Put the word ‘movie’ and the name ‘Harley-Davidson’ together in the same sentence and the odds are heavily in favour of the words ‘Easy Rider’ also ending up in there too. Easy Rider is a hugely important film for very many reasons, and it gave a huge boost to the biker culture. But is it the best Harley movie ever made? Were Harleys absolutely crucial to the plot of the film though? Really?

 

Granted, Fonda and Hopper would have struggled to establish the contemporary counter-culture if they were ambling down to New Orleans in a Greyhound bus; you can only watch the moon rising over an open field for so long. But what if they had been in a Dodge Challenger or a ’55 Chevy street racer (as in Vanishing Point and Two Lane Blacktop, respectively)? Would they have had the same adventures – good, bad and tragic – along the way? It’s possible, you know; it really is. It’s a strange contention to make, but Easy Rider could have been just as effective and successful if there wasn’t a Harley to be seen in a single frame.

 

You can’t say that of The Loveless though. You could no more have made The Loveless without bikes than you could make omelettes without eggs or beer without hops. And whereas Easy Rider is a ‘buddy’ movie, The Loveless is a gang movie. A gang in the loosest sense, as in a group of similar-minded people with a common aim and intent, but a gang none the less. It’s an ‘us against the world’ film just as much as in Easy Rider, but the greasers in The Loveless have no interest in changing society, much as they might despise it (and oh boy, they do!). Billy and Wyatt want to turn the whole world on. Vance and Davis don’t give a flying kick start return spring for changing society, for better or worse. And isn’t it Scientologists and Hare Krishna devotees who proselytise – handing out improving leaflets and looking for converts on door-steps - rather than Harley riders? Yes, it is.

 

Above all, Easy Rider is a film about failing to survive, against the odds. The Loveless is quite the opposite. You don’t really expect any one of the Harley riders to make it through to the end credits, but they do. They get to ride away.

 

No, much as I love it, much as it has had a huge impact on my life, Easy Rider is a great biker movie, but not the ultimate Harley movie. Talking of biker movies, we have to go back a few years, of course, and think about The Wild One.

 

It wasn’t the first biker movie but it was the first which was truly influential, and which showed the world the emerging outlaw biker culture – however credible it does or does not look in the film.

 

The real hero of The Wild One wasn’t, of course, the buttoned-up and basically decent character played by Marlon Brando. You get the feeling that he was going through a bit of a bad patch – as if he’d been fired from his job and then his dog had died – and in a few months he snap out of it, buy a shirt with a button-down collar and get a job to go with it, put a down payment on a little place in the suburbs and start going to church on Sundays.

 

Lee Marvin’s character, Chino, is a completely different kettle of hoodlum. He’s a real outsider – bordering on being a sociopath – and you’d only see him in a button-down shirt if a mortician with a bizarre sense of humour put one on his corpse. Chino is a volcano waiting to explode; utterly unpredictable and terminally volatile. He represented both the emerging Beat culture and the biker lifestyle though, that was growing up in the States in the Fifties. He’s a Rabelaisian freewheeler; a genuine, no holds barred bohemian.

 

He’s the one that’s roaring drunk, not Johnny. He’s the one that fights dirty, not Johnny. Not for him smart black leather. Black leather is worn to protect the skin and flesh in an accident; Chino isn’t interested in that – he’d be so drunk that he’d just bounce when he fell off.

 

But of course it’s Chino who rides a Harley in the film, not Johnny. Johnny rides a then-new and completely stock Triumph. It would have been a very sensible choice in 1953; fast, reliable and manoeuvrable – but hardly an outlaw bike. An advertising executive who ran a Buick during the week might have a Triumph for running around on at the weekends. Chico, on the other hand, rides a quintessential early custom bike – a cut-down, probably ex-military Harley with no front mudguard and, in fact, nothing on it at all that wasn’t essential to its basic purpose of going and stopping.

 

There’s a lot of Chico to be seen in Vance, Davis, La Ville, Hurley and Ricky – the bike gang of The Loveless. Well, when I say ‘bike gang’ that’s not quite right. They’re a motley group of guys – hardly a bike gang and certainly without a club name or identity – who just happen to have a few things in common. They’re simply into bikes – and the bikes are Harleys – and everything that goes with them at that far-off-on-the-horizon end of the spectrum.

 

That’s one thing, but they’re also complete social misfits too. Like Chico these guys wouldn’t know how to compromise if their life depended on it, and in fact one day it might well do. What matters is the moment; the speed, the beer and the good times – though throughout the movie they are very pointedly not having much of a good time at all. They’re utter nihilists; the telling shot is the blade going into the upholstery of the truck stop booth – no reason to do that, but then, no reason not to either. Similarly, when the waitress struts through her striptease at the roadhouse she’s met with soul-destroying disdain. All the characters in the film are utterly, thoroughly and completely unpleasant – to say the least. They have no redeeming factors, and apart from the young waitress, widowed five years ago and dreaming of getting away (something you know she will never do ) – there’s not an ounce of humanity between them.

 

The five Harley riders – finger-clickin’ members of the leather-clad far end of the Beat generation; all Howl and no poetry - loathe, distrust and despise each other, and have none of the sense of loyalty which holds a group together. They need each other and are reassured by the presence of the others, but they certainly don’t like each other. There’s also a girl in tow; Sportster Debbie, all bottle-blonde hair, tight slacks and high heels. Sexy as you like if you don’t mind unfortunate diseases. She’s Davis’s girlfriend in theory, but anyone’s in reality, and doesn’t particularly mind who knows it. Where d’you find a really naughty girl like that when you need one?

 

In a way it’s a post-punk film. There’s nothing of the idealism you see in Easy Rider (the idealism which, though glorious, in fact comes to nothing). There are no common bonds other than rootlessness and nihilism. The five bikers are treading water before their next jail term, or until their Harleys simply run out of road for the last time. For now they’re a triumph of oily hair preparations, and not a crash helmet in sight – would have messed up the hair cut more than the wind did.