Biker War Movie Review

This week I had occasion to watch two movies that turn, in important ways, on bikers' relationship with the military. The first was 1971's The Hard Ride, a Vietnam-era story about a Marine who comes home with his best friend's body to try to arrange a funeral with his biker friends. The second was 1984's Tank!, where the military aspects are central, but bikers play a pivotal role in the final outcome.

Together with other movies of the era, these sketch an outline of a transformation in American culture. Spoilers below the break line.

The Hard Ride fits neatly into its era, which include a number of surprisingly hopeless films. In films like Vanishing Point and Thunderbolt and Lightfoot, these are stories about men with military backgrounds and war-hardened virtues who are destroyed by the society that can no longer accept them. The Hard Ride lacks the anti-authority themes of the other films for the most part. The only policeman in the movie is "a pretty nice guy" who just wants to talk about the cool bikes because he's building a custom chopper of his own. The priest in the movie is a genuinely kind and upstanding man (who also takes a chopper out for a spin once in a while). He runs an orphanage that at no point is painted as anything other than a wonderful place that kids genuinely love and appreciate.

Nevertheless it is clear that the virtuous man returned from war is alienated from American society. His best friend was black, we learn, and their friendship born in fire and shared hardship is not accepted as valid by anyone from the peaceful world. No one can believe that this Marine is really willing to work so hard, and make so many sacrifices, out of friendship for a black man. Almost no one is willing to confess to having had any serious friendship for that man themselves, not even the white woman who had loved him (and is deeply defensive about the shame she feels for that fact). The bikers' outlaw culture was the only place where the lovers had found any acceptance, but even there it was grudging and partial. In the end, it is the peaceful world that proves unworthy. The ending of the film will not be surprising to anyone who has seen the other early '70s outlaw films.

Tank!, too, is a product of its era. 1984 was the tail end of the Outlaw Country era of movies that began in those early '70s films, including Easy Rider, Convoy, and Burt Reynolds' Gator films. The Burt Reynolds films show the arc of the evolutionary trajectory: the Gator films were morally bleak and showed an American society and law that was corrupt and twisted. In 1977, the very same crew -- Reynolds, Jerry Reed, and the lot -- made Smokey and the Bandit and changed the game. Now the law was corrupt, but American society was basically good -- and united with the outlaws in defying a set of laws that was sometimes corrupt, but not always so. That basic model was adopted by the "Dukes of Hazzard," which straddled the 1979-1981 period. By 1984, it was a model that was well-established.

The bad guys in Tank! are corrupt Southern law enforcement officers, just as in Bandit and the "Dukes." But no one else in society is corrupt. In fact, they are all rooting for the virtuous military guy who is drawn into conflict with the vicious corrupt sheriff. In the end, a division commanding general and the governor of Tennessee are both on the ground to help defy a sheriff from Georgia, but they can't cross the state line into his county. The ones who make it happen are outlaw bikers, who build a ramp with wood they brazenly steal off a nearby truck -- the best line in the movie happens here -- and carry out a daring rescue under fire.

I'm not sure that Tank! was the very last of these movies, but it was at the end of the genre. It is interesting to me that this genre deeply doubted American society, but never the virtues of the American military. At a time when other genres associated with Vietnam painted military men as monsters, this one consistently saw the virtues that this life produced. At its most hopeless, it saw them as too good for the fallen world that America had become. At its most hopeful, it saw them as paladins to root for and support as you could, because in fighting for them you could help them carry us all to a better world.