Hell's Angels '69

Chuck and Wes make a bet with the Angels that they can go directly to Caesar's Palace, in spite of their shabby biker appearances, to both gamble and rent a hotel room.

They then make a phone call to the farm where the Angels are camping, feigning harassment in the hotel for being bikers, asking for the club to come into town to back them up.

The trio exchange their choppers for smaller scrambler motorcycles and plan to cross the open desert to make their way back toward Los Angeles.

The Angels plan to track down Chuck and Wes, locating the motorcycle shop where they also obtain scramblers and pursue the brothers and Betsy out into the desert.

By now their physical resemblance to lovable teddy bears may well have affected the Angels' self image, but not, I hope, to the extent that they continue to submit to such degrading elevation in American folk-demonology.

Two California playboy types (Tom Stern and Jeremy Slate, who also wrote the film in which they star) join the Angels and con them into riding to Las Vegas, where they use them as public diversion to cover a robbery from Caesars Palace.

Before the Angels have brutally righted the wrong, the Nevada desert has been covered with a quantity of lost loot perhaps unequaled since the windblown paper money finale of Allan Dwan's The River's Edge (1957).

Only Miss Van Dyke emerges, her acting ability still in question (a plus in the context of Hell's Angels '69), but her physical presence superb.

Plump, pretty, with a kind of facial nobility that depends more on soul than on bone structure, she catches the image of the American lost girl with an indirection that deserves a better movie than this.