(American International Pictures, 1968)

We first met Adam Roarke in a one-sided communion with the big screen, back when the lanky Brooklyner was one of the brighter lights of the biker flicks. Roarke was easily the most persuasive rebellious leading man in the motorcycle movies,  a genre that required an attitude of defiance. Dennis Hopper had the attitude down in spades, Peter Fonda struck all the right poses and Jack Nicholson brought a consummate dramatic skill to any old role at all --- but Roarke seemed the most genuine...

We met Roarke in person more than a decade later, when he was playing a rare non-biker role opposite Steve Railsback in the sardonic Hollywood-vs.-Hollywood picture The Stunt Man (1980), directed by former bike-film specialist Richard Rush. A couple of years later, Roarke quit Hollywood for Texas, where at the Dallas Communications Complex he set up shop with one of the more practical and well-respected acting schools in the Southwest. What qualified Roarke to impart acting skills to newer talents was hardly his own academic background -- in fact, he had studied acting only briefly before he was drawn into the biker movies and various guest-shots on network television -- but rather his naturalistic gift for bringing that quality of authenticity to the screen.

A former real-life street-gang leader who went out looking for a better way, Roarke appears in Hell's Belles as Tampa, the villain of the piece, who makes off with not only a valuable motorbike but also the entire show. Veteran youth-movie producer-director Maury Dexter, working from a savvy screenplay by James Gordon White and R.G. McMullen, favors good guy Jeremy Slate and antagonist Roarke about equally. The belles of the title, played by Jocelyn Lane and Angelique Pettyjohn, serve chiefly to react to the mayhem that arises from the contested ownership of the prized vehicle.

A reluctant biker named Dan (Slate) wins a $2,000 cycle fair and square,

only to find it swiped by a lug named Tony (Michael Walker), who in turn loses the two-wheeler to Tampa. Tampa, when confronted by Dan, agrees only to pawn off a rejected motorcycle mama, Cathy (Lane) on Dan, calling the swap square. Dan, though smitten with Cathy, still wants his cycle back, and he goes to inordinate lengths to reclaim it.             There’s more than a possessive mania at work here: Dan intends to sell the bike and invest the proceeds in a patch of land, so that he can settle down and quit the highways for good.

In their excellent book The J.D. Films (McFarland, 1982), authors Mark Thomas McGee and R.J. Robertson advance the notion that screenwriters White and McMullen lifted their Hell’s Belles premise from the classic James Stewart Western, Winchester 73 (1950), in which a character steals a high-dollar rifle and the hero goes looking for both the thieved item and the thief. If that’s so, then the Western connection continues with Slate’s hero portrayal here, which takes a cue from the John Wayne-Ken Maynard-Bob Steele school of Saturday-matinee Westerns of a prior generation as he  rides alone in pursuit of Roarke's underhanded Tampa. Tampa just naturally has willing accomplices out the wazzoo, but they’re meaner than they are smart. Slate’s Dan is accompanied, of course, by Lane's Cathy, who serves as little more than a leather-miniskirt model.

The set-pieces, generously deployed, in which Dan takes out Tampa's cronies

include plenty of bare-knuckle fistfights, falling boulders, trip-wires and an ingeniously staged pit-trap filled with rattlesnakes. Having eliminated all resistance but Tampa himself, Dan squares off against the crook on a desolate stretch of road, each man astride a motorcycle and lashing a chain through the dusty air. The battle is a foregone conclusion, but its outcome piles surprise upon surprise and leads to a satisfying double-twist ending.

Both men bring restraint to the arena, allowing their deeds to do most of

the talking. Avoiding the trendy quasi-hipster dialogue that makes many such pictures unintentionally laughable, the script calls instead for curt understatement and realistic oaths, curses and insults that come with the territory of the born outlaw. These outbursts of name-calling helped to earn Hell's Belles an M (for mature audiences) rating in its day, but they seem almost mild by comparison with the gutter-mouth lingo that would fester under the slightly later permissiveness of the R-rated cinema.

Far more than just a saving grace, Ken Peach's PathéColor camerawork complements ideally the dryness of the story with a dreary view of the Arizona desert settings. Jocelyn Lane and Angelique Pettyjohn are, like the desert region, more on hand for scenic value; Lane -- a British import who also starred in such diverse pictures as The Sword of Ali Baba (1965) and A Bullet for Pretty Boy (1970) -- mopes, exults and cringes appropriately, however, and Pettyjohn seems a spirited sort. A Variety critic cited “promise” in Pettyjohn's desultory performance as Tampa’s squeeze. She’d already made what would become a memorable guest-starring appearance in a Star Trek  TV episode  and appeared in an Elvis movie (1967’s Clambake); the same year as Hell’s Belles, she’d star in the Phillipine Islands-lensed drive-in favorite Mad Doctor of Blood Island.  And while the Star Trek  appearance got her lots of bookings at Trek conventions in subsequent years, she ended up starring in a few X-rated movies and then going back to Las Vegas, where she’d begun her entertainment career as a showgirl and where, in 1992, she died of cancer.


Most of Hell's Belles was shot around the ghost town of Helvetia, a former copper-mining center that had once been the third-largest community in Arizona Territory.

Whether moments or years after a  showing of Hell’s Belles, though, it’s Adam Roarke's performance that stays with the viewer.  One prominent alumnus of Roarke's Film Actors Lab, Lou Diamond Phillips, told us not long ago, “Adam, more than anything else, taught me and the lot of us how important it is to enjoy a career in film, if that's what you're set on having. He taught us how to survive in a business that can nurture or destroy at a whim; how to conduct yourself on the set and in the front office; and how to embrace the life and have fun with it, above all. When I get impatient with the system, when something goes haywire in my career like it will for anybody, then I just think about Adam, who was grateful just to have the chance to act.”

Roarke made plain to us the delight he took in acting. Born in 1936, he

“rumbled with the gangs as a hoodlum kid, made my way as a dockworker, served my hitch in the Army -- and then somewhere along the way got it into my head that I could crack the movies,” as he put it. “So I did, and I still think it's delightfully ironic that my respectable acting career so often found me re-enacting the hoodlum days. So I guess you could say the street was my acting school.”

By 1987, Roarke had added directing to his résumé. He started out with a vengeance drama called Trespasses -- featuring prize student Phillips, who had broken through during the mid-1980s on Roarke's recommendation that Phillips be considered for La Bamba. Roarke kept the screen-acting school going apace, making only the occasional movie on into the 1990s. He died of a heart attack in 1996.

FROM THE PRESSBOOK: ACTOR JEREMY SLATE YEARNS FOR VOCATION DEPICTED IN FILM

Jeremy Slate has decided he wants to be in real life what he has been playing in many of his film roles: a western ranch owner, raising cattle, carrots or cucumbers.

In American International’s “Hell’s Belles,” film drama opening  on ................... at the ................. Theatre, he appears as a young western rancher who finds himself involved in a running, fast-moving fight with a gang of motorbike marauders. He is co-starred with Adam Roarke and Jocelyn Lane. The film is produced and directed by Maury Dexter.

As a young man who wants to own a western ranch, Jeremy has to fend off a group known as Tampa’s Riders, headed by Adam Roarke.

In real life Slate has long thought of owning his own `spread,’ and has been saving his money toward that end.

Actor Slate has appeared in a dozen `Westerns,’ the cowpoke range-riding kind, and he has gotten so used to the saddle, that he likes it. Ranching is not easy, Slate believes, but it’s a good living and it’s a good investment and it is a healthy way in which to live. Having worked in Wyoming, New Mexico, Arizona and California in many of his films, Jeremy claims he has his eye on several good pieces of ranching property, and when the time comes his is going to buy himself that little old home in the West -- ranch house and all.            







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