tells the gang, including his girlfriend Mike (Nancy Sinatra) to beat it, choosing to bury his dear departed friend himself and face up to his inevitable arrest.

And that, barring a handful of interludes where the Angels party their dirty little socks off, is it. The acting is as hollow as you’d expect for a Corman movie, the dialogue is awash in the kind of contemporary slang that irritates the modern ear, and the fight scenes feel like they were choreographed at the Iverson Ranch. And yet, Corman is clearly having a ball, establishing The Wild Angels as a western on wheels with wide shots clearly indebted to John Ford. Even the interior scenes benefit from deliberate blocking and camera movement that show an enthusiasm for the form that was in short supply by the end of the Poe cycle. The result feels like an earnest attempt to depict a problematic subculture in all its tatty glory.

And it is tatty, if not downright sordid. The Angels are casually racist and festooned with Nazi regalia as direct provocation to a square society only twenty-one years out of a world war - as Dick Miller’s unnamed rigger says, “If you guys had been in Anzio, you’d know what that junk means” -  and sexual assault is actively encouraged, which jars against the gang’s otherwise laughable hedonism, which very often comes across less like a threat to polite society than boorish horseplay.

Where other movies would go out of their way to condemn the gang for their actions, The Wild Angels is wilfully ambivalent. This is no social problem film. Unlike The Wild One (1953), where Brando’s Johnny Strabler has a soft heart beating under his beefy, sullen exterior, the gang in The Wild Angels have no real inner lives. Even the central relationship of Heavenly Blues and Mike is sketched in thin lines: he broods and acts out, while she tries for romantic commitment. They are irredeemable because emotional connection is anathema; it cannot fit with a creed that values hedonism and personal freedom above all else. The closest Blues comes to human connection is with a corpse, and even that is less out of love for Loser than it is a desire for self-annihilation. For him, there is nothing to say and nowhere to go.

This relentless nihilism proved too much for a lot of people, including the original Blues, West Side Story’s George Chakiris, who apparently dropped out because he thought the script was “immoral”². In the UK, the film wasn’t granted a cinema certificate until 1972, and even then it was cut. American critics denounced The Wild Angels as a “brutal little picture” and “repulsive” when they deigned to review it at all. And when it was chosen as the official American entry to the 1966 Venice Film Festival, the US State Department tried to prevent the film from being screened.

And yet, for all its exploitation picture trappings, The Wild Angels remains a true counterculture statement. It wasn’t the first biker film, nor was it the most exploitative (Russ Meyer already had Motorpsycho and Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill! on his filmography by 1966), but it was arguably the most commercially successful. The Wild Angels earned a whopping $15 million gross at the box office and placed in the top twenty highest earners of 1966, engaging a hitherto untapped youth market. As Peter Fonda said: “Roger Corman gave young people movies they could relate to, not films they had to fish for. He gave a whole new generation of moviegoers films that weren’t products of their parents.” The audience that embraced The Wild Angels had been bored rigid with The Sound of Music and The Singing Nun; they had seen the escalation of the war in Vietnam almost live on television. What could be more attractive to that audience than a bunch of youthful, antisocial ne’er-do-wells wreaking havoc in a small town?

It helped that Peter Fonda, previously the gangly romantic lead in Tammy and the Doctor (1963) and the lovelorn mental patient in Lilith (1964), became a literal poster boy for disaffected youth when he was busted for marijuana possession just as the movie opened. “I went on a nationwide promotion for the film and found crowds of cheering youths,” said Fonda. “Of the five posters that showed me in character, one sold over 16 million copies in the United States alone, with over 30 million total sold throughout the world.”

The importance of The Wild Angels therefore lies not in its artistic merits – of which there are frankly few – but in its influence. While Bonnie and Clyde (1967) is usually cited as the breakthrough New Hollywood movie, it is still very much a studio picture with an established leading man. The Wild Angels represents the moment where the underground bubbled up into the public consciousness, establishing not only a viable market for youth-oriented, antiestablishment cinema, but also kickstarting (pun intended) a trend for biker movies that would reach its radical (and deeply tedious³) apotheosis with Easy Rider (1969), a movie written, directed and produced by graduates of the Roger Corman Film School. Bonnie and Clyde is of course a much better film, but it is also one that benefitted from 8000-odd words of giddy gushing in The New Yorker courtesy of Pauline Kael⁴. Corman wasn’t so fortunate and this is a shame, because The Wild Angels – for all its faults – was a full-throated rebel yell and a taste of things to come.

---

Next Up: “They’re not cool slick heroes. They’re worn, tough men and that’s why they’re so dangerous.”

1. In true Corman fashion, Bogdanovich was also assistant director and uncredited extra in the cemetery scene.

2. Other sources state that Chakiris was dumped because he couldn’t ride a motorcycle, something of a problem for a biker movie.

3. Don’t worry, I won’t be covering Easy Rider here. Life’s too short.

4. Though let’s not kid ourselves that Kael was Bonnie and Clyde’s saviour, or even the first to give it a good review. Judith Crist, Penelope Gilliatt, Roger Ebert and Hollis Alpert all beat her to the punch by at least a month.