THE WILD ONE (Columbia Pictures, 1954)
The Wild One, the seminal biker picture, casts a lengthening shadow that stretches from 1954 into the present day, its influence echoing not only through the motorcycle-movie craze of 15 years later but also the emergence of the juvenile-delinquency picture, which began in earnest almost immediately after Marlon Brando and his leather-jacketed comrades roared onto the screen...

Biker Group: Black Rebels
Leader: Johnny (Marlon Brando)

“...I was Brando -- I was Dean. Blaspheming blue-jeaned booted baby boy -- Oh, how I made them turn their heads!” -- Loudon Wainright III, “In Delaware”


Johnny (Marlon Brando) and his Black Rebels make an impressive entrance to Wrightsville

Pride of place is enough to enable The Wild One to transcend its own quaint morality-fable essence, but there is a lasting ferocity about it, too, and an imperishable title portrayal that defines Brando as vividly as his work in The Godfather a generation later. Although he seldom invited typecasting, Brando became a type in his own right, popularizing a style that has colored much more recent work from the likes of Robert De Niro, John Travolta and Sylvester Stallone.

The Wild One took its cue from a magazine story that had hardly sought to glamorize or champion any emerging cycle-gang subculture. “The Cyclists' Raid,” which Frank Rooney wrote for Harper's magazine, was itself based upon a mob-scene ordeal in which some 4,000 unwelcome visitors stormed the town of Hollister, California, during a holiday weekend in 1947. Rooney's purpose was scarcely more than a righteous backlash, a call for vigilance against a dawning threat to law and order within a society that should have been breathing easier in the wake of the Second World War.


Kathie walks the gauntlet of gang members

By 1953, when The Wild One finally took shape as a picture-show attraction, America had polarized itself thoroughly in its needs, on the one hand, to find new menaces as hate-worthy as the Third Reich and, on the other, to embrace the live-and-let-live attitudes that had been the point of the Allied war effort. The very act of hitting the open road on a motorcycle appealed strikingly to that second camp while stoking a reactionary fear of the unknown in the straighter elements of society: Motorcycles were supposed to be police vehicles, after all, and as such they were scary enough when seen looming in a four-wheeled motorist’s rear-view mirror.

“This is a shocking story,” the prologue warns. “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.” Regional U.S. censor boards balked but allowed the release to proceed with caution; the British Board of Censors invoked a formal ban that lasted into the 1960s.


High Sherrif Singer (J.C. Flippen) prevents the townspeople from taking Johnny into their own hands

The movie's town is not specifically Hollister, California, but some nebulous West Coast province around Wrightsville, U.S.A., where the white median stripe of a backwater roadway draws the viewer's eye toward a desolate horizon.

“It begins here for me, on this road,” a voice drones. “How the whole mess happened, I don't know... Maybe I could've stopped it early. But once the trouble was on its way, I was just goin' with it. Mostly, I remember the girl... sad chick, like that. But somethin' changed in me. She got to me. But that's later, anyway. This is where it begins for me -- right on this road.”


In town, the Black Rebels concentrate on beer and women

Distant figures, looming on the horizon, draw nearer with a hum that becomes the rumbling of some 40 motorcycles, led in a regimented formation by a leather-jacketed lout named Johnny (Brando), whose narration establishes the adventure as an extended flashback from some higher moral ground of insight if not necessarily enlightenment. This very loutishness is calculated to make Johnny as appealing to one segment of the audience as he is repulsive to the other. Johnny's Black Rebels, declaring their piratical attitudes with the symbol of a skull and crossed pistons, have come to disrupt a sanctioned cycle race, where High Sheriff Singer (Jay C. Flippen) orders them away but fails to prevent their stealing a trophy. The sheriff wonders aloud where such a mob could have come from.

“I don't know,” comes a reply. “Everywhere. I don't even think they know where they're goin'... Ten guys like that give people th' idea that everybody [who] drives a motorcycle is crazy. What're they tryin' to prove, anyway?”

“Beats me,” replies the sheriff. “Lookin' for somebody to push 'em around so they c'n get sore and show how tough they are... usually find it someplace, sooner or later.”


Johnny's interest is piqued by a waitress (Mary Murphy)

The Rebels' arrival in Wrightsville is welcomed by the more youthful residents, who regard the cyclists with excited admiration. Restaurant operator Frank Bleeker (Ray Teal) senses a beer-guzzling bonanza. A dash for Bleeker's grill triggers the first outbreak of mayhem, putting the intruders promptly on hostile terms with the local elders.

After a confrontation with inept Sheriff Harry Bleeker (Robert Keith), Johnny heads for the bar, where he loses no time closing in on a waitress named Kathie (Mary Murphy). Kathie seems ill-impressed with Johnny's attempt to give her the stolen trophy, but there is no denying her attraction to his air of high-spirited defiance. His fellow cyclists want to leave, but Johnny insists upon remaining a while. The gang seems fascinated with the utterly self-possessed squareness of the townspeople. Kathie speaks longingly of a family vacation trip that never happened, clearly envying Johnny his get-up-and-go way of life.


Johnny's pal turned foe, Chino (Lee Marvin, center) shows up

Johnny is suddenly ready to leave town upon learning that Kathie is the sheriff's daughter. His departure is stalled, however, by the sudden appearance of Chino (Lee Marvin), a compadre-turned-rival who declares to Johnny that he has “been looking for you in every ditch from Fresno to here -- hopin' you was dead.” There follows a showdown, triggered by the stolen trophy but escalating when Chino senses Johnny's fondness toward Kathie.


A brutal fight enslues

Handing the trophy to Kathie, Chino announces his intended outcome of the fight: “... and see how she fights back a tear while her hero bleeds to death in the street.”

As the slugfest gathers momentum, townsman Charlie Thomas (Hugh Sanders) berates Sheriff Bleeker: “You're the cop, aren't you? If you can't boot these jerks out, there's plenty of us that can -- even if we have to bust a few heads.” Thomas worsens the violence with a vigilante grandstand play, but Bleeker is persuaded not to arrest a fellow citizen and takes only Chino prisoner.


Sherrif Bleeker (Robert Keith) arrests Chino

“He was afraid of making a mistake,” Kathie explains later to Johnny, “... afraid of losing his job. He's the town joke, and I'm stuck with him... He's a fake -- like you...” “Say what?” replies Johnny. “... You keep needlin' me, and... I'm gonna take this joint apart -- and you're not gonna know what hit you.”

While Chino's gang sabotages the town's telephone system and Johnny's mob abducts Charlie Thomas in lieu of a legitimate arrest, the locals arm themselves and prepare for a siege. Johnny rescues Kathie from an attack by cycle-gang members, then rides away with her. Reaching a secluded parkway, he plants a passionate smooch on her. She is unresponsive.

“Sorry,” she mutters. “I can't fight back -- too tired. It'd be better, wouldn't it? Then you could hit me."

Irritated by her passive condescension, Johnny replies that he “wouldn't waste my time with a square like you... I'm gonna take you back and dump you...”

She warms to him, unexpectedly. Caught off guard, he recoils, withdrawing now that Kathie seems to want him.



“It's crazy, isn't it?” she says. “You're afraid of me. I don't know why, but I'm not afraid of you now. You're afraid of me.”

Pressing the confrontation, she continues. “You're still fighting, aren't you? ... Why do you hate everybody?” As much as acknowledging her virginity, she adds, “I've never ridden on a motorcycle before... it scared me, but I forgot everything. It felt good...”


Kathie talks with the Sherrif about the upheaval in the town since the arrival of Johnny's gang.

After embarrassing herself with a rambling story about her romantic fantasies, Kathie runs from Johnny, who catches up with her only to find her in hysterics. A citizen, mistaking the encounter for an attempted rape, summons a mob. The villagers promptly establish their own appetite for violence. Johnny, as defiant as ever, taunts them: “My ol' man used to hit harder than that!”

Finally shamed into taking a stand, Sheriff Bleeker halts the beating, only to find a larger mob eager to prevent Johnny's departure. The vigilantes force Johnny's cycle into a riderless tailspin, causing the death of a well-liked elderly resident (William Vedder) and prompting the arrival of a tougher troupe of lawmen from the county seat. Johnny faces a hearing that vindicates him -- but only after a dressing-down from Sheriff Singer, who remembers him from the cycle race.


High Sherrif Singer (J.C. Flippen)

“Every one of you monkeys is in my book,” Singer tells the bikers. “... Now, git!”

Johnny allows himself one last stop, visiting Kathie at the diner. Having proved himself incapable of expressing gratitude or remorse throughout the ordeal that has dogged his tracks, he finally finds a deed that will serve where words fail him: Hesitantly at first, then finally mustering a grimace that might be a smile, he presents her the cycle-race trophy as a gesture of who-knows-what -- as though she would need a memento of such an occasion. A back-on-the-road finale leaves it ambiguous whether Johnny's redemption will prove lasting.

What impressed the picturegoing public of 1954 as threatening lawlessness plays out today like so much rude hooliganism, though deepened by Brando's steadfast bewildered alienation and Lee Marvin's apelike savagery. Screenwriter John Paxton (who evoked another kind of paranoia with 1959’s post-nuke thriller On the Beach) plants the larger menace within the supposedly endangered townspeople-thugs veiled in hick respectability, just waiting for an excuse to cut loose. Mary Murphy is precisely right as the picture's soul of innocence, and Yvonne Doughty has a winning showcase as Brando's former squeeze, now aligned with Marvin's more vicious splinter faction but pining, in her surly way, for the good old days with Johnny.

Laslo Benedek, a Hungarian who had studied psychiatry before entering the film industry in Berlin, directs with more visual savvy than story sense or psychological insight, allowing the complications to pile up with little dramatic unfolding. (Benedek's other significant film of a checkered career was 1951's Death of a Salesman.) His earlier experience as a cameraman and film cutter appears a helpful influence, however, on The Wild One, which moves decisively from one arresting set-piece to another -- the ominous entrance of the cyclists; the massed attack on Mary Murphy's Kathie; her rescue by Brando and his capture and beating by the locals. The staging of the fatal accident, with Brando's cycle veering horrifically out of control, is pure edge-of-the-seat thrill power.

The simplistic conclusion that violence begets only more of the same is a pure derivative of the Hollywood Western, and of the film noir style that had flourished in Hollywood during the 1940s. The Wild One has the gumption, however, to make itself a polemic on the Western myth of strength-through-violence, earning a place among such acknowledged frontier classics of its day as Shane, High Noon and Johnny Guitar. And after all -- what is the motorcycle if not a logical successor to the Westerner's horse?


Katie (Mary Murphy) ends up falling into Johnny's arms

See Link: 13 Rebels MC | The Real Wild Ones ~ for an article about the actual California motorcycle clubs of the day that the movie was based on.

Purchase: The Big Book of Biker Flicks: 40 of the Best Motorcycle Movies of All Time

Excerpts from the Big Book of Biker Flicks is published exclusively on the Falcon Motorcycles Blog with permission from the Authors and Publisher.

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