The Wild Angels

Copresented by the Hammer Museum and the UCLA Film & Television Archive

Roger Corman’s exploitation vehicle about an outlaw motorcycle club helped inaugurate the biker film as a genre, and these cheaply produced orgies 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.”

Print courtesy of the Jon Davison, Roger Corman, and Academy Film Archive Collection.