The Screengrab : beyond the law

Take Five: Ride Hard

Leonard Pierce — Fri, 08 Aug 2008 21:00:00 GMT

Larry Bishop's Hell Ride opens in limited release this week. Advance buzz about the retroriffic biker exploitation flick isn't great, despite the fact that the movie features one of the most mindlessly entertaining trailers of recent years. Still, it's good to see the biker movie, a cultural leftover from the 1960s that has remained with us despite the transition of Harley culture from last refuge of dangerous lowlifes to weekend amusement of the upper middle class, survive in some form or another. For over 40 years, the lone, leather-clad biker on a flipped-back hog or amped-up chopper has been one of Hollywood's most enduring archetypes, used for everything fom a means to instill mindless terror to cheap comedy relief to, all too often, both. If Hell Ride does nothing more than give Michael Madsen a chance to play an all-new variant on his standard violent lowlife character, it will at least keep this archetype alive. Though, given that plenty of aging Tinseltown stars, writers and producers are themselves motorcycle enthusiasts, it's probably not in any immediate danger anyway. While you're waiting for Hell Ride to come to your local theater -- or, more likely, given its dismal advance hype, while you're waiting for it to show up at your local video rental bargain bin -- here's five more biker movies to help you unleash your inner scuzzball.

THE WILD ONE (1953)

Laslo Benedik's teen-menace movie started it all, in more ways than one. Not only was it the first major motion picture to deal with the alleged menace of out-of-countrol outlaw biker gangs (which, a little over ten years later, would developed into a full-blown moral panic, as exquisitely detailed in Hunter S. Thompson's Hell's Angels), but it was one of the first movies to present us with the raw sexual charisma and magnetic, brooding talents of young Marlon Brando; it almost single-handedly started the 1950s craze among teen boys for leather jackets; and each gang in the film lent a name to a rock band (Brando's Black Rebel Motorcycle Club and Lee Marvin's Beatles). The events of the film -- which is still highly entertaining today, despite literally decades of imitators -- involve the takeover of a small California town by rival gangs of outlaw bikers; based on a story in Harper's (which was itself based on a real-life incident in Hollister, CA in 1947), it also starts a less pleasign tradition: that of ridiculously overstating the biker menace to appeal to your audience. Not only were the events in Hollister terribly mild compared to the dramatization in The Wild One (there was no real violence, and very little vandalism or criminal behavior), but the bikers involved were invited back a number of times over the years until it became something of a local tradition.

EASY RIDER (1969)

By 1969, the myth of the outlaw biker had transmogrified from simple post-WWII recreational activity to mysterious urban legend to full-blown moral panic, and finally, as evidenced in this notorious countercultural masterpiece, a counter-symbol of true freedom and the flight from small-mindedness and oppression in the face of stultifying all-American values. By the time Dennis Hopper, Peter Fonda and Jack Nicholson strapped on the helmets and hopped aboard their custom Captain America choppers, they were engaged in full-fledged reverse myth-making, transforming the rebel biker from the sort of dangerous threat to small-town America that Hopper had played a number of times in other, lesser exploitation movies to a vision of the divine fool, the holy innocent who, while he might consume barrels full of psilocybin and acres worth of grass, was in fact all that was good and decent about this country. And then, wouldn't you know it? Some greaseball redneck goes and blows his head off, just to be a dick. While there's certainly qualities to Easy Rider that make it a treat to watch (most especially Nicholson's performance, Laszlo Kovacs' cinematography, and bits of Terry Southern's screenplay), it's very much a product of its time; you may be glad it exists, but you're likely to spend a lot of time wondering exactly what happened back then.

GIMME SHELTER (1970)

Since Hunter Thompson didn't have a film crew with him when he was writing his Hell's Angels book, the Maysles Brothers' masterful documentary about the Rolling Stones' notorious concert at Altamont is likely to remain the definitive treatment of the most infamous of all outlaw biker groups on film. Unsurprisingly, it shows them at their worst but doesn't entirely play fair: while everyone knows the story of how the security at the concert was disastrously handed over to a lot of drunken, rowdy Angels who worked cheap and didn't care whose head they bashed in, and while there's no doubt that their killing of black concertgoer Meredith Hunter was an overreaction (and the racial slurs they deployed against him didn't help their cause one bit), it was only later made clear that the bikers had been right about Hunter: he was, as they'd said, been carry a gun, waving it around recklessly, and behaving in a very suspicious manner. Filmed evidence of this was why Hell's Angel Allen Passaro, who was primarily responsible for Hunter's death, was acquitted of murder. But as with most stories involving outlaw bikers, the truth got muddled and the legend got exaggerated: Altamont became widely known as the exact time and place that the Sixties died, and the Hell's Angels' reputation as lawless maniacs grew deeper and darker.

THE ROAD WARRIOR (1981)

After decades of imitators, parodies, and its own decreasing dividends in terms of sequels, it's hard to remember exactly how exciting the Mad Max movies were when they first came out. Hard, that is, until you sit down and watch one all the way through. Made at a time when Mel Gibson was still an electrifying performer and not a living self-parody, and directed by a George Miller light-years removed from feel-good movies about talking pigs, they still hold up a gold standard for smart, anarchic, terrifyingly high-velocity action movies, and Mad Max 2 -- more commonly known in the U.S. as The Road Warrior -- is the best of them. It's one of the best action movies of all time, and unlike most movies featuring car crashes, postapocalyptic wastelands, and murderous bandits who look like they were once members of Charged G.B.H., it doesn't sacrifice a shred of intelligence while bringing us its heart-stopping thrills. With oil recently clearing $300 a barrel, gas hitting over $4 a gallon, and many people -- both serious economic thinkers and paranoid tool-shed ranters -- considering what a "post-peak oil" world might look like, now is a good time to contemplate a future without gasoline, where deranged biker gangs run amok, and say: actually, that looks kinda cool.

BEYOND THE LAW (1992)

While public interest in outlaw biker gangs started to die out in the 1970s and had almost totally faded by the 1980s, the biker gangs themselves never went away, and even today, a fringe element of the culture is responsible for some fairly heinous drug dealing and the sort of violent turf wars that go with them. In 1982, an Arizona undercover cop infiltrated one such gang in order to bring them down after a particularly brutal drug killing, and Playboy magazine carried his compelling story. Over 10 years later, HBO produced this dramatic action thriller based on Dan Saxon's story, and while it didn't attract a great deal of attention at the time, it has gone on to become a bargain-bin cult classic, thanks largely to its highly realistic depiction of undercover procedures and its unusually literate storytelling. Okay, admittedly, some of the dialogue is a bit hokey, and Charlie Sheen looks absolutley ridiculous in a biker beard and leather vest, but it's a tightly constructed, nasty little thriller that's a lot better than it has any right to be. And hey, who's that playing a violent lowlife? You guessed it: Michael Madsen! How far we've come...

Norman Mailer (1923 - 2007)

Peter Smith — Mon, 19 Nov 2007 21:00:00 GMT

Norman Mailer's death on November 10, at the age of eighty-four, was a great blow to American letters, and also to film lovers, robbing us as it did of a major literary artist whose relationship to the movies was just about unique. Mailer always said that he was seduced into writing by the novels of James T. Farrell, and he claimed Ernest Hemingway as a personal hero. Both Hemingway and Farrell reacted to the new primacy of movies by stripping their writing down, but Mailer wasn't really quite of that school. His style was sometimes downright baroque, and he loved to delve deep into the psyches of his characters, of real people, of himself and the events in which he was taking part. Nor did he have much truck with the common attitude among literary figures of his era that the movies were the enemy. Mailer loved the novel as a form and feared that it might be dying out, but he tried to keep it alive by writing as if he were making a movie on the page. And he went about that goal not cynically or opportunistically but whole-heartedly.

Mailer loved the pulpy immediacy of movies and envied them for their ability to insinuate themselves in modern audience's consciousness and place their stamp on society. At the same time, he deplored the unadventurousness of mainstream Hollywood fare of the 1950s and early 1960s, the period when he was making his name and finding his voice as a writer. In his novels An American Dream and Why Are We In Vietnam? and also in the great journalistic works in which he cast himself as reporter-hero, Mailer wrote the movies that he thought American filmmakers should have been making: unpredictable, crazy, symbolically charged and determined to grapple with current events and the deeper concerns of the country. Years later, in his awesome The Executioner's Song, he shifted gears and created the ultimate docudrama of post-sixties America, epic in scope, spare in style and altogether emotionally confounding. To read the books and then compare them with the movies that Hollywood did make of The Naked and the Dead and An American Dream is to see just how inadequate Hollywood would have been to make good on Mailer's ideas, even if it had wanted to take him up on it. To see the 1982 TV movie version of The Executioner's Song, starring a young Tommy Lee Jones as Gary Gilmore, and adapted for the small screen by Mailer himself, is to see that Mailer himself had better ideas about what movies ought to be than he had about how to make them.

That was already clear from the movies that Mailer made himself in the sixties — Wild 90 (1968), Beyond the Law (1968) and Maidstone (1970). These were edited down from hours and hours of unshaped improvisations with Mailer, who plays the lead in all three, and his actor buddies and various other celebrities taking off from a vague situation (a buncha gangsters hanging out, a buncha cops hanging out. . .) and saying and doing whatever comes into their heads. The proudest moment in all these hours of celluloid comes at the end of Maidstone, in which cast member Rip Torn, feeling unfulfilled at the end of the shoot, attacks a surprised Mailer with a hammer after everyone else thought the film had wrapped; the two men end up tussling on the grass while Mailer's children, with whom he had been shooting home movies with leftover film stock, can be heard crying off-camera.

These movies were based on Mailer's theory about bringing an exciting new level of "reality" to movies, a theory that he explicated in such essays as "Some Dirt in the Talk" and "A Course in Film-Making," and also in his essay on Brando and Last Tango in Paris. When Mailer's long-unavailable films were brought back for a special retrospective screening in New York this past summer, Gerald Howard called Maidstone "a video transmission from the faraway Planet '60s — a civilization in the throes of a crackup" and described the agony of waiting so long to see it after reading the "extraordinary essay" about its making. The fact that the film is unwatchable, to Howard, was kind of beside the point. That the essays Mailer wrote about what he was trying to do as a filmmaker are so much more vibrant and intellectually thrilling than what he did, is not just an example of empty hype. They're proof not that he wasn't onto something but that he was a writer, not a filmmaker. The essays will outlast the movies, and some distant future generation may feel disappointed if nobody finally cares enough to preserve the last prints of his beloved eyesores.

Mailer also gave scattered appearances in other people's films, playing Stanford White in Milos Forman's Ragtime (1981) and Harry Houdini in Matthew Barney's Cremaster 2 (1999). He had a celebrated dust-up on The Dick Cavett Show and once brought his comedy stylings to the set of Gilmore Girls.

He also wrote scripts for TV movies about Robert Hansson and the O.J. Simpson trial, to be directed by his friend Lawrence Schiller. He contributed sound bites to documentary features on James Toback, the romance of Greenwich Village, the exploitation of 9/11, the Ali-Foreman fight, and Deep Throat. He contracted to write and star, with his actress daughter Kate, in an updated version of King Lear (with a Mafia setting, and with Norman to play "Don Learo") that was to be directed by Jean-Luc Godard and financed by Golan-Globus productions. Mailer apparently decided that this was too much even for him and fled the set, with his daughter in tow, after one day of shooting, though Godard went ahead and finished the film, or finished something anyway, with Burgess Meredith and Molly Ringwald. If Mailer made a public ass of himself and worse on more than one occasion, so did a lot of other people who didn't also manage to dash off The Armies of the Night. You will be missed, sir.

— Phil Nugent