1954: The Wild One

The Wild One (1954, Benedek) 3/10

“This is a shocking story, it could never take place in most American towns- but it did in this one. It is a public challenge not to let it happen again.”

Over restrained jazz music and scenes of an open highway, the aforementioned plea appears in hard capitalized block print before the opening credits. The crisp summer silence is then muted by a guilty male voice apologizing for his past, only to be erased by the grunting roar of a fleet of motorcycles. Naturally, producer (and future director) Stanley Kramer’s statement and the entire approach to The Wild One was outlandish, regressive and hysterical. But in an America still lingering from the effects of McCarthyism and living in the placid Eisenhower era, the message was palpable.

Before they inspired the name for a neo-shoegazing band, the Black Rebel Motorcycle Club of Lazlo Benedek’s The Wild One were the kings of cinema’s “outlaw outfits:” as much a threat to the preservation of white picket fence America as rock n’ roll, Reds and flouride. One of several films from the Fifties featuring stories “ripped from the headlines,” The Wild One was based upon an actual event in 1947 in the California hamlet of Hollister on July 4th weekend. Four thousand bikers converged on the town for the purpose of refueling their bikes and drinking beer; eventually destroying and looting the town only to flee a few days later. The Hollister story was published in Harper’s magazine four years later and despite the magazine’s employment of staged photographs (or perhaps because of it) , the story caught the eye of liberal-message film producer Stanley Kramer, who developed it into a cheap, low-budget project starring Marlon Brando.

Already known for his anti-social behaviour and riveting Method performances, The Wild One was the film that elevated Brando from eccentric actor into cult icon. Brando stars as Johnny, the leader of the BRMC (Black Rebel Motorcycle Club):a gang of drunken deliquents, petty thieves and social miscreants, who disrupt the harmonious atmosphere of an unnamed California community. Over the course of a few days, Johnny and his gang drink heavily, pester innocent bystanders, court loose women and pollute the air with hepcat language, loud jazz and sexual aggression. When the BRMC’s rival gang led by the cigar-chomping unshaven Gino (an actually intoxicated Lee Marvin) enters town to settle old scores, the violence is revved up; resulting in a series of tragedies, assaults, suspected rapes and eventually the rise of vigilantism to combat the naive appeasement policies of the local sherriff (Robert Keith).

The danger of the BRMC and the Beetles is found in their collective cohesion: as the respective members continually follow the every whim of their brooding leaders. This produces a factor that intimidates meek law officials and threatens worried residents. Their lewd behaviour, raw jokes and street brawls undermine community spirit and conventional ideas of morality and civility. Yet, for some character’s such as the Sheriff’s daughter (Mary Murphy) this hyper-masculine identity is simply a ruse: a pent-up aggression brought on by the bikers inability to express their true feelings within an appropriate gendered form.

Kramer’s warning at the beginning of the film, coupled with the anonymous quotidan nature of the town, stresses the culpability of this occuring in any American town. In this quaint town untouched by asphalt or television and where everyone knows one another, the desire to proudly welcome strangers into their community is seen as part of the rustic American spirit of goodwill. Yet, the bikers abuse this cordial response; terrorizing the small community with their motorcycle races, their drinking sesions and their pogo sticks.

At the merest pull on the throttle of their bikes, a string of sexually loose women seem to flood the town, one is even a former lover of Johnny absurdly telling him: “I’m singin’ tonight Johnny, I’m really singin’...I want the Christmas tree.” Yet Johnny shrugs nonchalantly. The bikers also attempt to dismiss in laconic fashion interactions between parents and children. When restaurant waitress Kathy (Mary Murphy) excitedly informs Johnny that “My father was gonna take me on a fishing trip to Canada once. We didn’t go;” the biker again disaffectedly shrugs before muttering “Crazy” in a lethargic tone. Thus their behaviour by 1950's standards is anti-social to the core: rejecting the traditional family unit and ideas of proper heterosexuality in favour of immorality and a neo-family unit in the institution of the gang.

The gathering of a variety of stock characters and the dusty appearance of a town untouched by modernity enhances this notion of tradition. There is Jimmy, the aging mentally blunt barkeep who unbeknowst to him is being made the object of a series of jokes by the crass hoodlums; there is the money hungry restaurant owner who desires to keep the BRMC in town for purely monetary reasons, despite objections by prominent citizens; there is the innocent girl next door working at the restaurant, who prior to Johnny’s arrival figured that going to a picnic was an idea of a good time: but is now corrupted by his potent sexuality and raw language; and there is the diplomatic police officer who is framed as an inept peacemaker who continues to promote conversation against the advice of others.

Given the film’s 1954 production, it is interesting to note the similarities in appearance and approach of the police officer and British interwar Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain. Both characters view themselves as great peacemakers and wish to use diplomacy and appeasement to resolve the crises affecting their community. Returning from Munich with a piece of paper guaranteeing a “peace for our time,” Chamberlain assumed he had placated Hitler’s demands in acquiring the Sudetenland from Czechoslovakia. A year later, Britain were at war and Chamberlain’s political career was ruined. In The Wild One, Robert Keith’s Sherriff continually acquiesces with Brando’s Johnny: himself aa despotic leader of his own black attired gang. By ignoring claims such as“You let this go by, anything can happen!” and “I’ve seen hoodlums like this before, if you don’t stop them...” the sheriff becomes a Chamberlain-esque figure; who writes his own downfall by failing to aggressively combat forces dangerous to the safety and security of the community.

Reluctantly accepting the role as a favour to Kramer who gave him his Hollywood debut in Fred Zinneman’s The Men, Brando appears bored throughout the film despite his researching of real life bikers, choosing his own wardrobe and bringing his own Triumph motorcycle. In The Wild One, Brando sits uncomfortably in his performance; offering an ill-postured effort drenched in personal apathy and overstatement. Yet, within his performance one can find a template and the essence for his Oscar garnering role as Terry Malloy in Elia Kazan’s On The Waterfront. Later, the actor recalled his disappointment in the picture stemmed primarily from the picture going “off track:” Attesting the film’s initial intent was to explain “the psychology of the hipster,” Brando astutely observed that rather than showing why youths gather into groups as a form of expression, the film simply “show[ed] the violence” caused by youngsters: making the film's supposed guilty parties alluring and chic.

Financially, the film flopped as hundreds of theatre owners refused to carry the film because of its controversial and violent content. The film was even banned for decades in Finland and Britain from fear of arousing gang secretarianism. However for younger audiences in the Eisenhower era brought up on staid artificial television shows and films, The Wild One was viewed less as a portrayal of a sociological menace and more so as a forebearer of cool. In an era when black music was deemed immoral and dangerous to the moral-social fabric of white America, The Wild One was an aggressive, sexualized threat. Despite the inferior nature of its style and context, The Wild One is arguably one of the most important cultural documents of the 1950s.

In the decades since its initial release The Wild One has shaped popular opinion and stereotypes not only about bikers, but about teenagers in general. Both social groups gather their ranks in packs and create micro-communal identities from this system of interaction. These identities define them not only with their spheres, but in their interactions with the outside world. Teenagers and bikers are viewed as loud, obnoxious, criminal and loose; they are presented as threats to accepted norms of communal interaction, sexuality and vice. It can be argued that The Wild One not only provided archetypes of the appearance of these groups roaming in animalistic packs, but it also gave these groups a material code of how to operate and interact with each other and within society.

Time has not treated The Wild One with dignity. Like its adolescent characters, it has aged: becoming more of a socio-cultural document, rather than a contextual important film. Certainly, Kramer and director Lazlo Benedek would have aspired for the film to be an important picture, but this can also be argued as the film’s core issue. Its self-importance undermines everything else about it. In an era were respectable and affluent teenagers were silently rebelling against their parents generation, The Wild One does not provide a cinematic forum for debate on inter-generational relations. Rather, it demonizes and condemns one group of society without searching for or addressing the social roots of the problem.

The film’s only truly realistic sequence is a wonderfully shot moment when Johnny out of breath and fleeing from an angry mob runs to the security of his motorcycle. Interestingly, the end of this sequence contains a shot strikingly similar to the opening of Nicholas Ray’s Rebel Without A Cause made three years later in which a drunk James Dean attempts to pick up a children’s toy from the floor; whereas in The Wild One Brando seeks to pick up his stolen motorcycle trophy from the floor.

Ray’s film however deconstructs the notion of teenage disillusionment, alientation and generational miscommunication. The bikers in The Wild One are framed as nomads, cut-off from their point of origin. In Rebel Without A Cause that middle-class origin is exposed as the teenagers “rebel” against their parents standards. This can be seen in the most famous lines from each film. In Rebel Without A Cause Dean claims “You are tearing me apart” to his ineffectual parents; Brando when asked by a fellow teenager “Johnny, what are you rebelling against?” ,the Method actor coolly responds “Whaddya Gat!” Thus the explosion of inward anger in Rebel Without A Cause is not evident in The Wild One; rather the act of rebellion seems to have no meaning or source: a sociological point which critics then and today have scrutinized The Wild One for failing to have.

Despite claims of authenticity in language, appearance and tone, The Wild One is an artificial mess. The dialogue is woefully contrived, the story paperthin and the direction overtly staged. Nothing feels natural or organic in The Wild One, but rather a hyper-aggressive and hyper-exaggerrated depiction of a social sub-culture antithetical to traditional America. Only Benedek and Kramer appear to be taking their subject matter seriously; as Marvin drunkenly stutters around, leaving Brando to impassively stare off into the distance. While contemporary viewers will see it for the churlish camp it is, audiences in 1954 saw The Wild One as a portent to social and cultural upheaval: identifying subversive bikers as the source of their public ills, rather than debating the social-cultural dilemmas affecting their own public communities and private lives.


* The Wild One is available through Columbia Tri-Star Home Video

Copyright 2007 8½ Cinematheque