Part of: Can't Get That Monster Out of My Mind: Joan Didion and Cinema

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The Wild Angels

U.S., 1966

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.”

35mm, color, 93 min. Director: Roger Corman. Screenwriter: Charles B. Griffith. With: Peter Fonda, Nancy Sinatra. Bruce Dern.

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