Hell's Angels '69

Roger Greenspun of The New York Times wrote in his review: "HELL'S ANGELS '69, which opened about 30 per cent out of focus at the DeMille yesterday, uses that noted law-and-order group, the Oakland Hells Angels, as heroes in a dismal story that wastes most of its attention on the villains. By now their physical resemblance to lovable teddy bears may well have affected the Angels' self image, but not, I hope, to the extent that they continue to submit to such degrading elevation in American folk-demonology. Two California playboy types (Tom Stern and Jeremy Slate, who also wrote the film in which they star) join the Angels and con them into riding to Las Vegas, where they use them as public diversion to cover a robbery from Caesars Palace.

"They make their haul, and their getaway, but not without the encumbrance of a buxom Angel mamma (Conny Van Dyke) and the threat of the Angels' revenge. Revenge comes after a desert motorcycle chase, photographed with such concern for getting pursuers and pursued into a single frame that it looks less like a chase than a pleasure ride. Before the Angels have brutally righted the wrong, the Nevada desert has been covered with a quantity of lost loot perhaps unequaled since the windblown paper money finale of Allan Dwan's The River's Edge (1957). But comparisons can only hurt Hell's Angels '69, which more than lacks in character and conviction what it attempts to make up in sucker's-eye views of Vegas casinos and timid glances at bike-groups' mores. With this caper, as with so many in recent movies, the theft is for a lark rather than for the money — a squandering of time and energy (more time than energy) that seems both unesthetic and immoral. Only Miss Van Dyke emerges, her acting ability still in question (a plus in the context of Hell's Angels '69), but her physical presence superb. Plump, pretty, with a kind of facial nobility that depends more on soul than on bone structure, she catches the image of the American lost girl with an indirection that deserves a better movie than this.[3]