Rating: 
Summary: Still a powerful indictment of 1960s nihilism
Review: Watching THE WILD ANGELS (1966) recently for the first time in over two decades, I was struck by how powerful and relevant it still seems. Unlike some of the more starry-eyed counterculture films of the late 1960s, this one captured quite vividly the nihilism of the era and the dark side of the 1960s. The first film about the Hell's Angels motorcycle club and initiator of a short-lived but popular biker film craze, it presents its Harley-riding characters as cases of arrested development, unable to cope in the adult world, who have managed to form their own social class of outcasts, drunks, losers and misfits. (The real Hell's Angels sued the filmmakers for defamation of character.) The film avoids blatant moralizing, but simply shows the Angels' erratic behavior, contrasting the brutality, misogyny and pot- and alcohol-induced hedonism of the men with the occasional bursts of empathy and self-awareness shown by their female partners. In fact, one of the most compelling aspects of the film today is the work of the four main actresses, Nancy Sinatra, Diane Ladd, Gayle Hunnicutt and Joan Shawlee, neither of whom, on first glance, would seem to belong in such a film. But they all strive to make their characters plausible, believable and human, even in the most demeaning circumstances, and add emotional layers that distinguish the film from its numerous imitators. Also worth singling out is Peter Fonda's portrayal of Blues, the Angels' nominal leader, whose dawning realization of his own tragic blunders provides the true heart of the film.Also striking about the film today is its depiction of a thoroughly desolate Southern California landscape far from Los Angeles. We see the working-class backwater districts of places like San Pedro and Venice Beach; remote desert towns mired in poverty; long, endless highways leading nowhere; and, finally, a town high in the mountains, with woods and snow, where the Angels go to bury one of their number. Some of the wanton behavior in certain scenes seems way over the top today and was clearly added to the film for its sensational and exploitation value, but such scenes are balanced by many more that dramatize, in stark terms, the desperation of people who feel they have no choices and no hopes. It remains one of director Roger Corman's strongest works.
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