THE CYCLE SAVAGES
Written and directed by Bill Brame
Starring Bruce Dern, Melody Patterson
Released in 1969
Written and directed by Bill Brame
Starring Bruce Dern, Melody Patterson
Released in 1969
On the first day of classes back at Film Critic University (Eau Claire, class of 1982), the headmistress taught us with the crack of a whip that the one thing we must nevah evah do is to sum up a creative person's life in a pithy line or two. Oh, it would be easy, Tina assured us. Remarkably, disgustingly easy. "There's just one problem," she said. "We critics nevah evah do nothin' nice and easy." She sneered and bit the snapping end of her weapon across the quivering blackboard. She was emphatic, in her own way. She said, "The critic is always subordinate to even the grossest pile of celluloid dung. Unless--" Again she cracked her whip and this time the blackboard shattered in anticipation. "Unless we're talking about Mike Curb." The pieces of broken slate muted as they struck the floor. "Mike Curb is the exception, boys. Don't you nevah evah say nothin' nice about Curb."
What can I say? The tuition was cheap.
Mike Curb. What a guy. He's still around, matter of fact. First I heard of him was back in 1970 when he was head of MGM Records, which had recently merged with Verve. A self-described cultural conservative, Curb threw eighteen of the label's acts to the curb--bad pun intended--because he claimed they encouraged drug usage among their impressionable audiences, like that was some kind of headline. Now at that time, though only twelve, I was quite partial to groups that encouraged drug usage, so I determined to keep my ears and eyes open about this here white Curb boy.
As it turned out, my juvenile instincts were right on. Mike Curb was a big proponent of such presumably wholesome groups as The Osmonds, Sammy Davis Jr., Shawn Cassidy, and his own Mike Curb Congregation. He was also a hep cat with the goons of the Nixon Administration and even went on to be the Republican Lieutenant Governor of California under Jerry Brown, an odd combination of leadership indeed.
But the damnedest thing that Curb ever did (and those of you wondering when I was ever gonna get around to making the point, well, it may be about to happen, you never know, so listen up, just in case) was to make the music for a number of early biker flicks, including the truly excellent Born Losers, which was the first of the four Billy Jack films, as well as Riot on Sunset Strip and The Wild Angels.
Nowadays Curb sponsors NASCAR racers and manages the companies that control the works of various contemporary Christian and Country musicians, most of them rather boring sorts.
Somewhere along the line, around about the end of the Sixties, Curb hooked up with future American Top Forty so-called disc jockey Casey Kasem, the voice of numerous cartoon characters (notably Shaggy from "Scooby Doo"), and the two of them enlisted a writer-director named Bill Brame to make an extremely antagonistic biker film called The Cycle Savages (1969), which starred a young and energetic actor named Bruce Dern. While this was Brame's first directorial assignment, Dern was already something of a rising movie veteran, having been featured invariably as the bad guy in westerns and other biker bonanzas. (Years later I watched Dern in an interview talking about the stars of his generation. He said something to the effect that "When people like Jack Nicholson and myself were starting out, we knew that we wouldn't be the pretty-boy Robert Redford types or the Paul Newman types. But we knew we would make it--because we were interesting.") Dern really works his ass off in The Cycle Savages. His incredible freedom and intense spontaneity saves this movie from the slag heap. The same cannot be said for the contribution of Mr. Curb.
I guess Curb and Kasem wanted to make a film that would have some mass-alarm appeal, the kind of movie made by and for straights who wouldn't know a Honda from a Harley or a GTO from a Gremlin.
Aside from Dern's vivacious performance, three things stand out in this film. First, we get to see part of a naked Melody Patterson, she of "F-Troop" fame, although she is badly cast in this film as a reformed not quite prostitute. She seems so incredibly uncomfortable here that the glory of revealed mystery is unfortunately lost. Second, the editing in this movie is so bad that it could have been sown together by Elvira Mistress of the Dark on a night when she couldn't find the corkscrew. Third, and more to the point, the music really sucks bananas. That music, of course, was courtesy of Mike Curb, without his Congregation, one presumes. You know how in movies from this period somebody is always turning on a radio and what comes out is that tinny-sounding instrumental crap that old folks thought young folks were crazy about, even though any self-respecting hipster of the period would have smashed any radio deigning to blare such garbage? Yeah? Well, that was Curb's entire soundtrack. Yet in a twisted way, that horrible music went right well with the editing, even in the first scene, where the biker gang, known as Hell's Chosen Few, come roaring into some curb side (sorry) eatery and terrorize everyone. Whoever was in charge of tracking this scene just put all kinds of weird grumbling and smushing sounds on a short endless loop, not to torture us but to save money.
And that ain't the half of it. During this opening montage of rowdy biker behavior of the sort that would embarrass the Sons of Anarchy, we spy a sketch artist sitting at a nearby tableau, etching out his impressions of the destruction in process. Now, two things about this really rile up Dern, who plays Keeg, the leader of the gang. One, he's afraid that if these drawings make their way into the hands of the police, well, the whole gig will be up. I never knew that police trusted pencil sketches in the same way they do digital photography, as far as vital evidence is concerned. Apparently I'm stupid. Two, the drawings aren't especially good. That last fact didn't really seem to bother anyone in the movie, but it very much worked its way into my crawl. "He's a freaking hack!" I screamed at the screen. "Tell him! Let him know to go back to school!" But, no. That would make too much sense. Instead Dern decides the artist can't be trusted and plans to destroy the man's hands.
To the extent that there was any intent whatsoever for this movie to do anything other than to turn a fast buck for Curb and Kasem, that intent most certainly was to use a wide brush to smear young folks. In the biker club house, we see psychedelic drawings of John Lennon. We see inverted peace symbols. We see women being brutalized, even though there's a strongly misogynistic implication that those women bring it on themselves. Elsewhere we see a brutalized bartender bemoaning the drug-crazed youth market. In short, most of the things that the straights thought the Sixties were "about" gets lumped into one big sack and tossed off as corrupt.
Okay. That's cool. That's just what Curb set out to do and he accomplished his goal. Never mind that the only thing that kept audiences from laughing through their vomit was the magnificence of Bruce Dern, although even with him there was one bit of oddness that never really got explained. His diction, his erudition, his every spoken word was crisp, clear, and without any of those typical dropped ending "g's" that some associate with everyday speech. Half the time he sounds like John Houseman on acid. Maybe that was on purpose. Maybe Dern had worked too hard to learn how to do movie talk to risk his efforts deteriorating in this slop bucket of a film.
So, yes, Tina, my dear ancient instructor that never was. I have not chopped Curb down in a pithy line or two. I used the better part of an evening to get it across. Where's your whip now?
What can I say? The tuition was cheap.
Mike Curb. What a guy. He's still around, matter of fact. First I heard of him was back in 1970 when he was head of MGM Records, which had recently merged with Verve. A self-described cultural conservative, Curb threw eighteen of the label's acts to the curb--bad pun intended--because he claimed they encouraged drug usage among their impressionable audiences, like that was some kind of headline. Now at that time, though only twelve, I was quite partial to groups that encouraged drug usage, so I determined to keep my ears and eyes open about this here white Curb boy.
As it turned out, my juvenile instincts were right on. Mike Curb was a big proponent of such presumably wholesome groups as The Osmonds, Sammy Davis Jr., Shawn Cassidy, and his own Mike Curb Congregation. He was also a hep cat with the goons of the Nixon Administration and even went on to be the Republican Lieutenant Governor of California under Jerry Brown, an odd combination of leadership indeed.
But the damnedest thing that Curb ever did (and those of you wondering when I was ever gonna get around to making the point, well, it may be about to happen, you never know, so listen up, just in case) was to make the music for a number of early biker flicks, including the truly excellent Born Losers, which was the first of the four Billy Jack films, as well as Riot on Sunset Strip and The Wild Angels.
Nowadays Curb sponsors NASCAR racers and manages the companies that control the works of various contemporary Christian and Country musicians, most of them rather boring sorts.
Somewhere along the line, around about the end of the Sixties, Curb hooked up with future American Top Forty so-called disc jockey Casey Kasem, the voice of numerous cartoon characters (notably Shaggy from "Scooby Doo"), and the two of them enlisted a writer-director named Bill Brame to make an extremely antagonistic biker film called The Cycle Savages (1969), which starred a young and energetic actor named Bruce Dern. While this was Brame's first directorial assignment, Dern was already something of a rising movie veteran, having been featured invariably as the bad guy in westerns and other biker bonanzas. (Years later I watched Dern in an interview talking about the stars of his generation. He said something to the effect that "When people like Jack Nicholson and myself were starting out, we knew that we wouldn't be the pretty-boy Robert Redford types or the Paul Newman types. But we knew we would make it--because we were interesting.") Dern really works his ass off in The Cycle Savages. His incredible freedom and intense spontaneity saves this movie from the slag heap. The same cannot be said for the contribution of Mr. Curb.
I guess Curb and Kasem wanted to make a film that would have some mass-alarm appeal, the kind of movie made by and for straights who wouldn't know a Honda from a Harley or a GTO from a Gremlin.
Aside from Dern's vivacious performance, three things stand out in this film. First, we get to see part of a naked Melody Patterson, she of "F-Troop" fame, although she is badly cast in this film as a reformed not quite prostitute. She seems so incredibly uncomfortable here that the glory of revealed mystery is unfortunately lost. Second, the editing in this movie is so bad that it could have been sown together by Elvira Mistress of the Dark on a night when she couldn't find the corkscrew. Third, and more to the point, the music really sucks bananas. That music, of course, was courtesy of Mike Curb, without his Congregation, one presumes. You know how in movies from this period somebody is always turning on a radio and what comes out is that tinny-sounding instrumental crap that old folks thought young folks were crazy about, even though any self-respecting hipster of the period would have smashed any radio deigning to blare such garbage? Yeah? Well, that was Curb's entire soundtrack. Yet in a twisted way, that horrible music went right well with the editing, even in the first scene, where the biker gang, known as Hell's Chosen Few, come roaring into some curb side (sorry) eatery and terrorize everyone. Whoever was in charge of tracking this scene just put all kinds of weird grumbling and smushing sounds on a short endless loop, not to torture us but to save money.
And that ain't the half of it. During this opening montage of rowdy biker behavior of the sort that would embarrass the Sons of Anarchy, we spy a sketch artist sitting at a nearby tableau, etching out his impressions of the destruction in process. Now, two things about this really rile up Dern, who plays Keeg, the leader of the gang. One, he's afraid that if these drawings make their way into the hands of the police, well, the whole gig will be up. I never knew that police trusted pencil sketches in the same way they do digital photography, as far as vital evidence is concerned. Apparently I'm stupid. Two, the drawings aren't especially good. That last fact didn't really seem to bother anyone in the movie, but it very much worked its way into my crawl. "He's a freaking hack!" I screamed at the screen. "Tell him! Let him know to go back to school!" But, no. That would make too much sense. Instead Dern decides the artist can't be trusted and plans to destroy the man's hands.
To the extent that there was any intent whatsoever for this movie to do anything other than to turn a fast buck for Curb and Kasem, that intent most certainly was to use a wide brush to smear young folks. In the biker club house, we see psychedelic drawings of John Lennon. We see inverted peace symbols. We see women being brutalized, even though there's a strongly misogynistic implication that those women bring it on themselves. Elsewhere we see a brutalized bartender bemoaning the drug-crazed youth market. In short, most of the things that the straights thought the Sixties were "about" gets lumped into one big sack and tossed off as corrupt.
Okay. That's cool. That's just what Curb set out to do and he accomplished his goal. Never mind that the only thing that kept audiences from laughing through their vomit was the magnificence of Bruce Dern, although even with him there was one bit of oddness that never really got explained. His diction, his erudition, his every spoken word was crisp, clear, and without any of those typical dropped ending "g's" that some associate with everyday speech. Half the time he sounds like John Houseman on acid. Maybe that was on purpose. Maybe Dern had worked too hard to learn how to do movie talk to risk his efforts deteriorating in this slop bucket of a film.
So, yes, Tina, my dear ancient instructor that never was. I have not chopped Curb down in a pithy line or two. I used the better part of an evening to get it across. Where's your whip now?
