By Ben Bussey
The mid-60s: that curious time when change was in the air, the kids were standing up for what they believed in, and – even more uncanny – Roger Corman was making movies that were actually kind of important. Though always best known for his lengthy and prolific career as a producer of B-movies churned out at high speed on low budgets, starting back in the 50s and still not slowing down today, Corman also did quite a lot of directing too once upon a time – and while, again, a lot of these were quick and cheap B-movies, there were times when he really put forth the effort and tried his hand at something timely and topical, designed not to simply placate the youth of America, but present something they could directly relate to. There was 1962’s The Intruder, an under-seen drama whose anti-racial segregation message was bold for the time; later came 1967’s The Trip, an extremely timely look at the LSD experience which Corman famously researched by taking LSD himself, an event set to be immortalised in The Man With Kaleidoscope Eyes, a biopic from Joe Dante.
Between the two came The Wild Angels (a 1966 production, which makes it a little confusing that this new DVD release is being dubbed a 50th anniversary edition) which, although they were not allowed to use the name, aimed to bring the lifestyle of the notorious Hell’s Angels biker gang to the big screen. Notably, it also put Peter Fonda front and centre on a motorcycle, where it turned out he looked pretty cool – thereby paving the way for the 1969 movie widely accepted to be one of the major turning points of American cinema, Easy Rider. On top of which, Fonda gives a speech toward the end – “we wanna be free, to do what we wanna do!” – which was immortalised in Primal Scream’s 1990 indie dancefloor-filler Loaded; a track which has itself been immortalised further by its use in 2013’s The World’s End. Phew, the endless cycle of cult status rebirth.
So, the importance of The Wild Angels to film and pop culture history may be hard to dispute – but how does the film itself hold up 49 years on? Well, because of the aforementioned Easy Rider connections it is a tricky film to judge entirely on its own merits, and there’s no question that it isn’t as iconic and enduring a classic as its 1969 descendant, but The Wild Angels is nonetheless gripping, entertaining and in some respects still quite surprising, even shocking in its portrayal of a group of young people – mostly, but not exclusively men – who spit at the conventions of taste and decency. Drawing on the French New Wave, which would of course prove a key influence to the American New Wave that took off in the 1970s, Corman is less interested in telling a classically rounded story than giving us a window into the everyday existence of an outsider subculture. We get very little in terms of context and exposition, not much backstory to explain away why these young people came to adopt this lifestyle, and (the remorseful conclusion aside) even less moralistic aspersions cast on their behaviour. This is quite something, considering this behaviour includes brandishing Nazi insignias, sneaking across the border to beat up Mexicans and committing sexual assault. Again, much of this remains quite shocking in 2015, so one can only imagine how provocative it was back in 1966, one year shy of the Summer of Love. Small wonder, then, that The Wild Angels was initially refused a certificate in the United Kingdom (only released with an X after cuts in 1972).
The use of Nazi iconography was, for me, one of the most fascinating elements of the film, for the simple reason that it’s almost never discussed, aside from one early scene in which Dick Miller (well, it is a Corman movie) furiously chastises Peter Fonda and Bruce Dern for wearing iron crosses and swastikas. Indeed, so heavily are those taboo symbols shown in the film, we even have a swastika etched on the end of the T on the title card in the opening credits – and the climactic funeral scene even sees the coffin (I won’t spoil whose) laid out with a Nazi flag on top. It’s notable that they downplay this in the poster art above, one stormtrooper helmet aside – and well they might, because The Wild Angels certainly isn’t a proto-Romper Stomper. Despite their aggression, and the notable fight sequence with a group of Mexicans (motivated less by racial hatred than out of revenge for a stolen bike), there isn’t anything too flagrantly Nazi-like about their behaviour; indeed, Fonda’s chapter president Heavenly Blues at one point stops another biker from raping a black nurse. Now, I know virtually nothing about the reality of bikers beyond what I’ve seen on Sons of Anarchy, but one gets the impression that the Nazi iconography is adopted for much the same reason that some punks wore it a decade later; simply because it’s guaranteed to offend just about everybody. It’s a fine example of how outsider subcultures tend to define themselves not so much by what they are, but what they are not; surely there’s no more extreme way of asserting your opposition to polite society than to adopt the symbols of the enemy, particularly back in the 60s so soon after World War 2. Given that the era is so often looked back on through rose-tinted (and possibly heart-shaped) glasses as the time when peace and love prevailed, a movie like The Wild Angels provides some valuable perspective that there was a lot else going on.
Still, given my confessed ignorance of biker culture, I’m hard pressed to comment on how true to life The Wild Angels might be, though it certainly seems a great deal more grounded and believable than, say, such more recent biker movies as Torque; and with the cast headed up by the hugely charismatic Fonda and Dern (who would of course reunite with Corman, along with Dennis Hopper, the following year on The Trip), it’s a great deal more compelling than your typical mid-60s B-movie. It never feels like it’s demonising bikers, nor does it necessarily seem to overly romanticise them – but even so, there’s no denying the inherent coolness of it all. And by the time Fonda declares “we wanna get loaded, and we wanna have a good time,” I’m sure the young rebel in all of us wants to raise a bottle to that.
The Wild Angels is out now on DVD from Three Wolf Studios (rated 15, not 18 as on the cover art above).