The three- to four-week shoot gave Gary the chance to work with one of his favorite people, director Richard Rush. “They just loved him, including Jack, and so it made it all worthwhile. Dick was so into it and trying so hard to make it something other than just a biker flick and we all knew that.”10
“I overlaid a Faustian theme,” Rush revealed. “My hero was quoting spontaneous lines like, ‘Better to rule in hell than serve in heaven.’”11
Kent and Hells Angel Barger did remember Nicholson’s skill with a bike differently. When asked if he and the club worked with Nicholson beforehand to study riding, Sonny tossed that aside, saying, “Absolutely not, he just fell into it and done it. He seemed like he could ride it. You gotta remember, he’s a good actor and the guy was good at what he does.”12 Nicholson favorably impressed the Angels, especially when compared to The Wild Angels star Peter Fonda. Likely, the bias against Peter, a rich kid and son of big star Henry Fonda, worked against the future Captain America, about whom Barger shrugged, “The guys never liked him and thought he didn’t know what he was doing on a bike.”13 According to Kent, “Jack was not that experienced with a bike … and he never did look like he owned the bike instead of the bike owning him.”
Kent summed up Jack’s nuanced work on Hells Angels on Wheels by commenting on his “absolute dedication and seriousness to the film, not his career. He was very much into the film and the authenticity of his part.”14
Nicholson has another impressive sequence in which he moves from victimized to vengeful and then to regret and fear. A punch-up by mateys and swabbies oddly anticipates The Last Detail. After being beat up by four Navy grunts, he returns shamed. When he’s helped by the MC after the beating, he looks down a lot—serious, thoughtful, conflicted. He again is the sensitive Poet. Later he gets his revenge in beating up a sailor who dies of his injuries (“I cooked one of them”). It is not a triumphant act. Poet’s face goes slack at an Angel after-party, as we witness reality and real morals kicking in. Poet remains clearly troubled through the climactic fight scene between Poet and Buddy against cowboys in a drained pool. When the police come to break it up, the outmanned but triumphant pair climb out of the pool and Poet has a precious moment shaking hands with a cop and gesturing in victory, fingers a-wiggling (likely an ad-libbed touch).
The ending blows it, however, as Buddy is upset at Poet for dropping his weapon during their own confrontation. Poet walks away, so Buddy flies his bike through a window to literally crash and burn, leaving Jack with a quizzical and lost look, as if thinking, “How can a movie this lively and good, real and unforced, end this way—so deflated, poor, faked, and pushed?” There’s something of a parallel between this ending (sudden and unexpected, resulting in a violent death of a main character) and that of Chinatown. Both shockers left Nicholson abandoned and alone, the conflicted survivor. The difference is that by the time he portrayed J.J. Gittes, Nicholson could master the reaction to unbelievable disaster, no longer dazed and confused but torn between being the witness and the victim.
Overall, Hells Angels on Wheels remains a satisfying filmic piece of work. Gritty characters, real Hells Angels, innovative cinematography, energetic direction and a rich story elevate this film out of its genre. Not famous, yet an achievement, this low-budget gem owes its enduring quality to three men and one woman: Richard Rush, László Kovács, Jack Nicholson and Sabrina Scharf.
Gary Kent remembered Jack
asking questions of the stunt guys like, “Is this phony if I throw the punch this way?” or “Would it be phony if I did this?” He was always looking for something that would make what he was doing authentic. He would ask about himself, not that he was insecure, but he was always reaching to make it more authentic. That was what impressed me about Jack and made me think that he’s gonna go somewhere, because he seemed more serious about acting and the project than he did about being a star.15
This film is the qualitative opposite of Rebel Rousers, filmed the same year but only released three years later to cash in on Nicholson’s Easy Rider fame. In Hells Angels on Wheels, the violence and sex seem real; the happenings, body paintings, drugs, effects from the drugs, the color and action, movement and character associations—are all real. None of this would be true of Rebel Rousers.
Rebel Rousers (1970) has more talent than it deserves, a contrived bikesploitation rip-off of Brando’s The Wild One. Jack, center, is shown with Diane Ladd (then pregnant with actress Laura Dern) and frequent Nicholson collaborator Bruce Dern.
Rebel Rousers is a contrivance, true only as an exploitation of the biker stereotype in order to present an overcooked morality play. The establishing premise is directly ripped off from The Wild One. Since they are bikers, of course they’re going to terrorize a small town, with action centered around a diner. So far, so lifted. Bruce Dern is the Brando gang-leader J.J. Weston, so it’s only natural that Jack homage Lee Marvin’s Wild One outfit with wide, horizontal black and white stripes along with a Michael Nesmith–style wool hat.
There’s so much talent for so little movie. In retrospect, it’s amazing that this nothing low-budget flick offers Academy Award winner Jack Nicholson and nominees Bruce Dern and Diane Ladd; notable character actors Cameron Mitchell and (Harry) Dean Stanton; legendary cinematographer László Kovács (credited as Leslie); and even Laura Dern (also an Oscar nominee), who makes an in-the-womb cameo with mom Ladd and dad Dern.
Pushing the obvious moralizing further, it seems cause-and-effect that since the gang smokes pot that they would attack a pregnant woman (Ladd) and her companion (Mitchell) for no reason. The action-heavy emphasis and character proneness for violence lends a heavy-handed, overstated tone that rings hollow and false. In contrast to Hells Angels pro Dick Rush, this movie was the sole directorial effort of Martin B. Cohen, who also co-scripted.
Some isolated flashes of character truth break through. In the first scene at The Cantina, Nicholson’s in the background playing to a buxom blonde until he suddenly brushes her off as if she’s a bug. When a fight breaks out between bikers on the beach, it has a feel of spontaneity and truth, while Nicholson (as Bunny) fits in as expert on his bike, just as Sonny Barger related.
A believable moment occurs when Bunny tells J.J., “Don’t look at me with that grin on your face,” before they both break character. Later in that same sequence, Nicholson comes close to introducing his Five Easy Pieces dog bark as he performs a little of the out-of-control Jack.
Actor Robert Dix explained that Dern and Nicholson “did an awful lot of ad libbing on this movie. They kind of rewrote the script because it wasn’t much of a script in the first place, and what they did was better than what was there.”16 One such likely ad lib was when Bunny performs a mock wedding ceremony using a Harley-Davidson manual as the Bible while he has his cap completely covering his face.
Bunny’s death was a dramatic highlight, and a fine touch of visual style. He died like an animal, shown from behind and dropping from a crouch to fully lying on the ground, with his striped pants from that perspective making him look like a dying tiger. The last shot of Bruce Dern as J.J., defeated and kneeling in the sand in front of the ocean surf, somewhat foreshadows the actor’s climactic scene in Coming Home.
Dern explained the early struggle he shared with Nicholson and Dennis Hopper. They were reviled as Method types, “but whether we were in the [Actors] Studio or not, we all basically had the same principles, which were: You really look at somebody, you really listen to what they’re saying, and everything comes out of that—comes out of what’s really going on at the moment.”17
Dix underscored Nicholson’s commitment to such a weak show, recalling, “Jack was an interesting guy, but what some people may not know is that he was a very dedicated actor. He was most sincere, very conscientious of his work…. He was one of the reasons that the esprit de corps was good and how we stayed in the groove as a production team had a lot to do with Jack and Bruce Dern.”18
* * *
Nicholson’s most important westerns were the back-to-back collaborations with Monte Hellman, though his most famous was the Brando oddity The Missouri Breaks. Nicholson co-produced the two Hellman existential classics and wrote Ride in the Whirlwind while Adrien Joyce (aka Carole Eastman) wrote The Shooting.
The relationships started early, in acting class with Jeff Corey. Millie Perkins was there after her debut in the title role of The Diary of Anne Frank, several years before they worked together on these westerns:
I worked a lot with Jack on exercises because I was a strong person and Jack needed a female opposite. He needed somebody that was not intimidated by him, as I was not.
Monte and Jack had history together somehow with Roger Corman and AIP … and when they sat down and decided to make a couple movies, they had a meeting with Carole when she wrote The Shooting and Jack was going to write the other one, and I think it was a secret that Roger financed it.19
Corman financed two features with much of the same crew on the same location in Utah. When The Shooting finished, Ride in the Whirlwind began. Stuntman extraordinaire Kent recalled,
Jack impressed me because most of the problems that a producer would run into on a really low-budget film, a disgruntled crew, airplanes when you need silence, Jack handled and he handled very well. He and Monte did it with grace and diplomacy because we had some pretty cranky people, although basically it was a fairly happy set—but is was Jack who would represent the company as producer and then he would turn around and be an actor.20
The Shooting features Nicholson as a creepy sociopath who sees killing as a job, but a job to be relished. Perkins portrays a relentless Woman with No Name who cares only about vengeance for her murdered family and becomes evil herself. She told me, “I just instinctively knew what the right thing to do was and I felt I knew who the characters were and I went out and did it. I didn’t have any artistic plan other than just instinct. We finished the one film and we immediately started on the next film.”21
The next film was scripted by Nicholson, who wrote or co-wrote five films released between 1963 and 1968, yet wrote only one other throughout the subsequent decades. He’s third above the title in the credits and plays unwitting young outlaw sidekick Wes with a relaxed and understated style, using his Easy Rider accent a couple of years before that production. Twenty-five minutes into the movie, he’s shown in close-up as shots ring out, though he looks pretty calm for somebody being shot at.
The early scenes between Wes and cohort Vern (Cameron Mitchell) seem like a Method standoff. Rupert Crosse, another member of the cowboy gang who is apprehended, is shown with a rope around his neck, an interesting social commentary in Nicholson’s script given the context of 1965. Perkins is not seen until that era’s version of a home invasion, during which Vern and Wes break into her family’s cabin for refuge.
They’re outlaws, but he’s really an innocent, kid-like when Millie’s character Abigail brings them food and when Wes shows his obvious delight in eating it. Jack plays it wide-eye and exclaims, “That’s good!” with an open expression like an overgrown kid.
After they eat in the family cabin, Wes leaves Vern to accompany Abigail on her chores in a charming courtin’ scene that combines horses, flirting, vigilantes, father and hanging.
They together depict backwardness and awkwardness, but without overdoing it. “I thought he did really well,” Millie said. “I really liked the way he did that. Neither of them [the characters] were too bright and Jack was a guy who wanted out of there. He did a very good job of bringing a nice, balanced performance to what was required of him, and that was somebody who was in the right place at the wrong time.”22
Gary Kent talked about the extensive preparation. “I thought they’d done their homework and these were tough times and they were true to that and Jack spent a lot of time in the library before we went up to shoot, reading about those times and studying those times.”
Low-budget as the films were, the filmmakers truly cared about the reality they brought to the screen. Kent said, “Monte and Jack both cared a lot about this film, that it be authentic and that impressed me with the bleakness of it, of the surroundings and the location, that little valley that the family lived in, and I just thought when we were filming, ‘These are really honest films.’”23
Talk about honest: Who would write a scene in which the only thing that happens over an extended period of time, an honest and real depiction of nothing happening—is a game of checkers while hearing somebody hitting the same tree stump over and over and over? Nicholson did, on this film, and it’s not a fleeting transitional moment but a true, human scene that’s given enough time (non-narrative time at that) to illustrate the type of life people experienced at that time in that place. We see a slow and uncluttered life, devoid of all of the activities and distractions of modern times, and without the need to fill every nanosecond with three things at once.
Another departure from the ordinary in Nicholson’s screenplay was a dream sequence. That’s not something ordinarily considered western material and certainly not common to the genre, but it nevertheless helps expand on the character psychology.
Because the members of the family become real people, it’s all the more shocking when Abigail’s father is killed. Yet she shows no visible reaction aside from subtly drooping eyes, a nuanced touch that comments on the uncertainty of the times while diverging from an expected melodramatic flair that would have undermined the truth Nicholson was seeking.
Perkins embodies that reality by appropriating the walk of her chickens for her character. She’s out in the middle of nowhere, seen by no one, and judged by nobody. This young woman has no need for the type of affectation afforded people who need to make an impression. There is no impression to be made, so her most direct influence were her chickens. “I started thinking about the fact that what does she have to identify with—her mother, her father or the animals?” explained Perkins. “She probably loved the chickens as a little girl and identifies with them. There was no affectation. There was no idea about how she was supposed to be; she just was.”24
Identifying with, and walking like, chickens was an adept interpretation to see on a pair of quickie westerns. But immersion and character energy were hallmarks of the shoot for Perkins and Nicholson, as Kent remembers. “Jack was so serious into this character, that when he was on camera, he was not only believable, but I could tell he was really inhabiting the guy, and I think Cameron fell into that and they worked well together.” The legendary stuntman saw Nicholson as “an extremely confident guy, on- or off-camera. The second film, Ride in the Whirlwind, was much closer in character to the real Jack. That person was half naïve, but he wasn’t going to be pushed around by anybody and was able to wisecrack on his own and come back at you with a good answer.” He described the relationship on the set between Jack and Cameron Mitchell: “I’m sure there was some improvisation going on between them, which just made it better as far as I was concerned.”25
Overall, Ride in the Whirlwind has a narrow plot, but there are moments of life that involve the viewer. When Abigail enters the farmhouse in which the pursued pair are hiding, Wes places his hand over her mouth to silence any possible scream. The way he lets go is quite unusual. Rather than the typical, casual lift of the hand, it’s almost peeled back, systematically pulling it away with care.
Kent remembered the Nicholson-Mitchell relationship as spontaneous rather than the result of much rehearsal and “primarily just a rapport.”26 Ride with the buddy and save the buddy becomes the principle that’s a theme of the movie. They don’t always have to get along or even have primary motivations, but that’s the way of their world. Ultimately, Vern convinces Wes to leave him behind, leading to an ambiguous getaway at the end, giving Jack the last shot in this film just as he had in its companion, The Shooting.
Time after time, those who have worked with Nicholson talk about the research, the intense study and the meticulous attention to details such as livin
g conditions, manner of speaking and especially (as Perkins remembers with good humor and abiding wonder) a near obsession with wardrobe. “Before we went over to Utah, we both went together to Western Costumes and picked out our costumes and even argued over the hat. I think one of us had a hat the other wanted. I said, ‘I want that hat,’ and he said, ‘I want that hat.’ But we argued about the costumes while were there and finally ended up choosing them and went to Utah with our costumes and our suitcase.”27
The importance of wardrobe in creating a character is perhaps no better illustrated than by Charlie Chaplin, who sought contradiction (baggy pants-tight coat, small hat-large shoes) when devising his Little Tramp. “I had no idea of the character,” Chaplin remembered. “But the moment I was dressed, the clothes and the makeup made me feel the person he was. I began to know him, and by the time I walked onto the stage he was fully born.”28
* * *
Hats and wardrobe play an important part in how we react to Nicholson’s western with Marlon Brando, The Missouri Breaks. Much was made at the time about Brando’s broad Irish accent and strange, ever-changing clothing. From handkerchief headgear to frock and bonnet, the former Sky Masterson appeared to be playing around in another genre—a Guys and Dolls around the campfire—shifting from Irish revenuer to western priest seemingly at whim. Critics lambasted him for not caring, for not taking the role seriously while accepting the paycheck. Audiences were bewildered, shaken by what was perceived as Brando’s breaking the fourth wall as part of some bored actor’s insider joke. Randy Quaid related to me that the shoot featured many strange experiences, not least of which was “Marlon Brando in a field by himself doing a ‘rain dance’ for an hour.”29 Director Arthur Penn called the character ephemeral, a chameleon in permanent disguise, so “he’s got to be different every time we see him.”30
Quintessential Jack Page 17
