The Wild One

St. James Encyclopedia of Pop Culture, Jan 29, 2002 by Michael Baers

The camera looks down a stretch of straight country highway, then in bold, white letters appears the following: "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." The words fade away to be replaced by Marlon Brando's voice speaking in a southern drawl. "It begins for me on this road," he says. "How the whole mess happened I don't know, but I know it couldn't happen again in a million years. Maybe I coulda stopped it early, but once the trouble was on its way, I was just going with it." A crowd of leather-clad motorcyclists roar past the camera, and with the confident declaration that what follows is an aberration, Stanley Kramer launched The Wild One in 1954. The truth of the matter is somewhat more complicated, for not only did the film incite a rash of copy-cat behavior, but may have had an affect on the Hell's Angels' delectations a decade later.

The Wild One derives from a real riot, following a large motorcycle rally in the Northern California town of Hollister. According to witnesses, six to eight thousand participants drag-raced up and down the streets of Hollister; fist-fights, lewd behavior, and vandalism were the norm, but the event was eventually dispatched by 29 policemen and it ended without a single loss of life. The coverage in the July 1947 issue of Life magazine was sufficiently lurid and alarmist, and it inspired Frank Rooney to turn the incident into a short story, "The Cyclists' Raid." Rooney told the story from the point of view of Joel Bleeker, a hotel manager (and significantly, a World War II veteran) who witnesses his daughter's death at the hands of the cyclists. Bleeker views the motorcyclists as inhuman quasi-fascists, but in its transition from story to film, sympathies were switched. The hero became Johnny (Marlon Brando), leader of the Black Rebels Motorcycle Club, who is sullen and incommunicative, but also reserved and possessing a degree of chivalry lacking in his compatriots.

The rioting itself is transformed in typical Hollywood fashion into a Manichean contest between Johnny and his dissipated rival, Chino (Lee Marvin), who, to make matters perfectly clear, wears a horizontal striped sweatshirt closely resembling prison garb. After gratuitously interfering in a local motorcycle race, the bikers proceed to the nearby town of Carbondale where they cause all manner of havoc, prompted in part by the local saloon owner, who all but rubs his hands in excitement at the prospect of a bar full of hard-drinking motorcyclists. The tension between locals and bikers, already tense after a notoriously bad driver hits one of the bikers, is further exacerbated by the arrival of Chino and his cohorts. As the motorcyclists begin to run genuinely amuck, the town's craven police officer cowers in his office while his daughter, Kathy, is accosted by the bikers, rescued by Johnny who drives off with her, and is thus absent from the ensuing carnage. Nonetheless, as the leader he is blamed by the townspeople, locked up, and when he escapes, knocked off his motorcycle as he flees, accidentally killing an elderly man, and then is unjustly accused of the killing.

Despite the rather thin story line--the New Yorker magazine called it "a picture that tries to grasp an idea even though the reach falls short"--The Wild One was an instant hit with young audiences. Theater owners throughout the country reported that teenage boys had taken to dressing in leather jackets and boots like Marlon Brando and accosting passersby. The pioneering members of the Hell's Angels (most of the group that later came to notoriety were children at the time) identified deeply with Brando. "Whatta ya got?" was Brando's insouciant reply to the famous question, "Hey Johnny, what are you rebelling against?" and it echoed in the real-life outlaws inchoate dissatisfaction. "We went up to the Fox Theater on Market Street," a founding member told journalist Hunter S. Thompson. "There were about fifty of us, with jugs of wine and our black leather jackets ... We sat up there in the balcony and smoked cigars and drank wine and cheered like bastards. We could all see ourselves right there on the screen. We were all Marlon Brando."

Much of the lasting allure of The Wild One stems from Brando's lionization by not only the Hell's Angels, but by countless teenagers. In "The Cyclists' Raid," Rooney had written: "They were all alike. They were standardized figurines, seeking in each other a willful loss of identity, dividing themselves equally among one another until there was only a single mythical figure, unspeakably sterile and furnishing the norm for hundreds of others." In light of the Hell's Angels' response to The Wild One as quoted above, and considering the way Marlon Brando's image was disseminated on posters, in books, and turned into an archetype, it is no wonder many blamed The Wild One for the Hell's Angels' excesses a decade later. Hollywood gossip columnist Hedda Hopper blamed Kramer entirely for the whole outlaw phenomenon, and Frank Rooney might well have identified Marlon Brando as that "single mythical figure furnishing the norm for hundreds of others."