The Wild Angels

To mark the passing of Peter Fonda, and since I've already written about Easy Rider, the film he is most associated with, I watched the first film he did on a motorcycle, 1966's The Wild Angels, directed by Roger Corman. It rankled me.

Corman, of course, cranked out movies at about one a month throughout the '60s. The Wild Angels was the first in a long series of outlaw biker films under the banner of American International Pictures that were done cheaply and made back money. I would also imagine they horrified that part of America that believed in law and order. Now, if I were living in those days I would surely have been either a hippie or a hippies sympathizer, but I wouldn't have liked bike gangs.

The Wild Angels is about a chapter of the Hell's Angels in San Pedro, California. Corman used actual Hell's Angels as extras, but they later sued him for casting the group in a bad light. I can see why. This picture shows them as nothing but children, not interested in facing responsibility. At the end of the film, when Fonda interrupts a funeral service, the preacher asks him what he wants. "We want to be free!" he shouts. Okay, the preacher asks, free to do what? All Fonda can think of is "ride" and "get loaded." They do not want to be free to work or follow the laws of society.

Though the film is a trim 93 minutes, there is really only about ten minutes worth of plot. Fonda plays Heavenly Blues, the leader of the pack. His buddy is Joe Kerns (Bruce Dern), who can't hold a job and is nicknamed "The Loser." They go after Dern's stolen bicycle in a town near the Mexican border. The Angels are racist, calling the Mexicans beaners and taco benders. They also wear the trappings of German warfare, such as the swastika and Iron Cross, though I'm sure they have no understanding of what they represent.

A fight breaks out, and Dern escapes on a police motorcycle. He's shot by the police, and is recuperating in a hospital, but Fonda wants to break him out. They do (not before one of them attempts to rape a nurse) but without medical care Dern dies. The rest of the film is them planning a funeral.At the funeral the gang goes bonkers, even gang-raping Dern's old lady (his actual wife, Diane Ladd). At the cemetery a fight breaks out with locals, but Fonda stays behind, burying his old friend. "There's no place to go," he says, prefiguring his line, "We blew it," in Easy Rider.

I'm at a loss to understand what this film is supposed to do. We certainly can't be expected to empathize with these scum, can we? Much of the film just shows them riding on their bikes, or girls wearing nothing but bras, dancing. Maybe these films scratched some primordial itch, and the viewers lived vicariously through these outlaws. But there's no good guy in this film, no reason to hitch our wagons to these characters emotionally.

The film co-stars Nancy Sinatra as Fonda's girlfriend, whom he treats like dirt (I wonder if Frank saw it, and what he thought). The screenplay was credited to Charles B. Griffiths, but it is thought that Peter Bogdonavich rewrote most of it. It wasn't his finest hour.

The allure of motorcycles is that they do give the sensation of being free, which was much better explored in Easy Rider. But even Hell's Angels have to pay their taxes and stop at red lights. Today the group is much more responsible, doing gallant things like shielding mourners at funerals picketed by the Westboro Baptist Church. But those in The Wild Angels just make you want to take a shower.