Way back in 1966, before he was reduced to a Johnny Depp caricature and the personal hero of that one libertarian douchebag in your college Philosophy 101 class, Hunter S. Thompson burst onto the literary scene with his debut book, Hell’s Angels: The Strange and Terrible Saga of the Outlaw Motorcycle Gang. Expanded from a 1965 article for The Nation, Hell’s Angels introduced America to not only the Doctor’s freewheeling, lysergic brand of prose, but this new underground culture of the motorcycle gang. No longer the leather-bound toughs of The Wild Ones, these bikers were hairier, freakier, and ten times more drugged up. They didn’t even bother to ask what you had for them to rebel against, they let their chains to the talkin’, maaaaaaan.
Hells Angels on Wheels roared into movie theaters the following year, when the Summer of Love had cooled down into the Winter of…I guess still Love? I dunno. I imagine the film must’ve been very shocking in its day and age, but for today’s viewer, Hells Angels on Wheels is notable for other reasons, namely its nascency. It represents ground zero for an entire sub-genre which played a major part in cementing the explosion of creativity that was American cinema in the 1970s, and provided a launching pad for a number of players who would go on to become indispensable cornerstones of that scene. But, before they could do that, they had to shoot a bunch of establishing shots of bikes parking in places.
In the spirit of the Peace movement, why don’t we be generous and describe the narrative structure of Hells Angels on Wheels as…episodic? Yeah, that’s the ticket! Basically every scene in the movie follows this structure: the Hells Angels show up somewhere and park their bikes for like five minutes, go into a place where everyone hates them, get into a fight with the people who hate them, then leave when either they kill someone or the cops show up. That’s it. That’s the whole movie. The audience’s surrogate is a young man named Poet, who quits his job at a gas station when a customer is a total jerk to him. Then his bike gets sideswiped by one of the Angels, who has, shall we say, questionable facial hair. Either this guy’s mustache just grows weird, or they did a terrible makeup job on him, anyway, you be the judge:
So Poet’s headlight is damaged, and he proceeds to start a fight with the Angel with the questionable facial hair. Now, instead of just beating him to death with some wrenches, the lead Angel, Buddy, appreciates Poet’s ability to scrap. They all hang out for awhile. They get into a fight in a bar with a rival biker gang. They get into a fight at a carnival with some sailors. Then they all go back to a swingin’ pad full of groovy wall decor and have a drug orgy for what feels like nine hours. At one point, a painter who looks and talks suspiciously like Hunter S. Thompson — floppy hat, sunglasses, gruff mumble — begins doing body paint on all the women, which takes up roughly six hours of this nine hour scene. But most importantly, Poet falls for Shrill, one of the biker mamas who he can tell is a little too smart to be around this scene, because so is he. Just one problem: Shrill is Buddy’s woman. I’m sure this won’t lead to awkward, poorly choreographed violence at all!
Speaking of, kudos to the filmmakers for going for realism; there’s a lot of handheld camerawork, plenty of Nouvelle Vague-influenced jump cuts, and the film seems to feature quite a few actual Hells Angels. In fact, Sonny Barger, the president of the Angels’ Oakland chapter, gets his own title card in the opening credits, even though he appears on camera for less than two seconds. Surely this title was properly earned, and not the result of any threats against studio people with switchblades. However, we’re talking about an era where filmmakers still hadn’t quite figured out how to properly choreograph a fight scene, so every scuffle still kinda looks like drunken acrobatics. And the death scenes are even worse. Here’s a short list of how people die in this movie: they’re awkwardly knocked down and punched once; their car is run off the road but otherwise totally unharmed; and their bike runs into a two by four, slowly tilts over, and catches on fire for no discernible reason. It’s a shame that the one thing that reads as hokey in a movie dedicated to portraying the reality of this violent lifestyle is, well, the violence.
Eventually Poet is made a “prospect” by Buddy, and the whole gang hits the road. One of the bikers and his woman get married at a Catholic Church in Nevada. There are more fights with people who don’t like them. In once scene a biker drives his bike up a real tall hill for awhile. One biker gets arrested on a murder beef, but the gang busts him loose less than a minute later, because stakes or tension is for squares, I guess. By far the most interesting part of this movie is watching the relationship between Poet and Shrill develop, and how that begins to threaten Buddy. These two are joined together by their discontent: they both want something outside of the ordinary from life, but are paralyzed by their self-destructive tendencies. This is especially true of Shrill, who isn’t happy unless she is causing unhappiness all around her, which leads her to play Poet and Buddy off of one another, until it all blows up in a powerful final confrontation that is unfortunately capped off by a truly stupid coda that never should’ve happened.
Hells Angels on Wheels was directed by a gentleman named Richard Rush. Though he wouldn’t be as prolific after the sixties, and hasn’t directed a feature film since 1994’s Color of Night (speaking of truly stupid codas that never should’ve happened), this film helped propel him to greater artistic heights: 1970’s Getting Straight was a critical darling and called the “best American film of the decade” by none other than Ingmar Bergman; 1974’s Freebie and the Bean was a box office smash and more or less invented the buddy cop movie; and 1980’s The Stunt Man earned him two Oscar nominations. Richard Rush has kinda been forgotten these days, but, I mean, François Truffaut called this guy his favorite American director. Have YOU ever been François Truffaut’s favorite anything? I doubt it, he’s been dead since 1984, genius.
Eagle-eyed viewers may have noticed that the cinematography on Hells Angels on Wheels was credited to one “Leslie Kovacs.” If you’re a hopeless dork like me, you probably whispered to yourself, “I bet that’s Lázló Kovacs.” Well, fellow hopeless dork, we were both right: this was one of Kovacs’s first American feature jobs, after shooting commercials and nature documentaries for much of the early sixties. He continued to collaborate with Rush throughout the seventies, as well as lensing classic films by the likes of Peter Bogdanovich, Bob Rafelson, Martin Scorsese, Dennis Hopper, and Norman Jewison. Shockingly, he never won an Oscar, but odds are if you paint a mental picture of American cinema in the seventies, you’re imagining an image shot by Lázló Kovacs.
That finally brings us to Poet, who was played by a young upstart named Jack Nicholson. Is it even necessary to point out that he’s the best actor in the film? Well, he is. The character is a bit underwritten, but he makes the most out of it. Nicholson can do more with a smile or a glance than other actors in the film attempt with an entire monologue. Best of all, he still hadn’t gone full on bug-eyed, jive talkin’, scenery chewin’, Lakers court side Jaaaaaaaack yet. There’s a vulnerable, wounded quality to his acting here that is incredibly compelling, I would argue that he perfected it in Five Easy Pieces, one of yours truly’s favorite films of all time, before moving on to the more ostentatious work that would net him 3 Oscars and turn him into a tabloid playboy.
Hells Angels on Wheels would help establish the counterculture motorcycle gang as a cinematic force to be reckoned with, at least on the drive-in circuit. More quick and dirty films of that ilk followed in its wake, such as The Wild Angels, Born Losers, and Hells Angels ’69, before one such film broke on through to the other side: an acid-soaked exploration that pitted the battle between the bikers and normal society as the struggle for the very soul of America in the Vietnam age. Oh, and they brought Kovacs and Nicholson along too. Obviously I’m talking about Otto Preminger’s Skidoo.
Nah, just kidding, I’m talking about Easy Rider. Released in 1969, the film proved to be the flashpoint for the most artistically fertile decade in the history of American cinema. And to think, it all may not have happened if it wasn’t for a little movie that’s mostly establishing shots of bikes being parked.
