(American International Pictures, 1967)
Film fans and historians tend to see biker movies as not much more than an impersonal mass of machinery and muscle, fueled with twangy power-chord rock `n` roll and garnished with cheesecake glamour. But even such a monolithic genre has its outcroppings of individualistic style and attitude, and they usually occur where least expected --- like the third entry in American International Pictures’ array of cyclists-vs.-the-System pictures. That’s Born Losers, whose acquisition served to free famed cheap-film mogul Roger Corman’s stable of artists for other pursuits by allowing star player Tom Laughlin the additional responsibilities of producing, directing, and writing...

While Corman, who had blazed this significant biker-pic trail in 1966 with The Wild Angels, busied himself with the psychedelic diversions of The Trip and a gangland piece called The St. Valentine's Day Massacre (both released in 1967, the same year as Born Losers), Laughlin fashioned a thoughtful and provocative study of prejudice, lawlessness and futile heroism from material that AIP itself might have made as merely a recipe-book rampage. Born Losers is the birthplace of Laughlin's trademark persona of Billy Jack, an unlikely but ultimately very popular liberator who would return in a more sharply defined, though diminishing, series of pictures with his name as a part of each title.

Laughlin's small-parts/big-studios career had come and gone during 1956-60. He retrenched immediately by scrounging up enough money to develop his own screenplay for The Proper Time, about a college kid's moral dilemmas, into a sure-enough movie. This low-rent release of 1960 set Laughlin up for 1961's Among the Thorns, a bad-boy-confesses-all original that saw only sporadic showings until 1965 and a strategic rechristening as The Young Sinner. Laughlin believed in his work sufficiently to nurture it along, but he had no inside track with major-league Hollywood.

His turn-key efficiency, however, on The Proper Time and The Young Sinner was all the persuasion American International head Samuel Z. Arkoff required to trust the 29-year-old Minnesotan to deliver a barnstormer with Born Losers. “Tommy, now -- well, the boy hadn't had what you’d call any hits, but that wasn't anybody's fault but the publicity departments of those fly-by-nighters [distributors] he'd hooked up with,” Arkoff told us in 2000 during a late-in-life appearance at Baltimore's FANEX trade show. “He could write 'em, direct 'em, produce 'em -- which amounts to keepin' 'em simple and cheap -- and we had the chops to peddle 'em. We jumped in on [Born Losers] amidships -- Tommy'd already started shooting on it as a free agent --- told him what we required to accept it as an American International project, lent him some administrative talents, behind the scenes, and then left it to Tommy and his wife to figure out how to bring it on in.



“Now, he put in more social-problem business than we would've, ourselves, but that was an object lesson all by itself,” Arkoff continued. “It made the critics sit up and take notice, not just the automatic built-in audience, and we benefited as a consequence.”

True to the late Arkoff's recollection, Born Losers defused the premature critical hostilities that American International had invited with only its second such picture, Devil's Angels. The critics had responded amicably, as a rule, to The Wild Angels in 1966 --- but once a bandwagon showed signs of shoving off, the honeymoon was kaput. Born Losers, its motorcycle interests aside, is more deeply concerned with a point, which is that it often takes an outlaw to vanquish an outlaw; this added thematic dimension helped draw the praise of such publications as Variety , which praised the film's “dramatic and topical” qualities and added that the little movie “carries the mark of authority and has been well made throughout.”

More forthright than even Devil's Angels at establishing the brutality of a cycle gang-at-large, Born Losers also glares accusingly at the forces of law and order, and at respectable citizens -- even the victims -- in their terrified refusal to see justice done. A mob run by Danny Carmody (Jeremy Slate) specializes in invading ill-prepared communities and then claiming the local schoolgirls as rape fodder. Carmody's threats sound even crueler than his deeds, and he so intimidates the townsfolk that no one will step forward with a complaint. An avenger emerges in Laughlin's Billy Jack, a part-Indian loner who launches a campaign of retribution with no one's blessing but his own.

Strikingly photographed by Gregory Sandor in the vivid PathéColor process, Born Losers hits the ground running, nailing its desperate situation with a cruel efficiency; paying all due respect (which is to say, not much) to the town's thwarted district attorney (Paul Bruce) and the swaggering-but-impotent local constabulary; and making much of name-brand star Jane Russell's guest appearance as the mother of a victimized schoolgirl. Billy Jack is introduced almost casually amid the turmoil, the better to present the character throughout as an ordinary guy who, as Popeye the Sailor might put it, has had “all I can stand 'cause I can't stands no more.” Billy Jack's vigilante activities serve their purpose at last, but the law can only backshoot him in a climactic show of reactionary incompetence. Not to give away too much, y'know.

The 114-minute running time, lengthy for those days, zips right by on a tide of cause-and-effect mayhem. The violence packs a wallop even today, but it never oversteps the demands of the story. Laughlin turns in a splendid performance, cannily underplaying to such a point that he recalls Gary Cooper more so than he foreshadows Sylvester Stallone. Laughlin, as director, allows chief villain Jeremy Slate to seethe and lash out but stops him just short of scenery-gnawing. Elizabeth James is likewise very good as a collegian who becomes a captive of Slate's hoodlums. Speaking of whom, William Wellman, Jr. -- son of the famous director and a solid ‘60s and ‘70s B-film star -- and Jeff Cooper (seen the next year in the big-budget generation-gap David Niven comedy The Impossible Years as the impossibly named Bartholomew Smuts) stand out from the reeking herd with a fine grade of rabid menace.

Laughlin wrote Born Losers under the name of E. James Lloyd; directed it as T.C. Frank; and co-produced it as Donald Henderson, sharing that credit with his wife, Delores Taylor. (Such a veil of pseudonyms is S.O.P. along the maverick fringes of the movie industry, allowing a lone-wolf artist to appear well equipped with a network of colleagues while freeing him from the interference that hired-gun talents and collaborators often impose.) Laughlin and Taylor resurrected the Billy Jack character as something nearer a Great American Monomyth archetype with 1971's Billy Jack, a more simplistically conceived tale of a returning warrior's indignant rebellion against a corrupt Establishment.

Laughlin told us during a 1972-73 reissue tour that he had sunk $800,000 into the making of Billy Jack, distributing the film as a barnstorming independent and snagging tens of millions of dollars' worth of paid admissions from, mostly, youthful moviegoers who found their own Vietnam-period disillusionment reflected in the rough-hewn parable.

Where Laughlin had failed in an attempt to develop The Young Sinner into a trilogy called We Are All Christ, he now allowed ambition and overconfidence to call the shots and set to work on The Trial of Billy Jack (1974), perhaps seeing in himself his own Christlike savior-as-martyr franchise. A new tide of box-office success (despite critical backlash) brought about the opening of a production company called Billy Jack Enterprises in 1975 in Los Angeles, but Laughlin's big picture of that year, The Master Gunfighter, flopped as conspicuously as the Billy Jack adventures had sailed. A retrenching with Billy Jack Goes to Washington in 1977 was greeted with loud derision where benign neglect would have sufficed.



FROM THE PRESSBOOK:
Tom Laughlin is an exciting new talent and a new name to motion picture audiences. In American International’s “Born Losers,” a hard-hitting shocker dealing with outlaw motorcycle gangs coming to the .................. Theater on ......................., Laughlin has an outstanding opportunity to prove it.

The actor gives an unforgettable performance as the half-Indian self-appointed protector of people’s rights, who almost single-handed takes on a wild gang of motorcycle outlaws as they launch a program of destruction, murder, rape and the pillaging of a small town.

In “Born Losers” Laughlin stars with Elizabeth James, Jeremy Slate, William Wellman, Jr. and guest star Jane Russell, who makes an important return to exciting film roles in the thrilling drama.

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