• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 431 0

who wrote the script, may have thought it would illustrate how groups of men—in this case the bikers and townspeople—can be transformed spontaneously into predatory bands by a kind of fraternal herd instinct that enables them to cast aside whatever moral principles they have, the same instinct that led American soldiers to massacre unarmed Vietnamese civilians at My Lai. But I think they were really interested only in telling an entertaining story. If anything, the reaction to the picture said more about the audience than it did about the film. A few nuts even claimed that The Wild One was part of a Hollywood campaign to loosen our morals and incite young people to rebel against their elders. Sales of leather jackets soared, reminding me of It Happened One Night, when Clark Gable took his shirt off and revealed that he wasn’t wearing an undershirt, which created a disaster for the garment industry.

In this film we were accused of glamorizing motorcycle gangs, whose members were considered inherently evil, with no redeeming qualities. Judeo-Christian values categorize people as good or evil, and society then punishes the evil. But this is absurd. Most people who commit crimes do so because they have been deprived socially, emotionally and economically. To cure this problem, society in its wisdom punishes them, and when they commit other crimes, it is inspired with the brilliant idea of putting three-time losers away forever. All we need to do is build more prisons and the problem is solved!

As I’ve grown older I’ve realized that no people are inherently bad, including the bullies portrayed in The Wild One. In this regard I agree with the words Tennessee Williams wrote to Elia Kazan (which Gadg quoted in his autobiography) about the characters in A Streetcar Named Desire: “There are no ‘good’ or ‘bad’ people,” Tennessee wrote. “Some are a little better or a little worse, but all are activated more by misunderstanding than malice. A blindness to what is going on in each other’s hearts … nobody sees anybody truly but all through the flaws of their own egos. That is the way we all see each other in life. Vanity, fear, desire, competition—all such distortions within our own egos—condition our vision of those in relation to us. Add to those distortions in our own egos the corresponding distortions in the egos of others, and you see how cloudy the glass must become through which we look at each other. That’s how it is in all living relationships except when there is that rare case of two people who love intensely enough to burn through all those layers of opacity and see each other’s naked hearts. Such cases seem purely theoretical to me.…”

• • •

The public’s reaction to The Wild One was, I believe, a product of its time and circumstances. It was only seventy-nine minutes long, short by modern standards, and it looks dated and corny now; I don’t think it has aged well. But it became a kind of cult film, and it certainly helped my career, though once again it was a matter of luck. I’ve always been amazed at how lucky I’ve been, and that picture is a good example. For one thing, the part was actor-proof. Also, I never knew that there were sleeping desires and feelings in our society whose buttons would be hit so uncannily in that film. In hindsight, I think people responded to the movie because of the budding social and cultural currents that a few years later exploded volcanically on college campuses and the streets of America. Right or wrong, we were at the beginning of a new era after several years of transition following World War II; young people were beginning to doubt and question their elders and to challenge their values, morals and the established institutions of authority. There was a wisp of steam just beneath the surface when we made that picture. Young people were looking for a reason—any reason—to rebel. I simply happened to be at the right place at the right time in the right part—and I also had the appropriate state of mind for the role.

More than most parts I’ve played in the movies or onstage, I related to