Exploitation December - The Wild Angels (1966)

Peter Fonda! Bruce Dern ! Nancy Sinatra! That weird, old baby looking guy from the Star Trek episode Miri!

A film with a story both paper-thin and meandering, The Wild Angels exploited America's fearful fascination with the Hell's Angels in the mid-60s. It also kicked off the biker movie craze that reached a critical peak with Easy Rider and burned out in the early-70s. Prior to The Wild Angels you had Brando dressed like a leather-boy taxi driver in The Wild One, but that was about it. After this movie, the roar of Harleys, the crunch of chains against bone and the Mongol war cries of bikers hungry for young flesh and hot blood could be heard in cinemas (and over drive-in speakers) on a regular basis.

Nancy Sinatra trying her best to emote.

The Wild Angels follows the exploits of Blues (Fonda), Loser (Dern) and Monkey (Sinatra) and their not-so-loveable crew of violent misfits. Over the course of a few days, they beat up some Hispanic mechanics, get drunk and joust with palm fronds, party in the great outdoors, have random sex and generally behave like decadent barbarians. Loser has a run in with the cops that leaves him shot and in a hospital. The rest of the gang decides to break him out (why would anyone think that would end well?) and he dies while taking one last toke of reefer. Bruce Dern is awesome in his "alive" scenes, playing Loser as a hyperactive, man-child. He's also pretty good as a corpse.

The Wild Angels, out for a pleasant Sunday drive.

The gang heads to Loser's hometown in Northern California to bury him. They have a wake that ends with booze and drug fueled violence, rape and "anarchism by way of Animal House" speech-making by Blues. When asked what the gang and, by extension, disaffected youth want by the preacher (Frank Maxwell), Blues responds with

We wanna be free! We wanna be free to do what we wanna do. We wanna be free to ride. We wanna be free to ride our machines without being hassled by The Man! ... And we wanna get loaded. And we wanna have a good time. And that's what we are gonna do. We are gonna have a good time... We are gonna have a party.

which to me sums up the whole Sixties "Youth Culture" philosophy. It started out high minded ("Stick it to the Man!") but wound up with everyone wasted and sleeping in their own vomit...aka the 1970s.

We end with Loser being buried, the cops approaching and everyone but Blues fleeing. He knows that game is over and that the festive nihilism he'd been living is as much of a con as mainstream society.

The movie has great acting from the leads (except Nancy Sinatra; she really does not play biker-chick very well). Fonda and Dern are good actors. Dern's American Kamikaze performance is engaging. Fonda conveys some intelligence behind the stoic thug facade. And, he does have an actual character arc, a good sign that something is going on in the writer's (Charles Griffith who had a long career penning B-movies) head. The director, Roger Corman, provides his usual efficient camera work; nothing too flashy, but always clear and geared towards telling the story. There are a few moments that are a bit rough - in particular, there are a couple of "dance" moments (in which the the gang's women gyrate like they have some sort of horrible nervous disorder) that some across as long and laughable. The story/plot is really a series of set-pieces, not tell a particularly compelling tale. That is probably the weakest part of the film; all of the male characters are dirt-bags, engaging in casual violence and rape, thumbing their nose at authority out of a primal infantilism. The women are enablers, who generally revel in their role as property, personal or community. This does contribute to the over-arching theme; that this "lifestyle" is pointless and self-destructive. The movie, for all of it's excessive, is very conservative; the Angel life-style seems superficially fun, but ultimately is a dead end.

Anyway, check it out. This is a superior B-movie and created an entire sub-genre of films.