Biker Films -- The Wild Angels

Last week, it was miniature wargaming, a valid historical enthusiasm, this week, it is old movies, another valid historical enthusiasm. Yeah, the blog jumps around a lot but it's always something somehow related to history. (Hint -follow the labels and find what you want -remember the old stuff is just as good, sometimes better, than the new stuff( 

Tonight we discuss Roger Corman's classic film, "The Wild Angels," from 1966. If you have any interest at all in the biker film genre, then you know this is the one which started it all. Roger Corman, known to many as "king of the B-movies," had read an article in Life magazine about the Hell's Angels and decided they warranted a movie. 

And the result was The Wild Angels, which like most of the genre had delightfully over the top, sensationalized trailers --trailers which are often more fun to watch then the films themselves. 

The film starred Peter Fonda, later the star of "Easy Rider," as "Blues" or "Heavenly Blues," the leader of a fictitious California Hell's Angel chapter. Nancy Sinatra, a singer in her own right yet known forever as Frank Sinatra's daughter, plays his girlfriend. 

Supporting roles are played by, among others, Bruce Dern, who went on to do countless biker films, and Diane Ladd, as well as Michael J. Pollard, the actor who made a guest appearance Star Trek (how it is that anyone anywhere who did a guest role on the original Star Trek shall now be immortalized.) 

As one watches the film now, it's interesting to ponder why and how it, and this is a documented fact, The Wild Angels film launched a genre of films that stretched over a decade or more and included at least twenty films although I've heard forty as the number, as well. 

Not only did it launch a film genre, but it also fueld the growth of the real life Hell's Angels motorcycle group (notice how I avoided saying either "club" or "gang"?), an organization that now spans several continents with chapters around the world. You can read about this in the book, "The Wild Ride -How the Outlaw Motorcycle Myth Conquered America," by Tom Reynolds, 2000. TV Books, New York. 
In other words, in 1965, when this film came out, while the Hell's Angels had gained publicity in the form of magazine articles and so on as well as Hunter Thompson's classic book, they were no where near as important as they became later, and did not, for instance, have chapters in Europe, South Africa, South America, and Australia among other places. These all came later, and came, in part, due to the popularity of films like this one and those that followed it.   

So, what was the appeal of this film? The cinematography is well done, the acting not awful, at least by biker film standards, but not great either. It is kind of a corny film full of corny lines. 

What it shows is a group of people on a quest, the quest being to transport the body of a dead Angel and then give it a proper funeral.   

It's got a lot of the common trops and scenes and such that one sees again and again in biker films. Wild dance parties on beaches with bongo drums, sunsets, bikers on lonely roads, rape and attempted rape scenes (yes, there are many of them in this film and even more in later films in this genre. They are, for better or worse, endemic to the genre.) 

And it's got the classic scene where a pastor in a church asks 

the Angels, more or less, if you want to be free, what is that you want to be free to do anyway? 

"We want to be free, free to get loaded and ride our machines." 

Obviously this struck a chord with some people. Simon Pegg references it frequently in his 2013 film, The Word's End. 

There is a sense of the characters being part of a group that lives outside the laws of normal society, something that definitely appeals to many in an escapist film. But even then at the end of the film "Heavenly Blues" just decides this whole thing has gone too far. 

There's a lot of minor controversies surrounding the film. One of them is whether or not actual Hell's Angels participated in the making of the film. Roger Corman often spoke of how they were hired as extras and brought their bikes and girlfriends, charging for their appearance in the film and billing more for the appearances of the motorcycles than the women. He also wrote of how they were unreliable workers and this posed challenges filming ( see "How I made a hundred movies in Hollywood and never lost a dime," by Roger Corman) Sonny Barger, the head of the Hell's Angels, however insists that no Angels appeared in the film. Personally I don't consider either to be reliable witnesses so I guess we'll never know. 

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