(American International Pictures,1967)
Noteworthy chiefly as one of the quick-and-cheap indulgences that helped prepare Dennis Hopper for the cheap but slow-burning Easy Rider (1969), director Anthony Lanza's The Glory Stompers also boasts one of the more colorful titles in the biker-flick canon, as well as a colorful cast that includes former movie Tarzan Jock Mahoney and radio’s famed Mr. Top 40 Countdown, Casey Kasem, as a character named, appropriately enough, Mouth. Story-wise, The Glory Stompers carries a ring of the perpetual struggle of the sacred vs. the profane, with a bracing suggestion that the profane might even be winning...

This darkly Biblical sense extends to something resembling a Cain-and-Abel subplot, along with a whiff of Sodom and Gomorrah in the Hopper gang's taste for mingling mayhem with womanizing. What the hipsters of the '60s would have called "a love-in" is described rather archaically in the film's pressbook as "a wild orgy," but then even the hippest of exploitation-picture press releases were usually written by middle-aged businessmen.

Tough luck for all concerned that The Glory Stompers suggests a great deal more than it comes prepared to deliver. It is, to borrow a line from the influential tradepaper Variety, "another motorcycle-gang meller [as in melodrama], far from the best but not the worst." In other words, praise by faint damnation.


Chino (Dennis Hopper) travels with the kidnapped Chris (Chris Noel).

Of course, independent producer Norman T. Herman and his underwriters at American International Pictures didn’t give much of a hang about what the press thought anyway . AIP jumped the gun on a formal release, trotting out The Glory Stompers in some 400 theaters nationwide a full week ahead of the official critics'-screening date in Los Angeles and landing a generous box-office kick-start in the process.

The screenplay, by James Gordon White and affiliated producer John Lawrence, finds Chino (Hopper, appropriating Lee Marvin's character name from The Wild One) in charge of a vicious bunch called the Black Souls. The members include Chino's tolerant-to-a-point squeeze, Jo Ann (Saundra Gale); thuggish henchman Magoo (Robert Tessier); backup troublemakers Monk (Lindsay Crosby) and Mouth (Kasem), who moonlights as a disc jockey; and the somewhat more studious Paul (Jim Reader). The motivating conflict seems to lie within an adversarial gang, headed by Darryl (Jody McCrea), an embittered survivor of a Chino-style beating. But all Chino really wants from Darryl is Darryl's girlfriend, Chris (played by busy -- and beautiful -- ‘60s starlet Chris Noel).

Chris' kidnapping accomplished, Chino now finds himself under siege from Darryl and a lone-rider biker called Smiley (Jock Mahoney). Chino is more keenly interested in forcing his attentions upon Chris, who plays up to the quieter Paul in hopes that he might help her escape. This heartbreaker gambit only makes things tougher for Paul, who finds himself caught in a death struggle with the savage Magoo. Too late, the film reveals Paul to have been Chino's brother, leaving the audience wondering more about the missed opportunities for any trace of emotional depth than about potentially tragic repercussions. But emotional depth is uniformly lacking here, so even the faintest show of intrigue or insight seems profound while the film is in the midst of playing itself out.


Famed deejay Casey Kasem, years before the American Top 40 program made him a household name, played in several biker movies. Here, he's a character known as "Mouth".

Jock Mahoney, the former Western hero and Tarzan series veteran, is good as the heroic-outlaw representative of an earlier biker generation -- so good, in fact, that one can only wonder why he doesn’t just roust these upstarts and take charge of the picture. Hopper is annoyingly right for the top-billed role, irascible and self-serving and ultimately in need of a good stomping his own self. Any finer maturity as an actor would elude Hopper until his resurgence during 1986 with Hoosiers and Blue Velvet. Jody McCrea, member of American International’s Beach Party gang and son of the Old Hollywood action-adventure star Joel McCrea, is all the role calls for as Hopper's rival. Jody had been plugging along as a star-in-waiting since the late 1950s; by 1970 he had abandoned Hollywood to follow in his dad's path as a rancher and career outdoorsman.

A couple of years later, while Easy Rider was raking in the counterculture bucks for Hopper, Glory Stompers director Lanza helmed The Incredible Two-Headed Transplant, a horror picture starring Bruce Dern -- another of that hip young biker-movie bunch -- and featuring Kasem as his pal.

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