I suspect that The Sweet Ride didn’t attract my attention back when I was researching Hoodlum Movies because it is not one thing or another even though it does have scenes with outlaw bikers. Malibu’s m’cyclists take second place to the surfing sequences, which in turn are somewhat overwhelmed by the tennis set and the sexual manoeuvrings of club members. In the end it is only the pulchritudinous attraction of Jacqueline Bisset . . . and the blast of Moby Grape playing house band at the psycho-delightful discotheque that remains in the memory.

Having bought the rights to William Murray’s 1967 paperback original, The Sweet Ride, 20th-Century Fox produced a hybrid drama that studio head, Darryl F. Zanuck, described as ‘tailored especially for youth. About the dropouts who live on the fringes of society, it may serve as an inspiration for those seeking to drop back in’ – sensationalism sold as a cautionary tale. Advertising copy for the film put a little more spice into the mix:

This is a wild trip into the world of the Now Generation. . . from the neon haunts of Vegas, the velvet traps of Hollywood to the Malibu beach parties.
Here are the people trying to make the Sweet Ride, that one moment when you know you're on top and you're the best there is at sex, surfing, or cycling. Add half a dozen beautiful girls to the scene and you get explosive right-now action-packed drama.
The exciting young cast of ‘THE SWEET RIDE’ includes Michael Sarrazin, sensational star of "The Flim-Flam Man," and Bob Denver, a TV favorite from ‘GILLIGAN'S ISLAND’. Gorgeous Jacqueline Bisset, who emerges topless from the California surf only to plunge her co-stars into mystery, violence and romance, joins Michele Carey, Lara Lindsay, Stacy King, and Corina Tsopei - The ‘Psychedelights’ - to give ‘THE SWEET RIDE’ all the sex appeal it can hold!

While in production, The Sweet Ride was described by the trade press as a ‘modern beach-scene drama’ and as a story about the ‘beach life of today’s go-go youth’. Its premise was an update on the out-of-date beach party film – the sweet ride to the darker side of that milieu. Sex, drugs and psychedelic music used to despoil the image of innocence portrayed in the Annette Funicello and Frankie Avalon bikini beach blanket surf romps.

In 1965, William Murray had reported back to suburbia on the horrors of the Hells Angels for the Saturday Evening Post and had now worked these folk devils into his novel that exposed the bohemian lifestyles of a tennis pro, a jazz pianist and a surfer who live together in a Malibu seafront house. Their everyday world is turned upside down when Vickie ( Jacqueline Bisset) appears topless from the surf breaking on the beach beneath their pad.

The novel and film open with a young woman being thrown out of a car and left for dead at the side of the road. While the film is coy about what has happened, the novel is more explicit in detailing the sexual assault she had to endure. The story proceeds from this attention grabbing opening via a set of flashbacks featuring those who have had a role in the events that led up to the opening.

The victim, Vickie, is a movie starlet living a double-life; in love with a young surfer, Denny (Michael Sarrazin), but also hopelessly caught up in the sexual games played her producer. Hollywood glitz and glamour is set alongside the contumacy of Denny and his two housemates who avoid all forms of responsibility. Not one of them is invested in earning a living, Choo Choo Burns (Bob Denver) is a jobbing jazz man who hates rock ’n’ roll, Collie Ransom (Anthony Franciosa) is a tennis bum speeding into middle-age. Ciphers for the bohemian lifestyle of non-conformists. The contemporary sign of the times is the effort they and their peers put into avoiding the draft at all costs; the war in Vietnam is not their concern, and the police, like Vickie’s censorious parents and Denny’s drunken mother, are not to be trusted or held in any form of esteem.

Anthony Franciosa and Bob Denver create a frame for a Moby Grape poster

Their social world includes tennis clubs and dive bars, Beverly Hills mansions and beach-side crash pads, Las Vegas gambling rooms and Sunset Strip discotheques where Moby Grape perform in a swirl of a psychedelic light show with silent Keystone cop movies projected on the walls. In this detonating pop-art inevitable the young dance to the heavy beat sound of Skip Spence and his band mates and have their senses fried in that goofy cartoonish way that Hollywood of the time represented lysergic emanations.

Variety’s reviewer was unimpressed: ‘Flat, but briefly exploitable programmer about young people. Needs strong support on grind duals . . . The Sweet Ride could sum up as Hell’s Angels’ Bikini Beach Party in Valley of the Dolls near Peyton Place.’ The film was all of those things and none of them, its hoodlum bikers, led by two familiar faces from previous roles in the outlaw cycle, Charles Dierkop and Lou Procopio, act and dress as if they were an Ed Roth caricature bought to life. Their club is called ‘Freaks’ (‘69’ in the novel) and its members are laden-down with swastikas, Iron Crosses and German helmets and exude not much more menace than Eric Von Zipper (Harvey Lembeck) the biker figure in Beach Blanket Bingo.

Similarly the surf scenes are less than spectacular and not enlivened one bit by the appearance of a surf Nazi, Rick the Stuka, who tries to give our hero a hard time. The Stuka is an obvious caricature of Mickie ‘da Cat’ Dora – the hippest of the hip among the real surfing fraternity – but Stuka’s role didn’t add up to much beyond reinforcing the idea that youth subcultures wantonly adopted Third Reich symbolism to make themselves as obnoxious as possible.

The Sweet Ride is a Beat Generation hold-over movie with an acute case of ennui and an inept studio’s attempt to reach the audience attracted by product from independents like AIP and to those whom figureheads like Ed Roth peddled his goods, putting into play those elements of delinquent outlaw culture it understood as appealing to contemporary audiences. All of this it wrapped around the age-old melodramatic trope of the corruption of the young woman cast adrift in the big city. In its grab-bag approach to popular culture The Sweet Ride can only gesture in an enervated manner to the hip and the cool it so desperately, so very obviously, wanted to emulate. But yeah, Jacqueline Bisset, who steals the show, Moby Grape and a cameo from Lee Hazelwood, his title song sung by Dusty Springfield, might, on a good day, be enough to play out some spare time

***

Dusty’s re-recording of the title song was released as a single on Philips, it is marvellous. It was also the lead track on the soundtrack album helmed by Pete Rugolo. The Moby Grape’s contribution escaped inclusion but eventually, in edited form, was released on Vintage: The Very Best of Moby Grape (Columbia, 1993) and Sundazed’s enhanced release of their debut album (2007).

The only digital version currently available (or at least easy to attain) is a 20th Century Fox Cinema Archives release (2013), picture quality is okay but Panavision image is panned and scanned. The film and the Grape sequence are easily found on Youtube.