Hells Angels on Wheels (1967)

Director: Richard Rush
Writer: R. Wright Campbell
Stars: Adam Roarke, Jack Nicholson and Sabrina Scharf

Index: The First Thirty.

Early on, before Easy Rider utterly changed his career trajectory, Jack Nicholson served as a reliable regular in the stock companies of a select few directors. Out of his first seventeen features, eleven were directed by either Monte Hellman, Roger Corman or Richard Rush.

This was his second for the latter, after the wildly different Too Soon to Love, but it bears a lot of similarities to the third, Psych-Out, which would follow in 1968. Both focus on particular American subcultures whose participants have opted out of regular society. Both look at how leaving norms behind is freeing but have big drawbacks. Both end in tragedy.

Here, the subculture is bikers, especially the Hells Angels of the title, who provided extras from four different chapters. Also credited are the Nomads of Sacramento but it’s the Angels who stamped an official approval on the film through Sonny Barger, their “leader”—quoted from the poster as he often denied that he was the president his credit calls him—having an unspeaking role early in the film.

The Angels do what you might well expect the Angels to do in a 1967 exploitation movie, namely ride around en masse and hassle folks. On one main street, an Angel clambers off the back of his friend’s bike into the back seat of a car to pick up the girls inside. Needless to say, the regular folks in town aren’t happy.

The only non-Angel they connect with is a gas station attendant called Poet, who’s fired for laying hands on an angry customer who’s been haranguing him for doing his job. Some of the Angels are filling up at a different pump and notice. “You tell ’em, man,” says one and they all ride away on their respective bikes.

He promptly bumps into more of them in a side street where they’re doing tricks on their bikes. To be more accurate, one of them, Bull, bumps into him, breaking his headlight. Poet wants it paid for and throws punches to back up his demand. The ensuing fight is broken up by the Angels’ leader, Buddy, who sees kindred spirit in Poet so promises him a new headlight and suddenly we have a bona fide movie, not just a montage.

Most of the characters here have little value and only serve to add to the texture of the film like they’re living breathing wallpaper. There are little subplots that add colour, but they’re not the driving force behind the film. There’s an ongoing vendetta that Sgt. Bingham has for Buddy and the Angels. There’s the wedding of Gypsy and Abigail. There’s Jocko running some old man off the road, accidentally killing him.

Really, though, only three characters have enough substance to sustain a story and they quickly form an odd sort of love triangle on which the entire script is built.

One is Buddy, played by Adam Roarke, who was uncredited as a mechanic in Ensign Pulver but takes the lead in this film and would play a similarly prominent role in Psych-Out.

Buddy is absolutely in charge of his band of Angels because whatever he says goes. Partly that’s because he’s comfortable giving orders, as any leader must, but partly because he’s willing to go to extremes.

Poet tags along to get his headlight, but it’s not the first stop on the way. First up, Buddy’s keen on starting a fight at a bar, Angels taking on Madcaps. Something personal, he explains. Poet ends up joining in. He gets the headlight at an amusement park but, after he’s attacked by sailors, four against one, Buddy seeks them out and the Angels take them down, so far that one of the sailors dies. After that, party time.

Of course, Jack Nicholson plays Poet and it’s a good role because he’s his own man in a film where everyone else isn’t. Either they’re part of mainstream society or they’re part of their subculture of choice, which has its own rules. Poet’s the only character who can really pick his own path in life, but it leaves him outside every community he encounters.

The scene at the gas station shows how he’s not willing to play by society’s rules, letting a righteous anger guide him. Of course, with his newfound respect from the Angels, we’re sure to see the potential for him to join them, but he never quite fits there either and that has to do with the third character, Shill.

When we meet her, Shill seems to be one of many women hanging around the Angels and Poet pursues her, apparently successfully. The party is at her place and she’s happy to make out with him in front of everyone else, which makes Poet rather uncomfortable.

Before long, however, he realises that she’s actually Buddy’s girl, or one of them, women in the Angels being closer to possessions than relationships. Poet thinks he can talk her into a relationship with him, but it’s not remotely that simple and Sabrina Scharf nails her role.

She had a short acting career, running only a decade or so, but a highly memorable life, progressing from Playboy Bunny to Star Trek and Easy Rider, then environmental activism and a failed run for the California State Senate, finally becoming an attorney practicing real estate law.

She’s impressive here, so natural in front of the camera that we can easily believe that she isn’t acting when she tells him, “I’m me and I’m not ashamed of anything I do.” We utterly buy into her being a free spirit.

Most importantly, she asks him, “Would you fight for me?” and he replies “I’d kill for you.” That subtle control drives the dynamic we see throughout the film between Buddy and Poet and it’s not the rhetorical question we think it is when we first hear it. Remember, just like Psych-Out, this ends in tragedy.

While Nicholson hadn’t yet found a mastery of his craft, he was getting better and better and it’s telling that, while Roarke is perfectly fine as Buddy, Poet feels like the male lead. We realise why Shill plays these two men against each other, one minute backing each other up in yet another brawl against regular folk and the next throwing punches at each other, and it’s why she belongs with the Angels and Poet doesn’t. The more we question that, the more we learn that we don’t either.

And, while that’s the primary reason why I would expect that Poet is the character with whom most watchers would identify, it surely isn’t the only one. Nicholson’s performance is another and that isn’t something we could say last time he appeared in a movie for Richard Rush. He only had a small role in Too Soon for Love but it’s easy to argue that he wasn’t ready for a bigger one. This time, he absolutely was.