The Wild One

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:"What are you rebelling against?"

:"What have you got?"

The Wild One (1953) was the very first outlaw biker film, also made memorable by the youthful Marlon Brando playing gang leader Johnny Stabler. Lee Marvin was his nemesis, the leader of the rival gang. It was a low-budget production but the central figure was Brando, in a motorcycle jacket riding a 1950 Triumph Thunderbird 6T, who played a rebel without a cause two years before James Dean.

The film version was based on a January, 1951 short story in Harper's Magazine "The Cyclists' Raid" by Frank Rooney that was published in book form as part of "The Best American Short Stories 1952." The story took a cue from an actual biker street party on the Fourth of July weekend in 1947 in Hollister, California that was elaborately trumped up in Life Magazine (dubbed the Hollister riot) with staged photographs of wild motorcycle outlaw revellers. The Hollister event is now celebrated annually. In the film, the town is located somewhere in Middle America.

Deemed scandalous and dangerous, the film was banned by the British Board of Film Censors from showing in the United Kingdom for fourteen years. Its first UK public showing, to a mostly Rocker audience being at the then famous 59 Club of Paddington in London.

Primary cast:

Marlon Brando : Johnny Strabler/Narrator
Mary Murphy : Kathie Bleeker
Robert Keith : Sheriff Harry Bleeker
Lee Marvin : Chino
Jay C. Flippen : Sheriff Stew Singer
Peggy Maley : Mildred
Hugh Sanders : Charlie Thomas
Ray Teal : Uncle Frank Bleeker
Richard Farnsworth : (uncredited)

External links

[Tim Dirks reviews The Wild One]: many quotes

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