The Wild Angels: Corman's Hells Angels Provocation

American International Pictures released The Wild Angels in 1966 and it made an enormous amount of money — by some accounts the most profitable picture the company had ever had at that point. Roger Corman directed it, Charles B. Griffith wrote it, Peter Fonda leads it as a Hells Angels chapter president called Heavenly Blues, Nancy Sinatra plays his girlfriend Mike, and Bruce Dern is Loser, the member whose fate organises the second half. Real Hells Angels appear as extras and consultants. The Angels subsequently sued.

It also went to Venice. The 1966 festival programmed it, which produced the spectacle of Europe’s most self-serious film event receiving a drive-in picture about outlaw motorcyclists and being visibly unsure what to do about it. That single booking is the whole story of American genre cinema in the mid-1960s: the disreputable product arriving at the palace, and the palace suspecting it might be art.

What Corman actually made

The plot is thin by design. Blues’s chapter rides out to recover Loser’s stolen bike, the trip goes wrong, Loser is injured and hospitalised, and the Angels decide the hospital is no place for one of theirs. Everything after that is consequence. There is no arc in the conventional sense. Griffith’s script is a series of rituals — the ride, the confrontation, the party, the funeral — and the film is interested in the rituals as anthropology rather than as plot beats.

Corman claimed to have researched it directly, spending time with Angels chapters before shooting, and the texture supports the claim. The film has a documentary flatness to it that no amount of exploitation marketing quite scrubs off. The bikes are real, the desert is real, the leathers are real, and a fair number of the faces in the background are real. That grounding is what separates The Wild Angels from the fifty imitations that followed it within four years.

Peter Fonda is the film’s centre and its problem. He plays Blues as a man with the pose fully assembled and nothing behind it — beautiful, laconic, hollow. It is a genuinely brave piece of underplaying for a lead in a picture sold on menace, and it sets up the funeral sequence, which is where the film goes from exploitation to something stranger. Nancy Sinatra, cast for her name and treated by most contemporary reviews as stunt casting, is better than she had any obligation to be. Bruce Dern and Diane Ladd, married in life, play a couple here, and Dern gets the film’s small store of vulnerability.

The funeral, and why the mechanics land

The set piece everyone remembers is the church. The Angels take Loser’s body to a small chapel, browbeat the preacher, and then — with the coffin open and the swastika iconography on full display — turn the service into a party. The preacher asks what they want. Fonda’s answer is the film’s most famous piece of dialogue, a short creed about wanting to be free and to ride without being hassled, delivered with the deadness of a man reciting something he has heard rather than something he believes.

Watch how Corman shoots it. He holds. The camera stays wide enough to keep the coffin, the altar and the party in the same frame, so you cannot look at the desecration without also looking at the corpse. The sequence runs long past the point of comfort, and its power comes from duration rather than from editing. Corman, the fastest director in America, chooses stillness at the exact moment his genre demands acceleration. That is the craft decision the whole film rests on.

The score is the other piece of craft that gets overlooked. Davie Allan and the Arrows supplied the music, and their fuzz-guitar instrumental “Blues’ Theme” became a genuine hit off the back of the film. Fuzz guitar was still a relatively new noise in 1966, and Corman uses it the way a horror director uses a synthesiser fifteen years later — as a texture that tells you what world you are in before anyone speaks. The Arrows’ sound became the default aural signature of the entire biker cycle, copied by every subsequent picture in the genre. Corman invented the biker film’s images and commissioned its noise, and the noise outlived most of the films.

The swastikas are the other thing. They are all over the picture — helmets, jackets, the coffin — and Corman films them without commentary, which drove contemporary critics to fury. The film’s refusal to editorialise is precisely what makes the sequence work as observation. These are people who have adopted the most loaded symbol available to them because it repels, and the symbol means nothing to them beyond its capacity to repel. The film records this. It declines to explain it. Forty-odd years of reappraisal later, that restraint reads as the picture’s intelligence rather than its cowardice.

The ancestor

Everyone reaches for The Wild One (1953), and the connection is obvious enough — Brando, the leather, the town under siege, the Hollister rally that inspired it. But The Wild One is a studio picture with a moral frame and a police force that arrives to restore order. It is a warning delivered from above.

The truer ancestor of The Wild Angels is Scorpio Rising (1963), Kenneth Anger’s forty-minute underground short: motorcycles, leather, Nazi insignia, pop songs, no dialogue, no judgement, sex and death and chrome edited into a trance. Anger got there first, and he got there with the same materials and the same refusal to explain. Corman took Anger’s iconography, hung ninety minutes of narrative on it and put it in drive-ins across America. The avant-garde supplied the vocabulary; the exploitation machine supplied the distribution. That transaction happens constantly in this era and it is almost never credited in this direction.

The consequences ran forward fast. Fonda and Dennis Hopper had both worked inside the Corman system — Hopper appears in The Trip, Corman’s 1967 acid picture written by Jack Nicholson — and Easy Rider in 1969 is unimaginable without the three years of biker product AIP put out in between. The whole apparatus is described in The Corman film school: everyone who started at the bottom and AIP and the assembly line of American International horror. The biker cycle it started ran for years and produced its own oddities, including the one covered in Bury Me an Angel: the biker film directed by a woman.

The case against

The film is boring in stretches, and that is not entirely a strategy. The middle sags. The rituals Corman is so good at observing do not accumulate into anything, and the picture’s refusal of plot leaves long passages where bikes travel from one place to another and the camera watches them do it. Ninety minutes is a long time to spend with people the film has established as incapable of change.

The women are badly served. Sinatra and Ladd are both good, and both are handed roles that exist to be acted upon. The sequence in which the party turns on Mike is ugly in a way the film neither dramatises nor takes responsibility for, and the neutrality that serves the swastikas so well serves this material very poorly indeed. Observation without judgement has a limit, and the picture crosses it.

The film’s relationship with its own subjects is murkier than the reappraisals like to admit. Corman got his authenticity by hiring the Angels, and the Angels then went to law over what he did with it — the picture’s realism and the picture’s exploitation are the same act, viewed from two sides. Griffith’s dialogue outside the famous creed is functional at best.

The verdict

The Wild Angels is a founding document that is only intermittently a good film, and both halves of that sentence are load-bearing. It invented a genre, it made Fonda’s career, it demonstrated that the American youth audience would pay to watch itself be frightening, and it contains one sequence — the funeral — of real and lasting power. It is also slack, repetitive, and morally passive at the moments where passivity costs the most.

The Venice booking was not the joke everybody assumed. Corman had made something with the flatness of reportage and the iconography of a nightmare, and Europe recognised it faster than America did. What the film understands, and what the imitators never grasped, is that the outlaw pose is a costume worn by people with nowhere to ride to. Fonda’s creed is a boy repeating a slogan at a funeral he does not know how to conduct.

Start here if you want the biker film’s origin, then go to Scorpio Rising for the same images without the plot, and to Gas-s-s-s to see Corman working the same generation four years later with the anger drained out and the affection left in. It circulates in Corman retrospectives and on the streamers carrying the AIP library; look for a print that keeps the desert grain, because the grain is half the atmosphere.

Spoilers below

Loser dies in the hospital, and he dies partly because the Angels take him out of it. The chapter breaks him free from police custody in a ward, drags him back to the clubhouse and treats him with beer and improvised nursing, and the film is clear-eyed about the arithmetic: their loyalty kills him. The gesture that proves they are a brotherhood is the same gesture that finishes their brother. Corman simply lets you do the sum.

The funeral follows, and then the graveside, where the chapter’s fight with the locals turns into a brawl among the headstones. The last shot is the film’s argument compressed into an image. The others ride away, sirens closing, and Blues stays behind, alone, shovelling earth onto Loser’s grave. Asked why he will not run, he says there is nowhere to go.

That is the ending, and it is why the picture outlasted its cycle. Every biker film that followed sold the ride as escape. The Wild Angels finishes with its president standing still in a cemetery with a spade in his hands, waiting for the police, having worked out that the freedom in the creed was always a description of having nothing. The genre spent the next decade filming the pose. Corman had already filmed the bill.