Cinema: A Boy, His Bike and His Broad

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Angel is a motorcycle bum who has ratted on his gang, the Devil's Advocates, by selling their sordid story to Like magazine for ten grand. The Advocates are angry, of course, so they leap aboard their Harley-Davidsons and go roaring off in search of Angel and Laurie, his little bombshell of a broad, who have hidden out in an abandoned house and taken up housekeeping. Soon, the "straight scene" starts to get to them. Angel shaves off his mustache and even gets a job. Laurie cooks his meals and occasionally cleans the place up. It's all too domestic to be true or, for that matter, to last beyond the inevitable moment when the Advocates stumble onto their hideout.

By all conventional standards, such exhaust-pipe theatrics should have been made into an equally predictable film. The result, called Run, Angel, Run, is, however, something more than fodder for the teeny-bopper drive-in trade. For all that is patently naive and even painful to watch, there are occasional scenes, such as a dinner-table argument and a tense ride with some hobos on a fast freight, that have a kind of tough virtue.

Director Jack Starrett and Cinematographer John Stephens pad out their film with lots of repetitive footage of the Advocates barreling up the California coast, but they also pull off a split-screen chase scene that puts The Thomas Crown Affair to shame. As Angel and Laurie, William Smith and Valerie Starrett (the director's wife) make up in enthusiasm what they lack in finesse. Angel is obviously and deeply indebted to Bonnie and Clyde, and even more to Nicholas Ray's 1949 They Live by Night, but anyone who expects a work as accomplished as those will be bitterly disappointed. Angel is one of those curious films that surprise and gratify simply because they manage somehow to be better than they should have been.