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Abstract: The author explores the nature, history, and significance of the wave of outlaw biker movies produced in the United States during the late 1960s and early 1970s. He argues that films such as The Wild Angels (1966) gave ambivalent treatment to the outlaw biker mythology. In some respects, the marauding motorcycle gang was presented as chilling evidence of a collapsing social order. In other respects, the biker movies reveled in their antiheroes' flouting of mainstream values, with an emphasis on transgressive difference that effectively effaced the divide between commercial exploitation and avant-garde experiment.

Key words: American International Pictures; bikers; Corman, Roger; Hell's Angels; motorcycles; The Wild Angels; The Wild One

Released in 1966 and billed as "the most terrifying film of our time," The Wild Angels laid the way for a slew of low-budget, lurid, and gratuitously violent movies based around the exploits of marauding motorcycle gangs. Directed by exploitation-meister Roger Corman, for American International Pictures (AIP), The Wild Angels starred Peter Fonda as "Heavenly Blues," the leader of an outlaw biker gang that runs amok in a series of brutal episodes, climaxing with an orgy of debauchery and destruction in a small-town church. In its salacious parade of transgression, The Wild Angels served as a template for the scores of biker movies that followed. During the late 1960s, AIP alone produced approximately a dozen "chrome operas," a stable that included Devil's Angels (1967), Born Losers (1967), and Angels from Hell (1968). AIP's success, meanwhile, was aped by Joe Solomons's release of Hell's Angels on Wheels (1967), while a posse of other independent producers leapt into the saddle with The Wild Rebels (1967), Outlaw Motorcycles (1967), Hell's Chosen Few (1968), and Savages from Hell (a.k.a. Big Enough and Old Enough, 1968).

In their relish for the grotesque, the menacing, and the marginal, the "biker flicks" of the late 1960s harked back to the "carnivalesque" aesthetics of what Eric Schaefer terms the "classical exploitation films" of the 1930s. Like classic exploitation cinema, films such as The Wild Angels and Angels from Hell privileged exhibition over narrative, spectacle over intellect. In their depiction of snarling, maverick outsiders, biker movies conjured themes of an uncontrolled, macho "Otherness" whose unrestrained lusts and sneering disaffection set it beyond the pale of mainstream culture. And, like the exploitation classics of the 1930s, the biker movie's treatment of these themes was avowedly ambivalent. In the 1960s biker genre, the anarchic excesses of the outlaw motorcycle gang were constructed as a spectacle that is, at once, both appalling and beguiling. On one level, the bestial depravity of outlaw bikers is presented as chilling evidence of a societal order in a state of collapse. But in other respects, the biker movies reveled in their antiheroes' flouting of mainstream tastes and conventions. Ribald and bawdy, the biker film delighted in tweaking the tail of conformist sensibilities. With an appetite for all that was shocking, liminal, and "unacceptable," 1960s biker films gloried in their full throttle, blood-and-thunder sensationalism--an emphasis on transgressive difference that effectively effaced the divide between commercial exploitation and avant-garde experiment.

From Wild Ones to Mild Ones: The Prehistory of the Biker Flick

The Wild Angels was not the first time that American filmmakers had delved into the world of the outlaw biker. The biker movie's origins stretch back to the 1950s and the cycle of teen exploitation films that rolled out of Hollywood as the film industry responded to a decline in adult cinema audiences by shifting its attention to the profitable youth market. The rise of the "teenpic" saw a glut of hurriedly made, low-budget features aimed at young audiences. Films such as Shake Rattle and Rock! and Rock around the Clock (both 1956) capitalized on the rock 'n' roll boom, while the latest teenage fads were exploited in Hot Rod Gang (1958) and Ghost of Dragstrip Hollow (1959). Juvenile delinquency was also a recurring theme, with a flood of "J.D. flicks"--for example, Untamed Youth (1957) and High School Confidential (1958)--that purported to preach against the "evils" of juvenile crime, yet simultaneously provided young audiences with the vicarious thrills of delinquent rebellion. 1

The Wild One was an early entry into the J.D. film canon. Produced for Columbia Pictures by Stanley Kramer in 1954, the film's portrayal of a motorcycle gang's invasion of a sleepy rural town was loosely based on actual events. During the late 1940s, fraternities of rootless bikers began to form among former servicemen searching for camaraderie and excitement as they struggled to adapt to civilian life. It was one such group whose weekend of drunken carousing in the Californian town of Hollister in 1947 became the basis for The Wild One. Fictionalized in "Cyclists' Raid," a short story published in Harper's Magazine in 1951, the Hollister incident was taken to the big screen by Kramer and director Laslo Benedek, featuring a taciturn Marlon Brando as the leader of the Black Rebels Motorcycle Club. The Wild One's narrative of conflict between conservative townsfolk and a gang of nomadic bikers had been originally conceived as an indictment of the greed and prejudice of unrestrained capitalism, but studio pressure ensured that this angle was downplayed in the final version. 2 Nevertheless, while the liberal moralizing of The Wild One was watered down, the film's portrayal of swaggering delinquents courted controversy, and a mystique of alluring danger developed around both the film and the bikers it depicted.

In The Wild One, Benedek and Kramer sought to generate a sense of graphic realism. Preproduction saw hours spent interviewing members of Californian bike gangs, snatches of their conversation appearing verbatim in the movie as the filmmakers reproduced the lifestyle and lore of the rebel biker. Indeed, The Wild One established many of the codes that came to typify the archetypal biker movie: the volatile aura of the maverick bike gang; their gratuitous violation of social taboos; the parochial "squares" terrorized by subcultural Others; the fascination with polished chrome, black leather, and other markers of menacing machismo; and the brooding introspection of the biker gang leader. This, however, was daunting territory for the major studios. In 1953, a Senate subcommittee had been launched to investigate the causes of juvenile crime, and throughout the 1950s its hearings gave special attention to the possible influence of the media. The climate of anxiety that ensued meant that the Hollywood mainstream was guarded in its treatment of wayward youth. In 1955, solemn melodramas such as Warner's Rebel without a Cause and MGM's The Blackboard Jungle painted sobering portraits of dysfunctional adolescence, but for the most part it was a theme from which the major studios steered clear. It was, though, a territory in which the majors' lower budget competitors felt at home.

The 1950s were a propitious time for independent studios. In 1948, the Supreme Court had ruled against the major studios' ownership of cinema chains, judging the practice (which dated back to the 1920s) overly monopolistic. The breakup of the majors' "vertical" monopoly of distribution and exhibition opened the field to the independents, and it also led to a greater demand for their films. No longer able to guarantee widespread bookings for their releases, and facing a general decline in audience numbers, the majors sought to maintain their appeal through the production of spectacular "blockbusters." The big budgets of these movies, however, meant that the majors' overall output fell. For neighborhood cinemas and drive-ins, which relied on double-bills and a quick turnover of featured pictures, this was an ominous turn. But it was a gap in the market that the independents could exploit with aplomb. AIP was the leader of the pack. 3

Founded in 1954 by James Nicholson (a former theater manager) and Samuel Arkoff (a cigar-chewing attorney), AIP cashed in on the new spaces in the cinema industry. Small theater owners provided 20 percent of AIP's investment capital, while Nicholson and Arkoff (keenly aware of shifting market dynamics) pitched their product squarely at the increasingly lucrative teenage audience (Doherty, 125-31). 4 With a gradual relaxation of censorship codes, meanwhile, an engagement with more risque themes became possible, and AIP built its reputation on such films as Reform School Girl and I Was a Teenage Werewolf (both 1957)--movies that pitted autonomous and sexually aggressive teenagers against conformist and inhibited authority figures.

In Motorcycle Gang (1957), AIP sought to reproduce the dangerous allure of The Wild One. The film focused on the rivalry between a reformed delinquent (Steve Terrell) and a biker firebrand (John Ashey), but it lacked the noir-esque elements that gave The Wild One its edge. Filmed in bright sunshine and interspersed with slapstick and wisecracks, Motorcycle Gang was, as one critic put it, "seldom more disturbing than being stuck in the slow line at Disneyland" (Seate 14). The deviant motorcycle gang put in a further appearance in another AIP film, Dragstrip Riot (1958), but by the end of the decade the dark intensity and sexual danger of the outlaw biker was out of step with the direction of AIP's releases. Instead, a very different take on the biker mythology appeared.

During the early 1960s, AIP's output was dominated by a cycle of beach films. Beginning with Beach Party in 1963, AIP's beach movies were a bouncy blend of music and comedy centered on a chirpy group of Californian teens. But while the surfside hijinks of Frankie Avalon, Annette Funicello, and their friends were the focal point to the Beach Party films, a gang of bumbling bikers were also series regulars. Led by the patently middle-aged Eric Von Zipper (comedian Harvey Lembeck mercilessly parodying Brando's smoldering angst), the "Rats and Mice" bikers of AIP's beach movies were a comic foil to the surfers' playful antics. A jokey cartoon version of the 1950s wild ones, the blundering Beach Party bikers were an emblem for outdated rebellion--a symbol of generational revolt configured as ludicrously passe against the good-time hedonism of the surf set.

The upbeat joie de vivre of the Beach Party series was, as Gary Morris ("Beyond the Beach") argues, part of AIP's attempt to appeal to a wider audience than that reached by its schlock-horror, J.D. movies. But the beach movies' depiction of sun-kissed, teenage fun was also indicative of broad shifts in the wider symbolic connotations of "youth" in American culture. Throughout the 1950s, notions of youth had been largely surrounded by negative social meanings--fears of juvenile delinquency serving as a vehicle for wider anxieties in the face of rapid and disorienting socioeconomic change. 5 By the early 1960s, however, the intensity of the J.D. panic was dissipating. Instead, a more positive set of youth stereotypes took shape, with young people portrayed (celebrated even) as an excitingly new and uplifting social force--ideals of youth coming to represent the confident optimism of JFK's New Frontier. 6 Commercial interests were also central in this upbeat "rebranding" of youth. With the growing profitability of the teenage market, consumer industries feted young people as never before, and youth became enshrined as the signifier of a newly prosperous age of freedom and fun. This, then, was the discourse embodied in AIP's beach movies--an idealized teenage lifestyle of carefree hedonism where the surly biker looked ridiculously anachronistic.

The sense of national well-being, however, was fleeting. By the mid-1960s, the American economy was faltering, while liberal optimism collapsed amid racial violence, urban disorder, and spiraling social discontent. Against this backdrop, then, the beach movies' high spirits looked decidedly incongruous. But it was a mood of anxious uncertainty that gave the biker movie a new lease on life.

The Ascension of Fallen Angels

It was a dramatic photo spread in Life magazine that first gave Roger Corman the idea for a film based on the Hell's Angels Motorcycle Club. 7 A veteran producer-director of AIP's horror movies and Westerns, Corman sensed that the magazine's account of a biker gang funeral would be an ideal basis for one of the studio's pictures. Sam Arkoff agreed and, with Corman at the helm, a film based around the exploits of outlaw bikers was rushed into preproduction.

During the mid-1960s, the Hell's Angels and their winged death's-head emblem had become synonymous with mainstream America's murkiest fears. The Hell's Angels had originally formed among the loose biker gangs that sprang up in California during the late 1940s. Merger with a series of rival gangs during the 1950s swelled the Angels's ranks, and along the West Coast several different branches were established. With the formation of the Oakland Chapter under the presidency of Ralph "Sonny" Barger--a burly, six-foot warehouseman--the Hell's Angels developed greater structure and organization. Under Barger's aegis the gang hammered out its own bylaws, chain of command, and insignia. A style of biker brotherhood that made Brando's leather-jacketed hoodlums look almost quaint by comparison, the Hell's Angels took the aesthetics of liminal dissent to new extremes--with long hair, Nazi motifs, greasy Levis, and customized motorcycles ("chopped hogs") whose low-slung frames, cattle-horn handlebars, and raked front forks were a symbolic expression of defiant non-conformity. The Hell's Angels, however, were still just one among a motley assortment of outlaw motorcycle gangs until they were plunged into a media spotlight. In 1964, following a drunken party in the ocean-side town of Monterey, several Angels were arrested for the gang rape of two local teenagers. The charges were later dropped, but sensational media coverage transformed the Hell's Angels into the bete noir of civilized society.

Amid the social turmoil of race riots, countercultural radicalism, and escalating opposition to the Vietnam War, the moral panic surrounding the violence and immorality of outlaw bikers gave focus to the broader climate of anxiety. A report hurriedly published by California's attorney general was a lurid litany of outrage committed by assorted biker gangs, and throughout 1965 and 1966 stories in Time, Life, Newsweek, and Esquire highlighted the Hell's Angels as the most deplorable of the baleful bunch. And it was precisely this aura of fearful Otherness that AIP sought to take advantage of as work began on The Wild Angels (originally to be titled All the Fallen Angels).

Aiming for gritty authenticity, Corman and scriptwriter Charles Griffith undertook background research by drinking and hanging out with Californian bikers--and for extra frisson even hired a troop of Hell's Angels (from the Venice Chapter) as film extras. George Chakiris, who had previously played a gang leader in West Side Story (1961), was lined up to play a rogue biker, Jack Black, with Nancy Sinatra costarring as a sultry love interest. Shortly before filming, however, it was discovered that Chakiris could not ride a motorcycle and, after a wobbly tryout, the actor declined to learn. Loath to use a stunt double, Corman replaced Chakiris with Peter Fonda, who agreed to take the part on condition that the character's name was changed to Heavenly Blues (a narcotic made from morning glory seeds).

Filmed in just fifteen days on a relatively spartan budget of $360,000, The Wild Angels exemplified Corman's "quick and dirty" oeuvre. As Blues, Fonda plays the leader of a tough biker gang hunting down a stolen motorcycle. After a confrontation in Mexico, gang member Loser (Bruce Dern) is fatally wounded, and his fellow Angels resolve to return his body to his hometown for burial--the film culminating in an orgy of violence in the local church, the gang ultimately routed by the incensed townsfolk.

Griffith's original script had focused on the hunger for thrills shared by both the outlaw bikers and the motorcycle cops who hunt them. But Corman was not impressed and asked for substantial rewrites. In Griffith's second version, subsequently redrafted by Peter Bogdanovich, the cops sink into the background. Instead, it is the bikers' alienation and debauchery that are highlighted. The film's bleak brutalism was characteristic of Corman. As Gary Morris argues in his auteurist study of the director, Corman's films typically viewed the world "as a closed, empty, pointless place" (Roger Corman 8). And, as in many of his films, in The Wild Angels, Corman depicts modern life as arbitrary, meaningless, and terrifying. As David Cochran notes, however, dark humor was a staple in Corman's work. Flaunting his low budgets and peppering his films with elaborate in-jokes for media-savvy audiences, Corman's creations were an "ironic mixture of seriousness and playfulness" that defiantly broke down distinctions between high art and popular culture (171). The Wild Angels exemplifies this metier, the film using the outlaw biker gang as an icon in which a grim, existential fatalism is combined with a carnival of transgressive excess calculated to infuriate mainstream moralism.

AIP and Corman were not alone in being drawn to the Hell's Angels' infamy. The Angels' mounting notoriety made them the bane of conventional society, but within the developing counterculture they were eulogized as rebellious outsiders. The truth was rather different. The outlaw biker culture of the 1960s was a repository of reactionary chauvinism. Violent, racist, homophobic misogynists, the Hell's Angels held the Civil Rights movement in contempt and brutally attacked antiwar activists. 8 Nevertheless, many among the avant-garde cognoscenti revered the Hell's Angel as a romantic "Noble Savage," fondly imagining the outlaw biker as a personification of raw, spiritual freedom. Hence, bikers were regular houseguests of psychedelic emissary Ken Kesey, and countercultural luminaries, such as Allen Ginsberg and the Grateful Dead's Jerry Garcia, claimed many Angels as their friends. 9 Hunter Thompson, meanwhile, established his reputation as a literary gunslinger through his account of the gang. Originally dispatched by The Nation magazine to write a story on the Angels, Thompson returned to ride with them for a year as he researched Hell's Angels: The Strange and Terrible Saga of the Outlaw Motorcycle Gang, his 1966 bestseller, which further heightened the gang's demonic mystique. The counterculture, then, was often naive in its celebration of the Hell's Angel as a free spirit, valiantly kicking back against the establishment. In contrast, exploitation filmmakers such as Corman were more ambivalent in their caricature.

The Wild Angels led the way. "The picture you are about to see will shock you, perhaps anger you!" warned the movie's precredits, aping the hand-wringing anxiety of middle America. But the ensuing film gave decidedly ambiguous treatment to the biker mythology. As Blues, Fonda cuts a quixotic figure. In a role that would become formulaic in biker movies, the gang leader is constructed as an enigmatic hero--distanced from the violent extremes of his fellow Angels but still an uncontainable rebel. It is a rebellion, however, that is incoherent and ultimately empty. Blues's key speech, which triggers the church fracas, embodies this sense of disaffected and directionless revolt. "We want to be free," Blues proclaims, but his sense of what this freedom actually constitutes is vague. In bewildered frustration, the Angel leader finally stammers an agenda stark in its banality:

We don't want anyone telling us what to do. We don't want anyone pushing us around.... We want to be free. We want to be free to do what we want to do. We want to be free to ride. We want to be free to ride our machines without being hassled by The Man. And we want to get loaded.

The underlying emptiness of the speech is further emphasized by the film's conclusion. Asked to say something at Loser's funeral, Blues can only reply, "There's nothing to say." Police sirens finally sound in the distance, and someone encourages Blues to flee; all he can do is answer, "There's nowhere to go," and he begins to shovel dirt into his friend's grave as the film closes.

The Wild Angels, then, is a deliberately grim little film. Nihilistic and bleak, it depicts modern life as callous, downbeat, and hollow. At the same time, however, Corman's dark humor is never far away. Indeed, much of The Wild Angels is a mischievous pageant of excess. Setting the tone for the welter of biker flicks that followed, the film goes all out to exploit the shock value of the outlaw biker. Feeding on the shrill moral panic that had come to surround the Hell's Angels by 1966, Corman's film turns the bikers into grotesque bogeymen who jar the audience's sensibilities and sneer at their dreary conventions. With a threadbare plot and minimalist script (120 lines at most), it is this almost gleeful emphasis on transgression that is the real center of The Wild Angels. Shots of open kissing between male gang members are a conscious attempt to court outrage, while everyday norms dissolve in the portrayal of the Angels' wild partying and constant brawling, their sexual violence, and invasion of small-town America (that abiding symbol of conservative values). Convention is also given short shrift in Corman's approach to filmmaking--attention to narrative and structure giving way to a stress on spectacle, with high-octane sequences of "sickle action" played out to a soundtrack of Davie Allen and the Arrows' pulsating guitar riffs. 10

The mayhem culminates in the small-town church (where else?). After Blues's rabble-rousing speech, Loser's remembrance service degenerates into sleazy bedlam with an extended sequence of drunken revelry (nearly fifteen-minutes long) that sees a procession of social taboos brazenly flouted. In the background, the church crucifix is neatly juxtaposed to the swastika flag draped over Loser's coffin as the dirty, unshaven bikers smash the pews, rough up the priest, and kick into a binge of drink, drugs, and sordid sex. To a soundtrack of wild bongos (what else?), a scene of primal savagery ensues. Frenzied dancers gyrate in abandon, bikers stumble about in a drug-addled daze, and a girl has sex with assorted gang members behind the church alter. Hoist from its coffin, Loser's sagging corpse is propped against a wall, a lighted joint placed comically between its lips, while the bound and beaten priest is dumped in the empty casket. Loser's girlfriend (Diane Ladd), meanwhile, is brutally assaulted, drugged, and then raped (off screen) by two of the dead man's erstwhile comrades.

In its shocking display of a world turned upside down, The Wild Angels was a throwback to some of the themes of the classic exploitation films of the 1930s. As Schaefer argues, the earlier classical exploitation films should not be conflated with the kind of movies cranked out by AIP during the 1950s and 1960s (2). Each genre has its unique history and attributes. The sex hygiene films, drug movies, and vice, exotic, and atrocity pictures of the classic era were made quickly and cheaply and stood firmly beyond the mainstream cinema industry through their independent distribution to theaters outside the major Hollywood circuits (Schaefer 5-6). AIP's films, in contrast, were less marginal and more widely distributed. But there remain some significant similarities between the 1960s exploitation films and Schaefer's 1930s classics--and not simply their low production values and breakneck filming schedules. In particular, The Wild Angels and many of the biker flicks that followed shared the emphasis on forbidden spectacle that Schaefer highlights as one of the classical exploitation film's key organizing principles. The 1930s classics claimed to educate or expose social ills, but behind that veneer, Schaefer argues, they were exercises in titillation in which issues of continuity, narrative, and logic were secondary to a sensationalized exhibition of the illicit (68). In this respect, Schaefer maintains, the classic exploitation movies were rooted in what Tom Gunning ("Cinema") terms "the cinema of attractions." Located in the fairground, carnival, and sideshow origins of early cinema, this form of presentation was centered on an "aesthetic of astonishment" (Gunning, "Aesthetic") that emphasized the act of display, addressing and holding the spectator through "exhibitionistic confrontation rather than diegetic absorption" (Gunning, "Cinema" 66). For Schaefer, the same zeal for exhibition was at the heart of 1930s exploitation films, these movies captivating audiences through their sensationalized spectacle of the forbidden.

In some respects films such as The Wild Angels were a similar "cinema of attractions." Like Schaefer's 1930s exploitation classics, the 1960s biker movies traded in an "aesthetic of astonishment," the lifestyle of the outlaw biker exhibited as a spectacle of the sensational, the forbidden, and the monstrous. And, like the 1930s classics, the 1960s biker flick professed a critical detachment from its subject matter. The Wild Angels, for example, affected moral indignation with its cautionary precredit "square up"--"The picture you are about to see will shock you." But, just like the 1930s classics, the film that followed reveled in its sensationalism, exploiting (and perhaps playfully sending up) the audience's voyeuristic fascination for terrifying "Otherness" and disruptive excess.

"Their Credo Is Violence, Their God Is Hate..."

Corman was not the first filmmaker to deploy the outlaw biker's aura of deviance in a spectacle of the forbidden. In 1963, Kenneth Anger had also been drawn to the myths and rituals of biker subculture. Scorpio Rising (1963), the film that cemented Anger's reputation as a perverse pioneer of the avant garde, intercut homoerotic images of the bikers' world of chrome and leather with a catalogue of media allusions in an "Eisensteinian" montage that made sardonic comment on American mythologies of power, glamour, and machismo. Russ Meyer, too, was attracted to the imagery of the outlaw biker. In Motorpsycho! (1965), one of his earliest films, Meyer drew on media stereotypes of biker savagery to present a garish parody of mainstream culture's fascination with illicit desire. Chronicling the trail of rape and murder left by a trio of malevolent bikers, Motorpsycho! is the epitome of sleazy excess, the movie's larger-than-life cliches serving to lampoon the obsessions and shrill anxieties of middle America. The Wild Angels, then, was not unprecedented. But Corman's movie gave fullest play to the outlaw biker as a spectacle of unsettling Otherness. With the histrionic publicity tag, "Their Credo Is Violence, Their God Is Hate...and They Call Themselves the Wild Angels," the film courted controversy with a violation of "square" taboos that proved both influential and highly bankable.

Initial responses to The Wild Angels, however, were unenthusiastic. Previewed at a New York convention, the movie provoked disgust from an audience of the Theatre Owners' Association. As the film played, AIP bosses Nicholson and Arkoff watched a steady exodus into the convention lobby; one cinema owner warning, "It's too strong for my theater," while the wife of another asked, "What kind of people are you to make a picture like this?" (McGee 168-69). At the 1966 Venice Film Festival, the film met a mixed response but was reviled in press reviews. Newsweek spoke for many when it dismissed the film as an "ugly piece of trash" (qtd. in McGee 170). The ballyhoo of publicity and outrage, however, proved a major boon, effectively guaranteeing the movie's credentials as a spectacle of shocking sensation. The Wild Angels proved an especially big hit with young audiences and the drive-in circuit: AIP struggled to keep up with demand for prints of the film as it grossed $5 million in its opening month. The film became one of the studio's biggest commercial successes, yet not everyone was impressed. Feeling the movie had misrepresented them, the Hell's Angels (reputedly) threatened to kill Corman and sued AIP for $2 million, claiming (somewhat improbably) that the movie had defamed their good character. The gang, however, was soon placated with a $200,000 settlement, and later Angels' president "Sonny" Barger even signed up to work on AIP's biker sequels.

In all, AIP went on to produce about a dozen biker flicks. In 1967, while The Wild Angels was still screening, the studio quickly completed Devil's Angels. Directed by Daniel Haller and starring John Cassavetes, this was another tale of small-town locals terrorized by depraved bikers. Again, the sparse script and storyline gave way to an emphasis on visuals, with panoramic shots of cruising motorcycles and a succession of "set pieces" that grandstanded the gang's lifestyle of beer swilling, punch ups, and sexual violence. But it was a biker movie entrepreneur Joe Solomon who produced the most successful biker movie of 1967, with Hell's Angels on Wheels. Directed by exploitation veteran Richard Rush, the film starred Jack Nicholson as an introspective loner, Poet, whose spell on the road with outlaw bikers ends in a violent confrontation with the gang leader over the latter's neglected and abused "old lady." Here, the usual exaggerated coverage is given to the wild depravity of biker subculture, although with the added spice that the Hell's Angels actually endorsed the film, the entire Oakland Chapter appearing in the opening sequence. Nicholson also appeared in a second biker flick that year, the actor assuming a more sadistic persona in Rebel Rousers, a lackluster tale of biker mayhem completed in 1967 but not released until 1970.

Several independent producers also kicked into gear. William Greffe came up with The Wild Rebels (1967) and Titus Moody (pioneer of the pornographic movie industry in the early 1970s) released Outlaw Motorcycles (1967) and Hell's Chosen Few (1968), while K. Gordan Murray (a kingpin of the low-budget, exploitation market) offered Savages from Hell (1968). Nevertheless, AIP was still out in front, and throughout the late 1960s biker films rolled off the studio's production line, with AIP often recycling props and using the same actors and crew from one movie to the next. In 1967, AIP followed Devil's Angels with Born Losers (1967), the first film to feature writer/director/actor Tom Laughlin in the role of half-Indian activist Billy Jack, who stands up against a predictably obnoxious biker gang. 11 In the same year, AIP also released The Glory Stompers, with Dennis Hopper making his biker flick debut as the unhinged leader of the Black Souls Motorcycle Club. Subsequent years saw more AIP biker fare with Angels from Hell (1968), The Savage Seven (1968), Hell's Angels '69 (1969, featuring cameos from "Sonny" Barger and other Oakland Angels), The Cycle Savages (1969), and Hell's Belles (a.k.a. Girl in the Leather Suit, 1969). Low budget and garish, they were all true to the AIP formula, reveling in wild thrills and outrageous shocks. The next two-wheel blockbuster, however, gave a more bohemian spin to the biker flick formula.

Easy Rider (1969) was nearly an AIP production. The film was offered to Sam Arkoff by the writer/producer/director team of Peter Fonda and Dennis Hopper, but the AIP studio head demanded the right to bring in his own director if production fell behind schedule. Instead, Fonda and Hopper took their brainchild to producers Bert Schneider and Bob Rafelson, who secured big-league backing from Columbia. On release, Easy Rider was a huge commercial success (grossing over $50 million), and in some respects took the characteristic themes and conventions of the biker flick into a mainstream arena. Fonda and Hopper were both biker movie veterans, and their film's innovative visual style, quick-paced editing, improvised dialogue, and fierce rock soundtrack gave it a sense of raw spontaneity similar to that of The Wild Angels and its ilk. The biker movie's sense of grim pessimism also registered in Easy Rider. On the proceeds of a lucrative drug deal, the film's protagonists, Wyatt (Fonda) and Billy (Hopper), leave California on a motorcycle odyssey through the American Southwest. Reaching New Orleans, they drop acid with two prostitutes and freak out through the Mardi Gras festival, then return to the road, only to be gunned down by shotgun-toting rednecks in a pickup truck. The optimism of the open road, therefore, ends in the disillusionment of a shotgun blast--a disconsolate metaphor for the collapse of liberal ideals in the face of burning inner-city ghettoes and the trauma of the Vietnam War.

This allegorical melancholy, however, means that Easy Rider sits uneasily in the canon of 1960s biker movies. With its wistful tag line, "A man went looking for America. And couldn't find it anywhere," Easy Rider is a film whose reflective, even highbrow, pretensions contrast with the brash "aesthetic of astonishment" that was the trademark of the "leather and chrome" pack. Riding roughshod over intellectual subtleties, the classic biker movie's stock in trade was spectacle, with a sensational show of fast-paced thrills and a startling exhibition of the grotesque.

A relish for irreverence and reckless kicks was a theme common to AIP films of the period. Outrage and misrule were the hallmarks of AIP's audience appeal during the late 1960s. As studio head Arkoff recalled,

We started looking for our audience by removing the element of authority in our films. We saw the rebellion coming, but we couldn't predict the extent of it so we made a rule: no parents, no church or authorities in our films. (qtd. in Seate 23)

Corman, too, was warming to the theme of rebellion. With The Wild Angels, the director recalled that he became "more radical" in his politics, a more "liberated" outlook subsequently registering in his psychedelic exposition, The Trip (1967), and his apocalyptic treatment of youth protest, Gas-s-s ... Or It Became Necessary to Destroy the World in Order to Save It (1970) (152). According to Corman, the radical direction of these films unnerved AIP executives (especially the more conservative Nicholson), who ensured that they were toned down through postproduction changes and cuts (166-67). Nevertheless, AIP was always alert to the commercial potential of controversy and was more than happy to bankroll other psychedelic/ protest vehicles, including Riot on Sunset Strip (1967), Psych-Out (1968), and Wild in the Streets (1968). Indeed, profit was always the key motive behind AIP's films. Undeniably, AIP pushed at the boundaries of respectability and taste, while the production techniques of directors such as Corman undoubtedly subverted the formal qualities of the Hollywood mainstream. But the degree to which such films had a radical social agenda is open to question.

Genres such as the biker flick were, at best, ideologically ambiguous. As Schaefer notes of the 1930s exploitation classics, the fractured and fragmented nature of biker movies gave them a good deal of "interpretative leeway," allowing them to be read in a wide variety of ways by different audiences (94). In some respects, for example, it is possible to read these films as "carnivalesque" texts. The notion of the carnivalesque is derived from the work of Russian literary scholar Mikhail Bakhtin, who depicted the carnivals of early modern Europe as spaces where the tabooed and the fantastic suddenly became possible. For Bakhtin, the carnival's uncontrolled explosion of emotion and bodily pleasure ritually inverted normal social hierarchies and challenged dominant norms of morality and discipline through an eruption of physical excess. Bakhtinian notions of the carnivalesque have been embraced by many theorists in their analysis of more modern cultural phenomenon. Robert Stam, for example, highlights the "subversive pleasures" central to a diverse selection of novels and films, while Schaefer regards 1930s exploitation pictures as carnivalesque texts since they privilege "lower body stratum" and overturn classic aesthetics based on formal harmony and good taste (122). In the archetypal 1960s biker movie, there were also undoubtedly carnivalesque elements. Trading in transgression, vulgarity, and Otherness, The Wild Angels and the films that followed can be seen as vehicles for an "aesthetic of astonishment"--their emphasis on a spectacle of the forbidden working to usurp the conventions of "respectable" filmmaking and flout mainstream taboos. But, although carnivalesque elements are certainly present, the extent to which the biker movie challenged dominant systems of power relations is moot.

In many respects, the 1960s biker movie was connected to fairly conservative myths and ideologies, in particular the mythic figure of the Western frontiersman. Pivotal to dominant ideological discourse in the United States since the nineteenth century, the challenges and opportunities of the frontier experience have been configured as the crucible of American independence and democracy. Here, the frontier pioneer is constructed as a rugged individualist--sturdy, autonomous, and resourceful. A core theme in the imagery and narratives of the Western, this mythology of individualism was reclaimed in the 1960s biker genre. Corman recalled that in The Wild Angels he "saw the Hell's Angel riding free as a modern day cowboy. The chopper was his horse. The locales would be the wide-open spaces--the beach, the desert, and the mountains" (133). In fact, AIP effectively retooled its Western assembly line for its biker films, with a wholesale shift of its Western production crews and actors into the creation of "iron horse" epics. Moreover, many biker plots were actually lifted from classic Westerns. For example, the narrative of Chrome and Hot Leather (1968) is indebted to the Magnificent Seven (1960), while Hell's Belles (1969) borrows heavily from Winchester '73 (1950). Allusions to the Western, Meanwhile, are especially apparent in Easy Rider. The main characters' names (Billy and Wyatt) are reminiscent of cowboy gunfighters, while Billy's buckskin coat and Stetson are an obvious Western touch. And, as Alistair Daniel observes, their journey across the vastness of the American landscape further invokes the pioneering spirit of the early settlers and the innumerable Westerns that have mythologized them (70).

This immersion in Western myth and frontier ideals explains why the biker flick was a peculiarly American phenomenon. 12 It also locates the genre within distinctly masculine themes and discourses. Like the subculture they depicted, the sexual politics of 1960s biker flicks were hardly radical but were rooted in notions of masculine individualism, aggression, independence, and control. As a consequence, biker movies invariably marginalized women, consigning them to the pillion seat as submissive "old ladies" or sexually compliant "mamas." Alternatively, women were portrayed as the victims of marauding sexual predators. Indeed, the casual regularity with which biker films featured the rape and molestation of women and the way in which this was habitually constructed as an erotic spectacle mark the genre as particularly misogynistic.

But there were occasions when the macho creed of the biker was less than monolithic. Films such as AIP's Mini Skirt Mob (1968), for example, featured groups of tough biker women, while Sisters in Leather (1969) and Angels' Wild Women (1972) also fore-grounded rapacious female bike gangs--Angels' Wild Women even portraying the gang "rape" of a male farmhand by a pack of insatiable biker women. The most incredible example of this subgenre, however, was She-Devils on Wheels (1968). Independently produced by Herschell Gordon Lewis (the shlock-horror maestro who had earlier crafted Blood Feast [1963] and Two Thousand Maniacs [1964]), She-Devils on Wheels centered on The Maneaters--a sadistic, all-girl biker gang whose members select their sexual playthings from a "stud line," later dragging the discarded lover behind their speeding motorcycles. In some respects, this construction of a predatory and sexually demanding femininity might be seen as a playfully carnivalesque inversion of traditional gender roles, another expression of the transgression, excess, and dark humor characteristic of the biker genre. This is partly true, but at the same time it is impossible to overlook the way that this "inversion" of power relations is framed in terms of titillation, so that the "domineering" biker women remain coded as the sexual focus of an objectifying male gaze.

The End of the Road

The box-office success of Easy Rider brought a new wave of two-wheel epics. Wild Wheels (1969) saw bikers battle a dune buggy gang, while Roger Corman returned to the saddle to produce Naked Angels (1969). By this time, however, the genre was beginning to flag, and producers sought to refuel the engine through new spins on the formula. Laurence Merrick masterminded a biker-blaxploitation crossover in The Black Angels (1970), the tale of a violent race war between black and white biker gangs. Director Lawrence Brown, meanwhile, conjured up the even more improbable concept of transvestite bikers in The Pink Angels (1971). The biker-horror hybrid also surfaced with Werewolves on Wheels and (from Britain) Psychomania (both 1971). Through the early 1970s, the biker movie spluttered on, although releases were more sporadic. Audience fatigue played a part in the decline; the market could bear only just so many "sickle" spectaculars. But other factors also contributed to the demise of the biker flick.

In one of the few serious analyses of the genre, Jim Morton argues that the popularity of the biker movie declined after the true viciousness of the Hell's Angels was exposed at Altamont in 1969. Hired as security for a Rolling Stones concert, the Angels intimidated and beat both the audience and performers, stabbing to death black spectator Meredeth Hunter in front of the stage as Mick Jagger sang a nervous version of "Sympathy for the Devil." 13 After Altamont, Morton argues, the Hell's Angels were "no longer funny symbols of rebellion" but were revealed as being "really as dangerous as everyone said they were" (64). However, whereas the Altamont debacle certainly exploded the countercultural avant garde's reverence for the Hell's Angels, for exploitation filmmakers the outrage was actually a gift. Their murderous reputation confirmed, outlaw bikers featured in a further spurt of exploitation shockers. Al Adamson (whose Independent-International Picture Corps had been behind Angels' Wild Women) hatched the calculatingly outrageous Satan's Sadists (1970), and in its tracks followed Angels Die Hard (1970), Hell's Bloody Devils (1970), Outlaw Bikers: The Gang Wars (1970), Bury Me an Angel (1971), Outlaw Riders (1971), The Hard Ride (1971), The Wild Riders (a.k.a. Angels for Kicks, 1971), and Under Hot Leather (a.k.a. The Jesus Trip, 1971), in which a convent is overrun by a maverick bike gang. There were even attempts to capitalize on the Altamont violence, the hippy commune replacing the small-town community as the target of biker carnage in Angel Unchained (1970), Angels, Hard as They Come (1971), and the relentlessly brutal The Peacekillers (1971). 14

Nevertheless, after this brief, bloody renaissance, the biker genre finally ran out of road. When the end came, however, it was not due to public disenchantment with biker violence, or simply to audience boredom with the genre. It was two other factors that led to the downfall of the biker flick. First, during the 1970s the drivein circuit faced new competition from the growth of nightclubs and discotheques, and at the same time was undermined by the emergence of mall and urban multiplex cinemas. 15 As the fortunes of the drive-in nose dived, so did those of the independent film companies that had depended on them. Consequently, the exploitation picture became an endangered species. The decline of the biker movie, then, was partly a result of the shifting business environment and the broader transformation of the American film industry. But this was not the only reason the biker flick bit the dust. Also important were changes in the connotations surrounding representations of the outlaw biker.

Crucially, the biker movie declined because the image of the maverick biker was steadily rehabilitated. Where once the outlaw motocyclist had been an avatar of loathsome outrage, by the mid-1970s his image was being reworked as an icon of wholesome Americana. The biker gangs, themselves, were still linked with violent crime, but in popular culture the image of the outlaw biker was increasingly configured as a signifier for the sturdy independence and healthy egalitarianism of the "American Way." Indeed, this process of incorporation is detectable in the tail end of the biker genre itself. In 1969, the National Football League actually encouraged Joe Namath (star quarterback of the New York Jets) to take the lead in C.C. and Company, in which he starred as an all-American "good guy" biker. The Losers (a.k.a. Nam Angels, 1970), meanwhile, saw outlaw bikers actually in alliance with "The Man"--a biker gang joining forces with the CIA to liberate American POWs from a Cambodian prison camp. As a genre of transgressive spectacle, therefore, the biker flick was virtually exhausted.

The success of the Mad Max trilogy (1979, 1981, 1985) and the Arnold Schwarzenegger character in the Terminator series (1984, 1991) confirmed the persistent cinematic appeal of the outlaw biker as an image of dark menace. The biker gang also figured in postmodern nostalgia films such as Rumble Fish and The Loveless (both 1983), together with ironic pastiches such as Chopper Chicks in Zombietown (1991). As an emblem for "square" society's most fearful anxieties, however, the rogue biker was a spent force. Co-opted into the cultural mainstream, the semiotics of the outlaw bike gang were no longer a dependable basis for the representation of outrage and liminal excess. Instead, filmmakers explored new avenues of shocking spectacle, the savage biker increasingly eclipsed by the maniac killer as a symbol of terrifying Otherness.

NOTES

1. Extended accounts of the "teenpic" phenomenon and the "J.D." movie can be found in Doherty and McGee and Robertson.

2. Kramer reveals that his intended ending for The Wild One had town merchants refusing to press charges against marauding bikers because of the dollars the gang had pumped into their coffers. Deemed too contentious by the studio, this conclusion was scrapped in favor of an enigmatic romantic pairing between gang leader Johnny (Marlon Brando) and archetypal good girl Cathy (Mary Murphy) (Spoto 157-60).

3. AIP was initially called the American Releasing Corporation (ARC).

4. Histories of AIP's early years can be found in Arkoff and McGee.

5. See Gilbert for a thorough account of the anxieties prompted by a perceived upsurge of juvenile delinquency in 1950s America.

6. For a discussion of the aura of "youthful" idealism and energy that surrounded the Kennedy presidency, see Hellmann (105).

7. Although Corman claims credit for recognizing the cinematic potential of the Hell's Angels (131-32), McGee argues that it was AIP executives who first came up with the idea after reading a feature in Saturday Evening Post (167).

8. In 1966, the Oakland Angels' tongue was only slightly in their cheek when they offered their services to President Lyndon Johnson as "a special team of crack commandos," to be parachuted into Vietnam to terrorize communist forces.

9. Thompson offers a relatively enthusiastic account of the encounters between the countercultural gurus and the Hell's Angels (270-84). However, the picture painted in the (1978) autobiography of George Wethern, former vice president of the Oakland Chapter, suggests that the Hell's Angels scorned the bohemian intelligentsia, simply exploiting them as a reservoir of easy drugs, booze, and sex.

10, Davie Allen's soundtrack to the film powered up the Billboard album chart. Allen subsequently provided an array of scores for AIP's releases of the 1960s and early 1970s. A full account of Allen's work for the studio can be found in Fuz magazine, No.1 (1997).

11. The sequel, Billy Jack (1970), was much more successful and prompted the rerelease of Born Losers.

12. Admittedly, a number of European biker-oriented movies exist. In Britain, for example, Some People (1962) and The Leather Boys (1963) painted motorcycle gangs in heavy shades of "kitchen-sink realism," while Hammer's These Are the Damned (a.k.a. The Damned, 1963) and Psychomania (1971) fused the biker idiom with sci-fi and horror genres. These, however, do not really equate with the stateside torrent of sensationalist biker films. Much closer to the genre was the Australian biker opus Stone (1974).

13. The disturbing event is chronicled in Albert Maysles's documentary Gimme Shelter (1970).

14. The early 1970s cycle of brutal and bloody violent biker movies reached its apogee in The Northville Cemetery Massacre. Although not released until 1976, it was probably filmed several years earlier.

15. A full account of the rise and fall of the drive-in circuit can be found in Segrave.

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Hellmann, John. The Kennedy Obsession: The American Myth of JFK. New York: Columbia UP, 1997.

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Schaefer, Eric. "Bold! Daring! Shocking! True!": A History of Exploitation Films, 1919-1959. Durham: Duke UP, 1999.

Seate, Mike. Two Wheels on Two Reels: A History of Biker Movies. North Conway: Whitehorse, 2000.

Segrave, Kerry. Drive-in Theaters: A History from Their Inception in 1933. Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 1992.

Spoto, Donald. Stanley Kramer, Film Maker. New York: Putnam, 1978.

Stam, Robert. Subversive Pleasures: Bakhtin, Cultural Criticism, and Film. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1992.

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BILL OSGERBY is a senior lecturer in cultural studies at the University of North London. He has written widely on youth, gender, and British and American cultural history. His publications include Youth in Britain since 1945 (Blackwell, 1998) and Playboys in Paradise: Masculinity, Youth and Leisure-Style in Modern America (Berg/New York University Press, 2001).

Photograph (Peter Fonda in "Easy Rider.")