The Wild Angels
 
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The Wild Angels (1966)

Peter Fonda (Actor), Nancy Sinatra (Actor), Roger Corman (Director) | Rated: R | Format: DVD
3.6 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (30 customer reviews) |

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Product Details

  • Actors: Peter Fonda, Nancy Sinatra, Bruce Dern, Diane Ladd, Buck Taylor
  • Directors: Roger Corman
  • Writers: Peter Bogdanovich, Charles B. Griffith
  • Producers: Roger Corman, James H. Nicholson, Laurence Cruickshank, Samuel Z. Arkoff
  • Format: Anamorphic, Closed-captioned, Color, DVD, Widescreen, NTSC
  • Language: English (Dolby Digital 2.0 Mono), French (Dolby Digital 2.0 Mono)
  • Subtitles: Spanish, French
  • Region: Region 1 (U.S. and Canada only. Read more about DVD formats.)
  • Aspect Ratio: 2.35:1
  • Number of discs: 1
  • Rated: R (Restricted)
  • Studio: MGM (Video & DVD)
  • DVD Release Date: February 20, 2001
  • Run Time: 93 minutes
  • Average Customer Review: 3.6 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (30 customer reviews)
  • ASIN: B0000542CP
  • Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #55,360 in Movies & TV (See Top 100 in Movies & TV)

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  • Learn more about "The Wild Angels" on IMDb

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com

Embittered by his experience working with 20th Century Fox on The St. Valentine's Day Massacre (1967), and weary of the Poe films for American International Pictures, Roger Corman was in dire need of inspiration for his next production. He found it in Life magazine, which featured a photo of the funeral of Mother Miles, head of the Sacramento, California, Hell's Angels. From this picture came both The Wild Angels and the biker-movie genre itself. Peter Fonda, who replaced George Chakiris, stars as brooding Angels chieftain Heavenly Blues. When his pal Loser (Bruce Dern) is shot by police, Blues attempts to bury him in a small town, but the locals resist, and a brawl ensues. Audiences and critics were alternately appalled and thrilled by the extensive drug use and violence, but beneath Angels' leathery hide beats the heart of a Western, especially in its ruminations on personal freedom. Charles Griffith's script (cowritten by Peter Bogdanovich, who also cameos in the film) helped make Angels the sole U.S. entry for the 1966 Venice Film Festival, which irked the State Department enough to try and revoke the honor. Corman's direction, freed from AIP's period pieces, is lean and exuberantly active, aided by Monte Hellman's editing. The film helped give Fonda the counterculture clout to later make Easy Rider, and boosted the careers of Dern and then-wife Diane Ladd; Nancy Sinatra, however, renounced the picture, fearful of its effect on her image. Mike Curb's score features Davie Allan and the Arrows' fuzz-tone-soaked hit "Blues' Theme." --Paul Gaita

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews
17 of 18 people found the following review helpful
Format:VHS Tape
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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16 of 17 people found the following review helpful
Format:VHS Tape
Some folks consider "The Wild One" the first movie about outlaw bikers; it's not. "The Wild One" is about 50s beatniks who happen to tool around on British bikes (except Lee Marvin, the best thing about the movie). If you want the real thing, Hells Angels on Harleys, then "The Wild Angels" is the one. This is the movie that started the genre, so most of the cliches seen in subsequent drive in picture show biker features started here.
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19 of 22 people found the following review helpful
The original biker movie February 11, 2004
By A Customer
Format:DVD
I'm not a movie critic, I'm a motorcyclist. I have this film on video and watch it fairly often, along with Beyond The Law, Hells Angels on Wheels and Angels Hard As They Come (the most underrated of biker flicks). Fonda, Dern, Ladd, Buck Taylor and Norman Alden are great. Nancy Sinatra was terrible and totally miscast, if she' repudiating this movie it's due to her terrible acting. I can't see Micheal J. Pollard as a biker (but he was wonderful in Little Fauss and Big Halsy). The star of this movie is Fonda's chopper, to me, it's more beautiful, and subltly understated, than that ultimate movie chopper in Easy Rider, the Captain America Bike. This movie is really about Heavenly Blue's changing values as his friend Loner dies. Girlfriend Sinatra realizes the change that's come over him, "it's like a piece of you went with him". He reveiws his life and sees it empty, without purpose without his closest compadre The Loser, as in the final line "there's no where to go" as he stays to bury his friend while others flee The Man. They go on to continue the life of carousing and hell raising while Blues follows through on a duty to a friend, and to me symbolically buries himself, his up-to-then life, as well as his only friend.
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Most Recent Customer Reviews
Stupid
Definitely not my type of movie. My husband wanted it; he even laughed through it. Too corny. Waste of time.
Published 7 months ago by movie4me
Fun to Watch After All These Years
I remember going to the show to see this movie and I was about 13 years old. I don't know how I managed to get in to see it. I just remember it is what made me love Harley's. Read more
Published 8 months ago by Marla J. Nelson
Ends bizarrely/too quickly
Bought this for a trip in the past because I remember my brother buying and playing the 33 rpm vinyl of the sound track just after the film was released 40 yrs ago; soundtrack... Read more
Published 8 months ago by P.Ilou
Wild Angels
Good Movie, worth the price I paid. My Mom had the album when I was a kid, still does. We listened to that soundtrack over and over.
Published 13 months ago by Robert L. Warsing
Back to the originals.
This was the movie back in the 60's that got me intersted in motorcycles. I never get tired of watching it.
Published 16 months ago by rider
THE WILD ANGELS
THIS IS THE PETER FONDA MOVIE BEFORE EASYRIDER,IT IS LOOSLEY BASED ON THE ADVENTURES OF THE RED AND WHITE IN THE 60'S ITS ONE OF THE VERY FEW MOVIES THAT NANCY SINATRA WAS IN(THESE... Read more
Published on September 16, 2009 by Brent Stowe
Wild Angels DVD
DVD was shipped quickly. I was amazed to find this movie from 1966 on DVD and in such great recording quality.
Published on May 18, 2009 by Jerry L. Bayne
The Wild Angels
The purchase and delivery time was fine. The inside case center that holds the DVD was broken in three places. Read more
Published on February 1, 2009 by Edward Pasco
don't take it too seriously
Its a good old Biker flick with cool bikes and scenery if you just kick back with a 12 pack, "get loaded" , and enjoy it. Read more
Published on November 17, 2008 by SuperGlide
Best B Movie about Bikers Ever....
...just because the sound track is so good. The acting is lousy and the story line isn't much better. But the choppers are "righteous".
Published on September 26, 2008 by D. Sikes
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