Diagonaldi Very well executed

Manthast Absolutely amazing

TrueHello Fun premise, good actors, bad writing. This film seemed to have potential at the beginning but it quickly devolves into a trite action film. Ultimately it's very boring.

Catangro After playing with our expectations, this turns out to be a very different sort of film.

sonya90028 Marianne Faithful plays a bored housewife, who decides to leave her husband, and ride a motorcycle throughout the European countryside. She'd been having a steamy affair with a handsome, virile man, who she considers way more exciting than her milquetoast spouse. So, she takes off with her paramour to find herself, and lead what she hopes is a more fulfilling life.It was unusual for a young woman to take to the road by herself, back in the 60s. So in this way, this film was unique in it's day. It does have an overabundance of psychedelic special effects, throughout the course of the movie. This was customary for many 60s films, but it was overdone here, and had a distracting effect that was irritating.Marianne Faithful looks ravishing in her full-body leather biker gear. She has a good-looking, but rather wan face. I thought a more robust-looking actress, who could project a more fiery temperament than Marianne, would've been more appropriate in the lead role. Marianne just seemed too ethereal, to be a rebellious biker gal.The movie has a snazzy concept. But, it also has a lackluster quality, that ruins the overall premise of the plot. The pace of the film, is far too slow and boring, for a film about a devil-may-care girl biker. If you're a Marianne Faithful fan, you may enjoy this movie, in spite of its lugubrious quality.

polypam I'm a sucker for swinging 60's era flicks, even cheesy ones (because of the great visuals), but I had heard that this film was very so unwatchably BAD that I never made it a priority on my mod movie flicks list. So I am REALLY glad that it popped up on cable just as I was flipping the channels. The story is okay (not great, but not a disaster), the dialog is a little rough at times but not awful, and the tragic ending was a little on the Russ Meyers side. But Marianne Faithful is just STUNNING throughout the movie (any of today's Hollywood starlets WISH they had an ounce of her natural beauty and on-screen presence), Alain Delon is a stone fox, and the dreamy flashbacks provide enough of a plot to make this film, dare I say, enjoyable:) Needless to say, not only was I thrilled I caught it on cable, but I was equally pleased to have stumbled upon it TWICE in one week. Definitely adding the DVD to my retro movie collection.

AZINDN A dated film with solarization, hip music, and the ultimate "it girl" Marianne Faithful as The Girl on a Motorcycle, this is a flashback tale with a 1968 pre-Easy Rider meets Barbarella setup. Rebecca is a French woman who abandons her marital bed in the middle of the night, slips on a skin tight black leather Lanvin jumpsuit, and mounts a huge Harley-like hog to ride to Heidelberg and meet her lover, a professorial Alain Delon, who will ravage her with long stemmed roses and mild S/M sex. While she travels, she fantasizes about sex, memory, and dull Raymond, a teacher and cuckold husband versus Delon.Filmed in 1968 when the notorious relationship of Faithful and Mick Jagger was the media topic, Girl on a Motorcycle brings back the notion of good women as sexually subservient to their men, and marriage as the only recourse of respectable young girls. Delon was a perfect debaucher by stealing the virginal Rebecca from her father's bookstore for a bike ride to "get the color in her cheeks." Her dull fiancé/husband remains ignorant to his wife's wilder adventures and her desire and enthusiastic willingness to have a pre-marital fling before the pending marriage. With border guards hands on harassing of Rebecca, this film is a slice of why the women's movement was so timely in the 70s as the notion of a lone woman riding the roads through France and Germany must have been as shocking as free-love, drugs, and the Rolling Stones to conventional society. But because she transgresses the limits of propriety, Rebecca must pay with the ultimate sacrifice in a traditional morality story of lust, leather, and booty on a bike.

arotolante I feel I must comment on what aimless-46 said in his (or her) review:"The ending is a bit of a puzzle; after the accident they pull up from the scene to a wide aerial shot and you expect the movie to go out on this shot (copied for "Easy Rider's" ending), which would have been very effective. Instead they cut to a travelogue-like scene of a European village and go to credits after about 60 seconds of this stuff. It serves no purpose other than to deflate any lasting impact."Actually the ending is quite clear and extremely effective!Earlier in the film, Rebecca daydreams about seeing her lover at 8am. As the clock chimes 8 in Heidelberg, we see Rebecca on her motorcycle traveling the road, parking her bike, running up the garden path to the gazebo and falling into Daniel's arms. She is then pulled out of her daydream (I believe by the tank full of soldiers driving past her on the road) and continues with her "real" travel to her lover.At the end of the film, this scene is played out again. Once the camera pulls away from Rebecca's crash, we hear the clock begin to chime 8 in Heidelberg. The camera focuses in on the clock, then revisits the same locations that Rebecca had imagined in her daydream, only she is not there. There is a sadness as we see the deserted road where she imagined she would travel, the place where she would have parked her bike, the empty garden path and the gazebo. We see the void she has left behind due to the carelessness leading to her horrible (yet spectacular) crash. And the viewer can't help but be reminded of how she told Daniel the last time they met that she would never come to him again. One wonders how he will take the news of her death, or if he will find out about it at all. Basically it's a meditation on loss and it's really quite moving.By the way, it's impossible to see this film and not get the metaphor of a teenage girl's dark sexual awakenings as embodied in the wedding gift of a motorcycle from her lover.A groovy soundtrack, leather, whips, motorcycle races, Alpine skiing, free love, fondue, Marianne Faithful getting lashed by a dozen thorny red roses - what a film! Thank you, Mr. Cardiff!