MOTORCYCLE GANG (American International Pictures, 1957)
Here we have the Goofus and Gallant of cyclist movies. A 78-minute pageant of action-filled mayhem cradles about half an hour's worth of moralizing in Edward L. Cahn's Motorcycle Gang, a fogbound and rickety bridge leading from The Wild One to somewhere near The Wild Angels...

Biker Group: Unnamed
Leader: Nick (John Ashley)

Timing is everything in pop-culture trend-mongering as well as in motorcycle maintenance. If not for its arrival so few years after The Wild One, Cahn's near-generic entry would be about as pertinent today as the 1941 B-movie Motorcycle Squad, a police thriller that does, at least, establish a significant caste barrier between the prowl-car elite and the maverick ranks of `cycle patrolmen. Motorcycle Squad, in fact, found an afterlife in the wake of The Wild One. The picture, starring square-jawed Kane Richmond as a disgraced-but-determined cop, was first shown as Double Cross .Then, several years later, it was resurrected for mid-1950s television and rechristened Motorcycle Squad, probably in a bid to glom onto the gathering popular interest in bikes and bikers that followed The Wild One’s success.

Despite its standing as a new-for-1957 production designed for the 30-foot-tall drive-in picture-show screen, Motorcycle Gang carries that same taint of reheated leftovers. John Ashley and Steve Terrell carry the yarn as pals-turned-rivals, goaded on by top-billed Anne Neyland, as a two-wheel temptress, to engage in an illicit race that might endanger Terrell's standing as a competitive cyclist. Nick (Ashley) is fresh out of jail, having served his time on a hit-and-run rap for which his buddy, Randy (Terrell), only got probation. Randy has made good with the law-and-order boys, using his riding skills to present a shining example of safe motorcycling and receiving in turn the blessings of the police department to compete in wholesome racing events. Nick wants nothing more than to undermine Randy's standing and show him up as a cyclist, all in the same illegal race.


Babes, blades and a bike - what more does Nick (John Ashley) need?

Randy could resist the pressure, and stay legit, but Terry (Neyland) plays either end against the middle and hastens the showdown in hopes of seeing a really wild race and maybe even a fatality or two. Neyland -- called “a new Lana Turner” in publicity material for Motorcycle Gang -- is a welcome sparkplug here, a rare strong-woman presence in a field usually occupied by wide-eyed innocents and mere token tough-gal types.

Eventually, Nick and his cronies take time out from the forced contest to pull a hooligan raid on a small town along the course. Screenwriter Lou Rusoff's borrowings from The Wild One are most apparent here, although Ashley's Nick hasn't the festering vengeful motivations of his counterpart, Lee Marvin's Chino, in the earlier film and Terrell's Randy is altogether too good a good guy to make his defiance of Nick resonate any deeper than an act of Boy Scout valor. Randy, of course, stands up to Nick, halting the rampage through the village, and the bad guys find themselves in the hoosegow while the redeemed hero lands in a hospital bed. Terry and Randy “wind up happily with their whole futures in front of them,” as the Variety review snarked, “probably on a two-seater Harley-Davidson.”

In a so-what? denouement that plays out like pure anticlimax, Randy finds his status upheld as a police-sanctioned racing cyclist. It’s the old bait-and-switch often used in exploitation films of a certain time period: The picture uses rebellion and violent action as a come-on, then sneaks in a moralizing message -- in this case, one having to do with the perks of responsible citizenship.

Director Cahn, a prolific old-timer, stages the cycle action convincingly but leaves the actors pretty much on their own to keep the emotional tensions crackling. Terrell and Ashley, both AIP teenpic stars at the time, prove better than the material.

Ed Cahn had been Universal Pictures' top film editor during the 1920s and early '30s, then weighed in as a director of higher promise than his generally budget-bound assignments allowed him to fulfill. At age 56 in 1955, Cahn began catering exclusively to the cheap-thrills youth market, alternating from that point between outlandish horrors (the likes of Creature with the Atom Brain and Invasion of the Saucer Men) and kids-in-upheaval kicks (Shake, Rattle and Rock and Dragstrip Girl). Motorcycle Gang shows greater care in the production values than in story or character development. Cahn bowed out with a polished if stodgy, low-budget remake of Beauty and the Beast in 1963, the year of his death.


1957's Motorcycle Gang was half of a double-feature package that included the campus-set potboiler Sorority Girl

The hand of producer Alex Gordon is also evident in Motorcycle Gang, whose casting shows his penchant for giving old-timers some new work. Seen in the cast are former B-western sidekick Raymond Hatton, playing a a comical uncle, and screen veteran Edmund Cobb in another supporting role. Another cast member worth noting is Paul Blaisdell, who became much more well known to AIP fans as the behind-the-scenes creator of the some of the company’s most famous monsters, including the She-Creature (from the 1956 film of the same name) and the unforgettable killer Venusian in It Conquered the World (also from1956).

Motorcycle Gang also packs a morbid fascination in the presence of the lapsed child star Carl "Alfalfa" Switzer, playing a prominent backup character known as Speed. Switzer's freckled mug was all over the map in those days, what with the constant rerunning of his Our Gang comedies on after-school television, plus his young-adult Gas House Kids features (one of them directed by Cahn) on Saturdays. It was one jarring experience for the youngsters of 1957 to see that same face, looking weary and doomed at 31, turn up on the big screen in Motorcycle Gang.

Switzer had one more movie appearance yet ahead of him, in 1958's The Defiant Ones, before his death in a drunken altercation -- reportedly over $50 owed him for his between-pictures work as a hunting guide -- in 1959. That sobering fact left even greater numbers of Our Gang devotees feeling bereaved, bewildered and alienated.

As was AIP’s strategy at the time, Motorcycle Gang went out with another picture as part of a double-feature package. The second film was Sorority Girl, a lurid melodrama produced and directed by Roger Corman. Newspaper ads for the movie featured art of a wicked-looking Susan Cabot wielding a paddle, while AIP’s pressbook suggested that exhibitors helped sell the double bill by offering a “sorority night” at their theaters, “where each pledge class would perform a small skit on your stage” in competition for “some sort of a prize such as a plaque or something in that order.” No advice was given as to whether extra credit should be given for the best use of paddles, nor how audiences who came for the biker half of the bill might receive a program of live sorority-gal skits.

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