Roger Corman Remembered

The Wild Angels
Directed by Roger Corman

Friday, July 12, 6 pm | BUY TICKETS

$12 | $8 Speed members

“Looking at many of the post-Angels biker films, Corman’s film undeniably remains one of the coolest in terms of production values, visual style, music and actors.”—Margaret Barton-Fumo, Senses of Cinema

The “Angels,” a San Pedro motorcycle gang, party their way through the Coachella Valley while searching for a bike stolen from them, clashing with police along the way. Starring Peter Fonda as the gang’s leader and Nancy Sinatra as his girlfriend, Roger Corman’s The Wild Angels helped inaugurate the biker film as a genre, and these cheaply produced fantasies of violence soon proliferated in drive-ins and grindhouses across the country.

The idiom fascinated Joan Didion, who saw it as “a kind of underground folk literature for adolescents,” a form that “located an audience and fabricated a myth to exactly express that audience’s every inchoate resentment, every yearning for the extreme exhilaration of death.” The influence of the genre can still be felt today, apparent in such recent works as Jeff Nichols’s The Bikeriders. 1966, U.S., DCP, 82 minutes.