Lost in Hollywood

What is the greatest motorcycle movie ever made? It's a difficult one. While bikes and bikers have featured in many films across the years, actually, for a pastime and culture that is popular around the world, there are very few mainstream movies that are about biking itself - and even fewer that are any good! Let's have a quick look at a few of the better ones....

The 50s and 60s were when biking really started to gain in popularity and this was a time when bikes and bikers started to be identified as part of a kind of a rebellious sub-culture.

Films like "The Wild One", starring Marlon Brando, helped set that trend. It all looks a bit dated now but this is a film that helped set the tone of what biking was all about at the time - social outcasts, attitude, lots of black leather, powerful bikes and the communities and rivalries that grew up around it all. 

For that aspect at least, "The Wild One" was an important film.

Steve McQueen's "The Great Escape" is often held up as a classic "bike" film but really it's a war and prison breakout story. It helped cement the image and "coolness" that surrounded bikes and McQueen himself was a popular hero at the time as well as a bike enthusiast and racer and was always good to watch on screen - but as far as I'm concerned, it's not really a "biker" movie in the true sense. 

Its somewhat unfortunate legacy is that it is usually aired as a "filler" in Christmas tv schedules these days!  

Ask most people what they consider to be the no.1 biker film of all time and chances are that "Easy Rider" will figure high on the list. This is a film that has almost entered cinematic folklore as THE Hollywood depiction of biking culture. Certainly, it seemed to capture the time well and in Peter Fonda, Dennis Hopper and a young Jack Nicholson, it had a good cast. The notorious Hell's Angel Sonny Barger acted as consultant for this film and he rides a Sportster in it. Steppenwolf's classic track "Born to be Wild" also helped set the tone. Personally, I think the film is a load of rubbish but no-one can doubt its place in American biking history and culture.

"Easy Rider" was released in 1969 and it spawned a great many sub-standard "copycat" movies - really, what followed was a period of around three decades where biking films only attained B-movie status. And there were some absolute shockers along the way: "Outlaw Riders", "Electra Glide in Blue", "The Wild Riders", "Bronx Warriors" "I Bought a Vampire Motorcycle", "Knightriders" etc etc. All following a depressingly similar format. 

But there was also the odd gem along the way - and it took independent film makers to forge a different path to what had gone before. 

The classic British film "Quadrophenia" (1979) remains one of my favourite films to this day. Simple and effective, with good imagery and a terrific cast, it captured young angst and the Mods v Rockers rivalry of 60s Britain perfectly. 


Then, the 1981 release of "Silver Dream Racer" reflected the British public's burgeoning interest in bike racing at the time of Barry Sheene and others. In it, a young bike enthusiast inherits the prototype for an incredibly fast machine which was designed by his brother. He successfully gets the finance for it, and uses the bike to challenge for the world championship at Silverstone. 

SDR wasn't the greatest film by any stretch of the imagination but as with Quadrophenia, it was something different to what had gone before.

Fast forward to the 2000s and there are three further films worthy of mention in this piece - and guess what, the one made in Hollywood was comfortably the worst of the three! "Wild Hogs" (2007) could have been a really interesting film. It is essentially about a group of middle-aged riders setting off for a journey across America. But instead of the 'voyage of discovery' film it could have been, Hollywood turned into a comedy - worst of all a comedy that pokes fun at the concept of middle-aged bikers. A terrible, terrible film.

"The Motorcycle Diaries" (2004) tells the story of a young Che Guevara and his friendship with Alberto Granado, a fellow medical student. Together, they take a motorcycle trip across the South American continent. 

This is a film that is quite unlike anything else in the biking movie genre - it is a story of discovery, of the people they meet on their journey and of the poverty and hopelessness of the poor and disenfranchised that they encounter along the way. For Guevara, this trip was a political awakening and a turning point in his hitherto sheltered, carefree life. We all know what happened next.... Highly recommended. 

As is traditional, I have saved the best until last. As good as Quadrophenia and The Motorcycle Diaries are, there is one film that towers above them as a true homage to what bikers and biking is all about. "The World's Fastest Indian" (2005) is based on the true story of Burt Munro, a bike racer from New Zealand. Superbly played by Anthony Hopkins, this is a film that portrays the true essence of biking - an ordinary man, obsessed by motorbikes, tinkering around in his garage in an effort to build a bike to go faster that anyone else. It tells the story of Burt who modified a 1920 Indian Scout, paid his passage from New Zealand to America and then raced the bike he had built to set a land speed record at the Bonneville Salt Flats in Utah. 

At the time of the record attempt Munro was 68 years old and was riding a motorbike that was 47 years old! The record he set still stands to this day.

For me, "The World's Fastest Indian" is one of the best films ever made of any genre - it represents the triumph of the human spirit, it lifts your heart and leaves you with a great big smile on your face. It is deservedly number 1 on my list - but what say you?