The real-life motorcycle gang, The Hell's Angels, lend their name to the fictional gang in the film. Fonda plays the gang leader, who is stuck with the unlikely name Heavenly Blues. (??) Along with his girlfriend, Mike (Nancy Sinatra), his best friend, Loser (Bruce Dern), and his girl, Gaysh (Diane Ladd, Dern's wife at the time), and some of the real-life Angels, they ride, fight, party, make out, etc., all to a soundtrack of innocuous rock music, similar to the music heard in other "hip" movies of the period.
The plot has the gang setting out to retrieve a bike that was stolen from Loser. A brawl ensues. The cops show up. The gang flees, but Loser gets left behind. He steals a police motorcycle and is shot in the back during a getaway chase. His injuries are serious and he undergoes surgery. The gang springs him from the hospital and he dies soon afterward. They take Loser's body to his home town in the California mountains. The funeral in a small church turns into a drunken, violent orgy. When the gang tries to bury Loser's body in the local cemetery, some townspeople confront them. A brawl ensues. The cops show up. Everyone flees, except for Heavenly Blues, who laments to Mike: "There's nowhere to go."
This unsavory little photoplay was the beginning of a long string of similar biker flicks to follow, some of them released by AIP. Roger Corman may have considered this film to be a kind of sequel or homage to the 1953 Marlon Brando classic THE WILD ONE. Or maybe he didn't. In either case, the two films have little in common, other than the central theme of a motorcycle gang. There are some good moments in THE WILD ANGELS, most of them involving Bruce Dern's excellent performance in a relatively small role. But the overall feeling is one of cheap sensationalism and an attempt to preach to the audience about the yearnings of young people caught up in the 60's culture. During the climactic funeral sequence, Heavenly Blues gets to passionately speak lines such as: "We want to ride our machines without getting hassled by The Man!" And: "We want to get loaded!!" Peter Fonda must have learned something valuable from this experience. In EASY RIDER, his character, Wyatt, is tight-lipped and doesn't say much of anything during the entire movie.
For American-International, THE WILD ANGELS marked the beginning of their next phase of film production. Having successfully made and marketed horror movies and beach party movies, they were ready to move into more adult content. In the next few years, the biker flicks would be released, along with other countercultural films such as THE TRIP, PSYCH OUT, and MARYJANE. Frankie Avalon and Annette Funicello would step aside to make room for Jack Nicholson and Susan Strasberg.
Also featured in the cast are Buck Taylor, Gayle Hunnicutt, Joan Shawlee, Michael J. Pollard, Frank Maxwell, and a brief appearance by Corman regular Dick Miller, always a welcome presence in any movie.
I found it ironic that the movie ends in a cemetery, it's as if Corman still couldn't escape his connection with horror films.
ReplyDeleteI never thought of that! You could be right.
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