Biker movies for those rainy, hangover, and other substance-fueled days. To start, a bit of history: on July 4, 1947, a squad of around 4,000 motorcycling hooligans invaded the small Californian town of Hollister, turning it into pandemonium worthy of any Viking raid (broken windows, brawls, drunkenness, sexual assault, and other affronts to the peaceful small-town way of life), and naturally, causing widespread terror among the locals. Barely two weeks later, Life magazine featured a full report on the incident, highlighting a spectacular full-page photo of one of those barbarians placidly posing atop his machine, with a mountain of empty beer bottles at his feet.
Such a forceful document would deeply impress American public opinion, awakening a sudden interest in everything related to juvenile delinquency and organized gangs. "Pulp" narrative immediately echoed this social concern, inaugurating a series of potboilers about wayward youth, some of whose titles would achieve considerable popular projection ("The Amboy Dukes" or "The Blackboard Jungle"). Hollywood, however, would take a few years to glimpse the potential, which happened in 1951 when filmmaker Stanley Kramer read a story by writer Frank Rooney directly inspired by the Hollister incident.
Kramer perceived the cinematic potential of the theme. So, along with director Laszlo Benedek and screenwriter John Paxton, he set to work on making the first proper "biker movie": "The Wild One" (1954). Before filming began, along with young Marlon Brando, the actor chosen to play the protagonist biker, the creators spent three weeks mingling with real motorcyclists, soaking up their life philosophy and gathering their opinions. "The Wild One" tells the story of Johnny, leader of the Black Rebels, a group of motorcyclists who storm a quiet little town. The rest of the story unfolds predictably: problems between residents and bikers, misunderstanding, a war of nerves, and, in the midst of it all, the impossible relationship between the sweet girl and the noble savage. It is true that, viewed today, "The Wild One" seems hardly violent; however, for the time, it seemed extremely intense, so much so that censors cried foul and critics labeled the film an "incitement to anarchy and violence." Columbia Pictures pressured Kramer to insert a puritanical and hypocritical message onto the final shot, assuring the public that all those undesirables were eventually captured and condemned. This version was exhibited in states where censorship demanded that fictional crimes be punished (the film remained banned for some time in countries like Great Britain, where it could only be released 14 years later). Another studio imposition was to change the original title, "Hot Blood," to the more disapproving "The Wild One." Despite the alarmist predictions, the film's release neither caused a geometric progression of juvenile delinquency nor even a flood of motorized gangs. The fact is, beyond the criminal component of all the "biker" paraphernalia, what resonated most deeply with the public was Marlon Brando's effective portrayal of that tough, primal, and incredibly cool guy, with just the right touch of rebellion and nobility to attract women and inspire imitators among young men. His biker outfit (leather jacket, black jeans, thick boots, and sideburns) would become the official uniform for every teenager with "outsider" intentions, as well as a genuine badge of identity for the rising and increasingly numerous rockabilly group.
JD ON WHEELS
Over the following years, a plague of JD films (juvenile delinquency movies), almost all with minuscule budgets, swept across the United States. Within this vein, biker movies formed a distinct category, with Benedeck's film as a clear precursor. Almost all clumsily played with a series of easily identifiable stereotypes: the wayward but good-hearted biker, the irredeemably evil rival for society, the busty blonde who guides the protagonist down the right path, the camaraderie among buddies that almost always takes on misogynistic overtones, the "losa" poetic, and the cult of the machine, leather, speed... The plots were recycled again and again, as brazenly as they were charmingly. For example, "Motorcycle Gang," an American International Pictures film from 1958, was practically a remake of "Dragstrip Girl," a film by the same company from the previous year. Both films lack the slightest dramatic structure, betraying the extreme scarcity of budget in every shot; however, they exude such a crude and endearing innocence that it's hard not to watch them, decades later, with a certain knowing smile. Another systematically repeated schema would be the final defeat of the motorized "bad boys" at the hands of the decent, formal group of teenagers of the moment. That same year, "Dragstrip Riot" showed the tug-of-war between two sons of the asphalt (one good, the other bad) to win a girl (a sweet Connie Stevens). All this interspersed with races, fistfights, and the unusual presence of Fay Wray, King Kong's very own girlfriend, in her last film appearance.
By the early 60s, 'JD Films' seemed to have given almost everything they could from such meager formulas, while 'biker' imagery had become as common in "Teen-explotation" as Kleenex in a porn shoot. Outside commercial circuits, some filmmakers with a more underground-experimental vocation would dive into the chromed and customized aesthetic with titles like "Scorpio Rising" (1963), by the brilliant queer Kenneth Anger, or "Blow Job" (1964) and "Bike Boy" (1967), both by Andy Warhol. All these titles delve into the subculture of homo 'biker' fetishism of sweat, metal, and leather, a theme that the less radical "The Leather Boys" (1964), a British film by Sidney J. Furie, also explores.
During that decade, another who would do his own damn thing was the unorthodox Russ Meyer, who would leave his "biker" mark with "Motorpsycho" (1965), in which, as in any good Meyerian fantasy, the bikes were the least important part, occupying the scant bit of screen space left by the melons of his usual female cast.
But what the decline of cinematic juvenile delinquency would really give way to was a new subgenre for teenage consumption: "beach movies." "We were already making movies about Californian surfers, a bunch of fun-loving boys and girls. Just Cokes, no beer. Our audience was already bored with so much JD, and welcomed clean, fun sex," affirmed Bill Asher, director for AIP of numerous beach films. Even so, the biker look was by no means erased from celluloid, as it would be used in a multitude of beach comedies as a dirty and ill-advised counterpoint to so many bronzed youngsters. Harvey Lembeck would repeatedly play the thug Eric Von Zipper, leader of "The Rats," a biker gang tasked with annoying the young surfers in the "Panty Beach" series (made up of films like "Bikini Beach" or "Beach Blanket Bingo.").
Thanks to hell, in 1966, a gigantic wave swept away all those jerks in swimsuits and other wholesome Zumosol people (Frankie Avalon, Annette Funicello, Connie Francis...), leaving the field open for the kamikaze Roger Corman to aggressively enter "cycle cinema," thus giving rise to the second golden age of the subgenre.
THE ANGELS ARRIVE
Inspired, like Kramer, by a photograph in Life magazine showing a crew of real Hell's Angels, with their elaborate choppers, attending the solemn funeral of one of their members, Corman presented a project to AIP to revive the genre. The studio drafted a treatment titled "Fallen Angels" that focused the action from the perspective of a town terrified by a motorcycle gang, portraying "the Angels" as the villains of the film. Corman strongly opposed this treatment: "I didn't care about the citizens' perspective. What I wanted was to tell the story of the Angels. They were the figures. I wasn't interested in eternal values, but in the world of the outcast, of the outlaw," Corman expressed years later. The real Hell's Angels had garnered general attention in 1964 when some teenagers declared they had been abducted and raped by a gang of wild motorcyclists. The press was quick to label the Angels a national threat through numerous reports in various respectable publications. The indescribable Hunter S. Thompson would write a book about them ("Hell's Angels," Ed. Anagrama), in which he described them as "a human zoo on wheels," understandable given the aesthetic exuberance, almost circus-like, that a minimally willing Hell's Angel could achieve: earrings, Indian feathers, Prussian helmets, tattoos, chains, iron crosses, swastikas, skulls, etc. With such visual delirium within reach, Corman could not miss the opportunity to turn it into fodder for cinematic exploitation. Thus, the "cycle movie" par excellence would be born: "The Wild Angels" (1966).
The monarch of supersonic filmmaking, with his usual astuteness, opted for a semi-documentary style, sufficient to develop the slight plot. This resource, logically, was aimed at saving the maximum number of takes possible, which would result in a film of extreme narrative parsimony, a rushed but effective structure, and spartan dialogues (Charles Griffith's original script consisted of barely... 120 lines). Another of Corman's tricks to save money was to resort to real Hell's Angels to avoid expenses on extras and specialists. Thus, he contacted Big Otto, one of the "biker" bigwigs and rival of the most famous of them all, Sonny Barger, president of the powerful Oakland Brotherhood. The austere director committed to paying the Angels (around 20) $35 each per day of work, but they demanded $20 more for each motorcycle and another fifteen for each girl (less than for the machines), which, according to Corman's calculations, was still economical compared to the figures that specialists would have charged.
However, working with them would cause the director many headaches. To begin with, during the first few days of filming, all the motorcycles intended for the actors, which were stored in a truck, were stolen. Logically, all suspicions fell on Big Otto's boys. On the other hand, the low temperatures and the poor condition of their ancient Harleys meant that they constantly broke down or got stuck in the sand, turning the shoot into a festival of interruptions. Furthermore, during the three weeks of filming, the police would constantly snoop around and often show up with arrest warrants for some of the picturesque extras. All these factors made tensions a regular part of the daily agenda.
Corman also demanded that all his actors ride the "choppers" themselves. This led to the replacement of George Chakiris ("West Side Story") with Peter Fonda, as the former was unable to learn to handle himself on two wheels. Fonda then insisted on changing his character's name (until then Jack Black) to Heavenly Blues (a hallucinogenic plant). In addition to Fonda as the leader of the clique, the cast included Bruce Dern, Nancy Sinatra, Michael J. Pollard, and Diane Ladd. The plot is, more or less, as follows: Loser (Bruce Dern) loses his chopper to a rival Mexican gang: Heavenly Blues and company go in search of their friend's machine, and when they find the Mexicans, a tremendous fight breaks out, which is interrupted by the arrival of the police: Loser is shot and hospitalized, but the Angels know that, if he recovers, their friend will be jailed, so they break him out.
The injured man dies, and his companions organize a funeral that degenerates into a sacrilegious frenzy of violence and sex... The critical reaction to "The Wild Angels" was highly disparate, creating radical controversy. Despite negative comments calling it "senseless violent garbage," the film was screened at festivals like Venice and Cannes, receiving a warm reception in Europe. In the United States, it quickly became the highest-grossing film in AIP's history, eagerly devoured by the countercultural youth of those years. However, not all Hell's Angels received the feature film favorably.
Shortly after the premiere, Corman began receiving serious threats against his physical integrity, while the San Bernardino fraternity, commanded by Big Otto, sued the austere filmmaker for defamation, demanding 4 million dollars in compensation for what they considered "a false and insulting portrayal of their way of life." Corman did not back down.
TIMES OF EXPLOITATION
The immense box office success of Corman's film convulsed the low-budget world, with "Biker movies" suddenly emerging from everywhere.
Curiously, while on a social scale those seemed to be years of pacifism and free love, box office figures showed that young people didn't shy away from a good dose of gratuitous violence, raw sex, and morbidity on wheels. Corman would again get his hands dirty with bike grease by producing "Devil's Angels" (1967), another Charles Griffith script cut from the same cloth. Although the advertising proclaimed outrageous things like; "Violence is their only God" or "They hunt in packs like mad dogs," the truth is that the film, despite being almost a remake of "The Wild Angels," showed a tribe considerably less brutal than that of the said film. John Cassavettes played Code, the leader of the group Los Calaveras, who turns out to be a somewhat more thoughtful and reasonable individual than usual in this type of film. Another who would wallow happily in "biker" exploitation was Joe Solomon, who penetrated the subgenre by producing "Hell's Angels On Wheels" (1967) for AIP, Jack Nicholson's debut on two wheels. Director Richard Rush would surpass Corman on this occasion by hiring no less than 155 real Hell's Angels, and not content with that, he would appoint the great boss Sonny Barger as technical advisor for the shoot, which pleased him so much that he not only kept all his boys in line, but also offered to appear personally on screen.
The plot revolved around the initiation of a gas station attendant named Poet Gack Nicholson as a Hell's Angel, who is attracted by the freedom and lifestyle of the gang. However, he gets into trouble by becoming fond of Buddy's girl (Adam Roarke, another accomplished biker), none other than the gang leader.
Nicholson also starred around that time in "The Rebel Rousers," alongside the already initiated Bruce Dern and Diane Ladd, as well as a young Harry Dean Stanton. The story is about an architect (Cameron Mitchell) whose pregnant wife (Diane Ladd) is kidnapped by the inevitable biker gang, led by Dern. Coincidentally, Mitchell turns out to be an old schoolmate of Dern, so the latter is willing to release the girl. Unfortunately for her, Nicholson has won a motorcycle race in which the prize was precisely the girl, and he demands his reward in the flesh...
Producer Martin B. Cohen would years later describe "The Rebel Rousers" as "the most appalling thing I've ever done."
So there you have it. Another notable "cycle movie" from 1967 was "Boro Lasers." Directed by Tom Laughlin (under the pseudonym T.C. Frank), it is somewhat important for being the debut film of the character Billy Jack (played by Laughlin himself), a half-Indian who would later star in a successful series of feature films with racial problems as the central theme. Here, good old Billy Jack has to deal with a gang led by Jeremy Slate (also a regular on two wheels) who terrorizes his town, in addition to assaulting a young woman who is on vacation there (Elizabeth Jones). Another added incentive lies in the unexpected presence of the mammiferous Jane Russell, already in frank decline.
Dennis Hopper, for his part, would be deflowered on a twin-cylinder with "The Glory Stompers," playing a depraved biker who kidnaps women for white slavery... after having had his way with the merchandise, of course.
Of films like "Cycle Savages," "Hell's Bloody Devils," or "Angels Hard As They Come" (produced by Jonathan Demme), all from 1970, little can be said, except that they far exceed the barrier of ridicule.
From the same year comes "Satan's Sadists," a production by Sam Sherman's cheesy International Independent Pictures, with the versatile Russ Tamblyn at the head of the cast, embodying a kind of motorized Charles Manson.
An inevitable twist on the same theme was the female gang on wheels. In "The Mini-Skirt Mob" (1968), Diane McBain joins a biker gang to terrorize her ex-boyfriend and his new wife.
The Corman-esque New World production "Bury Me An Angel," written and directed by Barbara Peeters, featured a girl allied with a deranged Hell's Angel, hunting for the biker who killed her little brother. Incidentally, anyone who thinks that due to the female authorship of this film there might be some minimally feminist intention underlying it, should disabuse themselves of that notion.
In this section, the hilarious "She-Devils On Wheels," produced and directed by the undisputed "gore" master Herschell Gordon Lewis, deserves special mention. The film narrates how a bunch of spermovorous women behave like a runaway herd of praying mantises, leaving every male they encounter dry, then dragging and trampling him with their motorcycles.
Vietnam was also a theme too appetizing to escape the clutches of motorized exploitation. In "Angels From Hell" (1969), a Vietnam veteran returns from the slaughter to form an army of motorcycle outlaws with which to fight authority.
In "The Hard Ride" (1971), another veteran returns home to bury a fallen comrade, whose last wish was to have a biker funeral. Ironically, in the end, the protagonist also kicks the bucket, thus being able to enjoy the same honors as his friend.
"Chrome and Hot Leather" (1971), for its part, besides marking Marvin Gaye's film debut, tells how another ex-combatant recruits his old Green Beret buddies to crush a gang that left his girlfriend a wreck.
However, being a Hell's Angel doesn't mean being immune to patriotism.In fact, among the biker tribes on screen, we will rarely see European or Japanese machines. A true "biker" will opt for the patriotic choice, that is, a Harley Davidson. In the words of a cinematic Hell Angel: "One of us on one of those Japanese pieces of crap would be like John Wayne on an African camel."
This shows that even Neanderthals are capable of feeling love for their flag. This was precisely the case of a group of idiots who, during the Vietnam War, volunteered to go and fight the "yellows" on their choppers, forming an independent elite group.
This true story would inspire Joe Soloman, always on the lookout, to make "The Losers" (1972), a delirious film in which five Angels venture into the Cambodian jungle (by the way, riding not Harleys but Yamahas) on a suicidal secret mission for the CIA, with the aim of freeing a high-ranking American officer captured by the enemy. As if the premise wasn't ridiculous enough, things become hilarious when, once found, the officer refuses to return with them.
Another recurring theme during the early 70s was the clashes between wild bikers and naive hippies. The peaceful hippie communes would thus suffer the scourge of untamed gangs in films like "Angels Hard As They Come" (1972) or "The Peace Killers" (1971), although both countercultural trends would occasionally have to unite to defend themselves from narrow-minded incomprehension and redneck hostility, as in "Angel Unchained" (1970).
Finally, the pacifist and "biker" waves would merge, more or less harmoniously, in the most famous road movie in history: "Easy Rider" (1969).
ROAD AND BLANKET
Easy Rider clearly represented the beginning of the end for the formula. Columbia Pictures (who took over the project after Sam Arkoff of AIP refused to let the inexperienced Dennis Hopper direct the film) tried to distance the project as much as possible from the "biker" cliché, using advertising slogans that were much more philosophical and pompous than usual in "exploitation movies."
The result would be one of the most fake and silly movies in history; a film that, even today, I cannot help but view as the supreme act of circumstantial imposture by a series of over-inflated egos. Where the certainly unspeakable exploitation filmmakers wielded a blatant yet harmless money-grubbing idiocy, the Fonda-Hopper tandem reeked of countercultural posturing, of cheap mysticism that time would only ridicule.
I don't deny some moments of certain lyrical intensity, some usable characters (that pragmatic Jack Nicholson) and an indefinable evocative breath of dreamlike emptiness in certain sequences; however, Peter Fonda still seems to me a pathetic microcephalic (on and off screen) and his presence a real drag on the film's digestion. His character (as representative of true counterculture as Emilio Aragón is of R&R) doesn't come down to earth in the entire damn movie, constantly babbling idiotic and utopian dreams about love, humanity, and goodness. As for Hopper, let's not kid ourselves, at that time he had not yet become who he would be years later. Even so, if all the hippie crap is removed from "Easy Rider," what remains is a healthy fable about hedonism and the most pragmatic disillusionment.
A fundamentally materialistic and shameless message that the foolish majority of the time failed to perceive behind the artificial flowers of the "rebel millionaire" Fonda. Both critics ("what a profound movie") and the box office ("what cool guys") unanimously praised "Easy Rider," turning this fraud into one of those mythical feature films whose interpretive nuances are sought for years. Ultimately, it would transcend as the most respectable title of our beloved subgenre of road movies. Anyway... moving on.
GASOLINE
During the twilight years of the genre, producers, seeing profits falter, would try any foolishness to squeeze a few last drops of commercial juice out of it. The genre would give its 'sleaze' answer to "The Magnificent Seven" with "The Savage Seven" (1968), a film in which American Indians become evil "bikers," devastating a defenseless small town.
The ineffable Joe Soloman would explore the relationship between Angels and the press in "Run Angel Run" (1969). In it, a "biker" sells his story exclusively to a tabloid magazine for a large sum of money, a not-so-crazy premise (this very thing had happened in real life) that ends up going off the rails. However, Soloman's unbridled imagination would reach its delirious peak two years later when he produced "Werewolves On Wheels," a psychotronic film about biker lycanthropes directed incompetently by Michael Levesque. But the flirtations between horror and motorcycles would not end there, but would give rise to another trashy gem, "The Death Wheelers" (1973) by the British Don Sharp, a film also known as "Psychomania," where a horde of motorized zombies rise from their graves to cause mischief again. Impressive.
From the mid-70s onwards, "cycle cinema" virtually disappeared as such, although bikers could still be seen in films like George A. Romero's "Knightriders" (1981); "Cult None," where "biker" aesthetics and Arthurian mythology merge into a curious multi-genre cocktail; "City Limits" (1984), a post-apocalyptic fantasy with motorized gangs; or "Timerider" (1985), in which a biker is transported to the year 1877. All of these are films that emerged as a result of brutally hybridizing various subgenres, including the one we are discussing.
A special mention goes to the excellent documentary "Hell's Angels Forever" (1983), an interesting overview of the life and customs of these groups, compiled from images gathered over more than ten years by its three directors: Richard Chase, Kevin Keating and Leon Grant.
Finally, arriving in the 90s, we have come across some embarrassing and unfunny pastiches like "Harley Davidson and the Marlboro Man" (1991) or the rather more orthodox, though innocuous, "The Last Rider" (1992), a modest revisitation of most of the thematic constants of the almost forgotten subgenre, manufactured directly for the video market (the last bastion of low budgets, once drive-ins and re-release circuits were knocked out).
Nevertheless, the grain of trash cinema continues to ooze good "biker" pus, in drips, in ragged films like "I Bought a Vampire Motorcycle," an irreverent, crude, and wild homage to "cycle-horror," with a psycho-motorcycle possessed by a demonic spirit as the mutilating star of the show.
As I said, any day now the "choppers" will roar again, convulsing the bowels of Z-movies once more, to the delight of all of us who truly drool over the most over-the-top pauper cinema, and also of those who still believe, like Kerouac, that "the road is life."
Text: Ruta66, Biker movies. Four decades of motorized cinema - nº 80, pag 36, January-1993
