Angels Hard as They Come

Jonathan Demme's first produced screenplay, for Roger Corman, and essentially Rashomon on motorcycles. A biker gang and a group of hippies clash at a ghost town, a girl ends up dead, and the film replays the events from conflicting perspectives, which is more ambition than the cycle usually showed.

Demme and Joe Viola bring a countercultural intelligence to the formula, and you can see a real filmmaker learning the trade inside the exploitation machine. It is smarter than the average biker picture, if still very much one.

An early credit for a future great, and a cut above its stablemates.