Hoodlum Movies: Seriality and the Outlaw Biker Film Cycle, 1966-1972

Hoodlum Movies

Also by Peter Stanfield

The Cool and the Crazy: Pop Fifties Cinema

Maximum Movies—Pulp Fictions: Film Culture and the Worlds of Samuel Fuller, Mickey Spillane, and Jim Thompson

Body and Soul: Jazz and Blues in American Film, 1927–63

Horse Opera: The Strange History of the Singing Cowboy

Hollywood, Westerns and the 1930s: The Lost Trail

Edited Collections

Mob Culture: Hidden Histories of the American Gangster Film

Un-American Hollywood: Politics and Film in the Blacklist Era

Hoodlum Movies

Seriality and the Outlaw Biker Film Cycle, 1966–1972

Peter Stanfield

Rutgers University Press

New Brunswick, Camden, and Newark, New Jersey, and London

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Stanfield, Peter, 1958– author.

Title: Hoodlum movies : seriality and the outlaw biker film cycle, 1966–1972 / Peter Stanfield.

Description: New Brunswick : Rutgers University Press, 2018. | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2017053306 | ISBN 9780813599021 (cloth : alk. paper) | ISBN 9780813599014 (pbk. : alk. paper)

Subjects: LCSH: Motorcycle films—History and criticism. | Motion pictures—20th century—History and criticism.

Classification: LCC PN1995.9.M66 S73 2018 | DDC 791.43/655—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017053306

A British Cataloging-in-Publication record for this book is available from the British Library.

Copyright © 2018 by Peter Stanfield

All rights reserved

No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without written permission from the publisher. Please contact Rutgers University Press, 106 Somerset Street, New Brunswick, NJ 08901. The only exception to this prohibition is fair use as defined by U.S. copyright law.

www.rutgersuniversitypress.org

For Giles but that’s the way I like it, baby, Harding

Contents

Introduction: Hoodlum Gestures

Chapter 1. Strange Excitements: The Topical and the Sensational

Chapter 2. Getting Out of Town: The Cycle Unfolds

Chapter 3. After Easy Rider: Modulations and Curious Combinations

Chapter 4. Nazi Satanists, Vietnam Vets, and Motorcycle Mamas (and Other Such Pulp Delights)

Conclusion: Buried in the Sand Forever

Acknowledgments

Notes

Index

About the Author

Introduction

Hoodlum Gestures

The telephone is ringing

You got me on the run

I’m driving in my car now

Anticipating fun

—Alice Cooper, Under My Wheels (1971)

As a youth, at the birth of rock ‘n’ roll music, I was fascinated by custom cars, juvenile delinquency, teenage fashion, post-war hoodlumism (hanging out with motorcycle gangs), beatniks, modern art, drugs and so on, anything of a perverse nature was top priority.

—Michael Davis, bass guitarist of Detroit’s MC5

She may not have shared the same juvenile interests as Michael Davis, yet Joan Didion, the novelist and essayist, was intrigued enough by the specter of postwar hoodlumism to watch nine biker films in seven days before publishing an account of the experience in a May 1970 edition of her regular Life magazine column.¹ In the manner of an anthropologist, she set out to explore a dark continent, which only a few adults have ever seen. For her, the motorcycle film constituted a sort of underground folk literature for adolescents and a fabricated mythology to express precisely that audience’s every inchoate resentment, every yearning for the extreme exhilaration of death. The biker movie is, she wrote, a perfect Rorschach of its audience.²

From The Wild Angels in 1966 until its conclusion in 1972, the cycle of outlaw motorcycle films contained forty-odd formulaic examples. All but one were made by independent companies that specialized in producing exploitation movies for drive-ins, neighborhood theaters, and run-down inner-city movie houses. Despised by critics but welcomed by exhibitors unable to book first-run films, these cheaply and quickly made pictures were produced to appeal to audiences of undereducated mobile youths. Plagiarizing contemporary films for plotlines, the cycle reveled in a brutal and lurid sensationalism drawn from the day’s headlines and from earlier exploitation fare.

Collectively, these movies portray a picture of America that is the inverse of a progressive, inclusive, and aspirational culture. A nihilistic taint runs through the cycle without providing much in the way of social or aesthetic compensation. Neither on original release nor subsequently have these films accrued cultural capital. In kind, they are stuck with a legacy of negative critical equity. These are dumb, uncouth, loutish films made for real or imagined hoodlums who had no interest in contesting or resisting the entreaties of popular culture. Biker movies are repetitive, formulaic, and fairly indistinguishable from one another. Disreputable and interchangeable these films may be, but their lack of cultural legitimacy and low ambition is a large part of the rationale for this study, inviting questions about seriality and film cycles that are otherwise ignored in histories of 1960s and ’70s American film.

Many of the filmmakers involved in outlaw biker movies—Jack Nicholson, Peter Fonda, Dennis Hopper, and Laszlo Kovacs, among them—would play a significant role in New Hollywood. The biker cycle was not, however, about the new beginnings and open horizons that films such as Bonnie and Clyde (1967), Easy Rider (1969), Five Easy Pieces (1970), The Last Picture Show (1971), and Two-Lane Blacktop (1971) projected. Even as their characters were gunned down or burnt out in the final reel, directors Arthur Penn, Dennis Hopper, Bob Rafelson, Peter Bogdanovich, and Monte Hellman were seen to be laying to rest the monolithic Hollywood studios, with their hidebound practices that produced irrelevant movies with aging stars—dramas that were far removed from the interests and concerns of the baby boom generation these cineastes played to.

The biker picture offered an altogether bleaker vision of the state of things in Hollywood; as they trampled over and despoiled past glories, the films in the cycle held out no hope of better days ahead. Like a murder of crows feeding on the carrion of pop culture, the biker film besmirched all that it touched. While Hopper in The Last Movie (1971), Bogdanovich in The Last Picture Show, and Fonda in The Hired Hand (1971) paid homage to the movies made by Howard Hawks, John Ford, and the like, even as they gainsaid the myth of the West, the biker movie merely picked over the genre’s bones for opportunistic story ideas and stylistic gestures. The grandeur of Ford’s Monument Valley or the Rocky Mountain locations of Anthony Mann’s westerns was supplanted in the biker movie by the scrubland surrounding Bakersfield or the dilapidated ranches once used for numerous western film productions and later leased to television companies. A purveyor of national mythologies unequaled in modern popular culture and a cornerstone of American film production that had once accounted for a third of all films produced in Hollywood, as seen through the filter of the biker movie, the western was in a penurious and parlous state.³ Stripped of its epic stature, the landscape no longer represented the promise of change and renewal. The spectacular deserts of California, Arizona, and Nevada were rendered in the cycle as sprawling junkyards, slag heaps spilling over with the detritus of modern life.

The Spahn Ranch, where once parts of Duel in the Sun were shot and a key location for Bonanza, among the longest running of the western TV series, had become by the late 1960s the setting for underbudgeted biker movies and a playground and hideout for Charles Manson and his murderous family. Once Manson had made the headlines, producers would exploit this connection and thereby enhance the cycle’s illicit reputation and further sully the image of Hollywood.

If in one sense the cycle is the story of the western’s burial, it is also a tale of the end of the star system, providing the last go-around—and perhaps last wage check—for, among others, Gloria Grahame, Jane Russell, Scott Brady, Kent Taylor, and Cameron Mitchell, all of whom looked as if the bottle had taken its toll. Playing alongside these revenants were the progeny of Hollywood, child stars now all grown up, such as Russ Tamblyn and Dean Stockwell, or those who were trading on their parents’ names: Peter Fonda, Nancy Sinatra, and Jody McCrea, to name but three. The poor production values of the biker film made sure that this juxtaposition of the old and the young did not symbolize a seamless passing of the blessings of one generation to another but instead suggested a lineage now devoid of charisma, talent, or even just a little chutzpah. In the gathering of the generations, family Hollywood had nothing to celebrate.

The image of Hollywood unraveling was compounded by the decentering of American film production by independent companies that had been ongoing since the 1950s, initially away from the metropolis of Los Angeles toward the city’s outer margins and then even farther afield with southern-set vigilante movies, such as the Walking Tall (filmed in Tennessee, 1973) and Billy Jack (filmed predominantly in New Mexico, 1971), that pressed hard on the tail of the biker movie in the early 1970s. Eventually, a good part of the exploitation film industry left the United States altogether for cheaper and more exotic Philippine locations.

American International Pictures and New World Pictures were the cycle’s key producers, working in competition and sometimes in cahoots with smaller independents such as Crown, Fanfare, and Independent-International. Hoodlum Movies records and details the filmmaking community involved with these companies. The temporary creative alliances among personnel are documented and mapped wherever archive materials allowed. For a number of films, there is a great deal of information available; for others, especially those at the lowest end of the production scale, virtually nothing has been recorded, not even a list of play dates. Nevertheless, it is possible to elucidate the extraordinary interaction of a relatively small group of filmmakers who appeared in, scripted, or otherwise worked on the films. The aspiration to document these networks as they formed and disbanded around individual or linked films has been a key activity of the research undertaken for this project. There are, however, no biographies in Hoodlum Movies; nor are there any Rabelaisian tales of seven-day weekends and Sunday mornings coming down.

Given the persistent misogyny that the films displayed and the exploitation companies’ commitment to providing fare for male adolescents, there is of necessity more than a passing curiosity in Hoodlum Movies about how a female audience was addressed in the cycle and in its marketing. This is especially so with the subseries of films with girl bikers as the story’s focus and in the role taken by women filmmakers, such as Valerie Starrett, Delores Taylor, and Barbara Peeters. What emerges from the examination of the cycle’s gender politics is a picture that doesn’t mitigate the films’ deep-rooted misogyny but does add complexity to the representational strategies that were deployed. Similarly, the rendering of race and class is more nuanced than might be expected of such blatant exploitation movies. That is not to say that these films have a hidden progressive agenda, as has been said of many of Corman’s New World Pictures; they haven’t. But the films’ contradictions and ambiguities are manifold and fascinating, no less so in their use of martial imagery (facilitating the presentation of an uncertain patriotism), and their insistent flirtation with fascist symbols.

Watching the seven biker movies in a Hollywood Boulevard theater and in Bakersfield and Tarzana drive-ins, Didion pondered the fascination these films held over her, especially given that they were all the same: To see one is to have seen them all, she wrote. Each film meticulously observed the rituals of getting the bikers out of town and onto the highway, of ‘making a run,’ of terrorizing innocent ‘citizens’ and fencing with the highway patrol and, finally, meeting death in a blaze . . . of romantic fatalism.⁴ Her concise description of generic elements grasps the basics of the formula: bikers terrorize a small town or community, have run-ins with the police, and ride to their certain sentimentalized death. There is always that instant, she observed, in which the bikers batter at some psychic sound barrier, degrade the widow, violate the virgin, defile the rose and the cross alike, break on through to the other side and find, once there, ‘nothing to say.’⁵ It was not the narrative repetition that fascinated her and kept her returning to these films but the thought that she was getting an insight into contemporary America that could not be found in the New York Times. The biker film provided her with an ideogram of the nation’s youth, one that offered a far-from-edifying vision.

Didion perceived the mute bikers as mirror images of the films’ audience of undereducated working-class youth. Her symptomatic reading of the cycle as representative of a generalized social malaise prefigures scholarly accounts of the biker movie specifically and exploitation films more generally. Similarly, her identification of narrative repetition as a sign of a filmmaker’s flawed aspirations is commonplace in critical reactions. To contend with these received perspectives, Hoodlum Movies focuses on the mode of assembly, circulation, and consumption of the biker movie. This recalibration has the ambition to provide a more inclusive account of the function of repetition—the practice of serial production—in commercial cinema than has so far been achieved and to ask more nuanced questions about film’s relationship to the social.

Hoodlum Movies is not a celebration of the biker picture as a lost moment or fragment from Hollywood’s storied past nor is it the reclamation of a trove of films rich in untouched cultish pleasures. No such claims or gestures are made here. Ugly beauty cannot be found in the biker film’s thuggish and ungainly form. By this point in time, fan industries would surely have made a loud declaration on behalf of these films if they held any kind of value for those interested in resistant cultures. Beyond a mere handful of critical texts, that work does not exist; the biker film has rarely been used to trash the academy.⁶

The focus is not on the films as artifacts or relics of pop youth culture but on the opportunity they afford to provide a parallel history to the well-worn tale of easy riders and raging bulls of New Hollywood folklore. The history of the biker movie is insecure; it does not rest on highly creative and excessively remunerated individuals and landmark illustrious movies. Instead, Hoodlum Movies is about filmmakers’ crass pursuit of the sensational and the exploitable. The book is a case study of filmmakers as producers of undistinguished, regulated novelties, and as such it develops the idea of pulp cinema explored in Maximum Movies—Pulp Fictions: Film Culture and the Worlds of Samuel Fuller, Mickey Spillane, and Jim Thompson (2011) and the cyclical film theory that grounded the research for The Cool and the Crazy: Pop Fifties Cinema (2015).

Biker films were dramas of hoodlum culture, made for adolescent malcontents. Set in marginal spaces and exhibited in out-of-town drive-ins and dilapidated theaters, the films were about, and watched by, self-obsessed mobile youths going nowhere, cycling back on themselves in endless displays of repetitive inchoate activity.

Hoodlums Everywhere: Moral Panics and Folk Devils

In March 1965, the attorney general of the State of California, Thomas G. Lynch, published his report on the Hells Angels¹—a hoodlum group which poses a threat throughout California. Six months in the making, the report was prompted by the alleged rape of two teen-age girls in Monterey last Labor Day weekend. The names of 463 Hells Angels were supplied to the attorney general by the police, along with those of 438 persons who belonged to other disreputable motorcycle groups. Hells Angels gang members alone were said to have racked up 874 felony arrests, 300 felony convictions, 1,682 misdemeanor arrests and 1,023 misdemeanor convictions. The club’s general hoodlum activities, said Lynch, include gang assaults, gang rapes, gang fights and destruction of property. The report was given front-page coverage in the Los Angeles Times.⁷

Designed to spur statewide law enforcement agencies to take all necessary measures to contain the menace of outlaw motorcycle gangs, the report’s more immediately felt effect, whether intended or not, was to provide the news media with a ready-made folk devil.⁸ Writing in the New York Times, Leo Litwak said Lynch had created a picture of alarming menace.⁹

Depraved hoodlums—unmanageable, incorrigible, vindictive and organized—roamed the California highways in stripped down Harley-Davidson motorcycles. They were dressed like pirates, with full beards, a ring in one ear, shoulder length hair, an embroidered winged skull on the backs of their sleeveless denim jackets, Iron Crosses on their chests, swastikas on their helmets. These weren’t the teen-agers of the usual urban gang, but adults, ranging in age from early 20’s to the mid-40’s. They could strike anywhere in the state, and they didn’t fear the police. The underground in which they were lords seemed dark, rancid, impenetrable.¹⁰

The New York Times had covered the previous year’s events in Monterey that lay behind Lynch’s report. It noted that angry officials issued Don’t come back warnings to black-jacketed motorcycle riders, perhaps three hundred in number, who called themselves Hell’s Angels: ‘These are not kids,’ Mayor George M. Clemens protested, ‘they are old enough to know better. They’re a crummy looking lot, with their beards and unwashed appearance. We don’t want them back.’ It was the city’s third visit from the bikers during the last two years.¹¹

Lynch’s report fed press attention that was drawn toward the sensational and the salacious, revitalizing older events, such as the 1963 Porterville incident, where Hells Angels purportedly terrorized the town’s citizens. The report also acted as a ready primer into outlaw culture. The initiation rituals, which were invariably said to include some unspecified sexual perversion, were particularly prominent in media coverage. The New York Times repeated Lynch’s claim that any new member must bring with him to the meeting a woman or a girl, termed a ‘sheep,’ willing to submit to sexual intercourse with each member of the club.¹² The reporting on such lurid rites was presented alongside a fascination with the hoodlums’ personal hygiene: Probably the most universal common denominator in identification of Hell’s Angels is their generally filthy condition . . . Investigating officers consistently report these people, both club members and the female associates, seem badly in need of baths.¹³ The Hells Angels brand, as signified by the winged skull insignia circled by the club and local chapter names, was described together with members’ decorative and provocative use of various types of Luftwaffe insignia and reproductions of Iron German crosses. As one Angel told a reporter for the Saturday Evening Post, When you walk into a place where people can see you, you want to look as repulsive as possible. We’re bastards to the world and they’re bastards to us.¹⁴

In May 1965, freelance journalist Hunter S. Thompson, writing for The Nation, provided a fulsome corrective to the exaggeration and distortion of Lynch’s fifteen-page report, which was colorful, interesting, heavily biased and consistently alarming—just the sort of thing, in fact, to make a clanging good article for a national news magazine. Which it did; in both barrels.¹⁵ Few of the assertions made by Lynch stood up under Thompson’s scrutiny; the number of club members, their criminal activities, their initiation rites, their sexual proclivities, and the infamous Labor Day gang rape were all revealed as shibboleths. Newsweek and Time, according to Thompson, leaped into the fray with a flurry of blood, booze and semen-flecked wordage that amounted, in the end, to a classic of supercharged hokum.¹⁶

Five months after the publication of Thompson’s piece, the Saturday Evening Post ran an article on the menace. Their reporter, William Murray, covered the same ground as Thompson and noted that the charge of rape against the four arrested Hells Angels had been quickly and quietly dropped. The wrecking of the small town of Porterville, California (population 7,991), in September 1963 was another of Lynch’s key stories about the Angels that was found to be specious. The truth was the cyclists had been escorted peacefully out of town. There was no riot. And of those 1,023 misdemeanor convictions, most were for traffic offenses that occurred over fifteen years. Still, the impression lingered on that foul deeds had been committed and the authorities had been aroused.¹⁷

The sacking of Porterville fit the popular image of outlaw bikers that followed Life magazine’s photo story of the drunken revelries that had taken place in Hollister in 1947, events that formed the basis for the Marlon Brando vehicle The Wild One (1953). The Monterey rape story was a natural adjunct to such reports of outlaw biker pillaging. Subsequently, the Hells Angels figured in any number of news stories that appeared to mirror these scenarios. The most notorious involved the rape of an eighteen-year-old daughter of a police officer. She was lured into a house full of men, some of whom were said to be Hells Angels. When sixteen suspects were rounded up, the victim’s father took the opportunity to shoot one of them. The wounded man was later found to have had nothing to do with the rape. Ultimately five suspects were indicted, wrote Murray. None was a Hell’s Angel.¹⁸

Following the publication of Lynch’s report, the Hells Angels’ 1965 Labor Day run to the resort town of Bass Lake was widely covered by the media. Those expecting a violent confrontation between barbarian bikers and law enforcers supported by the town’s citizens were disappointed. There were no incidents of note, and reporters were left to repeat descriptions of unwashed bikers drunkenly cavorting with one another.¹⁹ Nevertheless, three days after reporting on the lack of incident, the Los Angeles Times gave front-page space to staff writer Jerry Cohen’s article on the club.²⁰ Describing the verdant Bass Lake shore scarred by empty wine bottles and mashed beer cans, he wrote that the scene lacked logic. Cohen’s article focused on the president of the Oakland chapter, Sonny Barger: "His deep, tattooed chest was bared