Rating summary

Movie		3.5
Video		4.0
Audio		4.0
Extras		0.0
Overall		3.5

The Wild One Blu-ray Movie Review

Mad Marlon

Reviewed by Michael Reuben March 17, 2015

Long before Toecutter, Goose and the Nightrider, there was Johnny of the Black Rebel Motorcycle Club, or "B.R.M.C." Director Laslo Benedek spent most of his career directing television in its formative years, but he made one signature film, The Wild One, that set the template for countless biker pictures to come and created an image of Marlon Brando as the uncompromising gang leader, Johnny Strabler, that remains iconic to this day. With the possible exception of Vito Corleone, Johnny is the figure (though not necessarily the role) with which Brando remains most closely associated. His poster was a long-time favorite on college dorm room walls; he was featured among the celebrities on the cover of the Beatles' Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band; and his look has been imitated by Elvis Presley and countless others.

But The Wild One itself is less seen today, largely because, by contemporary standards, it's pretty tame. If not for the presence of Brando and the rival gang leader played by a young Lee Marvin, the film might have been forgotten. Although the opening text promises something "shocking", most of the violence is threatened rather than carried out. Benedek uses some of the techniques of film noir (deep shadows, empty spaces, suggestive framing) to imply more than he can show, but one never gets the sense in The Wild One that the biker gangs are truly a threat to life, limb or chastity. Any sense of danger comes from Brando's and Marvin's ability to suggest what their characters could do under the right circumstances. It would take several decades of social upheaval before such crimes were widely committed in mainstream films by gangs of street punks, inspiring characters like Clint Eastwood's Dirty Harry and Charles Bronson's Paul Kirsey to respond with deadly force. In The Wild One, it's still just a few bad apples acting out.

By the time Richard Rush made Hells Angels on Wheels in 1967, motorcycles themselves had acquired an outlaw image. Not so in the era of The Wild One, which opens with Johnny (Brando) and the B.R.M.C. interrupting a racing tournament in the town of Carbonville, California. It's not the fact that the gang arrives on bikes that disturbs the locals; it's their unruly behavior, and they're quickly chased off by a group of cops and racing officials.

The gang finds less resistance in the nearby town of Wrightsville, which has a single lawman, Sheriff Harry Bleeker (Robert Keith), who lacks both confidence in himself and the support of the townspeople. Finding Wrightsville to be boring and "square", the gang wouldn't stay longer than it takes to down a few beers at the local tavern operated by the sheriff's brother, Frank (Ray Teal), except for two things. The first is that a gang member known as Crazy (Eugene Peterson) is injured in a collision with a car driven by an elderly resident named Art Kleiner (Will Wright), and he requires medical attention. The other is Johnny's interest in Frank's waitress, Kathie (Mary Murphy), who treats him with the familiar mixture of disdain and curiosity that betrays a wild streak under a "nice girl" exterior. Johnny is crushed when he discovers that Kathie is the daughter of Sheriff Bleeker. Not surprisingly, he doesn't like cops.

Tensions escalate with the arrival of Johnny's nemesis, Chino (Marvin), and his gang, the Beetles. Formerly part of the same gang before Johnny split off with the B.R.M.C., the Beetles and Chino are clearly resentful, and Chino insists on single combat with Johnny. Soon enough, Chino has been thrown in jail, following an altercation with the town's leading businessman, Charlie Thomas (Hugh Sanders), who thinks the sheriff is "soft" and begins organizing the locals into a defense brigade.

Multiple confrontations follow, people get hurt and eventually someone gets killed. Exactly what happened becomes a puzzle for the outside authorities who swoop in to restore order, but it's no mystery for the audience—and here is where The Wild One is especially interesting from a historical perspective. The bikers are certainly not innocent; their casual disregard for property foreshadows the widespread urban violence that would usher in a new era of law-and-order policies some twenty years later. But the townspeople, led by Charlie Thomas, are just as quick to brush aside the duly constituted authorities and take the law into their own hands, and it is they, not the outsiders, who inflict the most lasting harm. They may not start out "wild", but they quickly descend to Johnny's level.

The credited screenwriter of The Wild One is John Paxton (On the Beach), but his uncredited co-writer was Ben Maddow (The Asphalt Jungle), who was forced to submit many of his screenplays through pseudonyms and fronts during the Fifties to circumvent the HUAC-imposed blacklist. Buried beneath The Wild One's tale of biker violence, it isn't hard to glimpse an allegory about how good people can be transformed into a savage mob that will trample the very values they claim to be defending. All it takes is a bit of fear and a leader who, as the sheriff observes, was a bully even back in school. Audience expectations of the era (not to mention the production code) required that the film end with normalcy restored and even a glimmer of hope that outsiders like Johnny can be redeemed. Today we're more cynical.

The Wild One Blu-ray Movie, Video Quality 

The Wild One was shot by veteran cinematographer Hal Mohr (The Jazz Singer), and the opening credits specify that he used a "Garutso Balanced Lens", a patented design by inventor Stephen E. Garutso that offered greater depth of field while keeping the foreground in focus. Though some of the claims made by Garutso and his co-inventors at the time were far-fetched (notably, that their results created a 3D-like effect), Mohr shot several films with Garutso lenses, with impressive results. Mill Creek's 1080p, AVC-encoded Blu-ray of The Wild One, presumably from a transfer supplied by Sony, provides a crisply defined, detailed presentation, with deep blacks and finely rendered shades of gray that give the image a sense of depth and texture. Brando's subtle shifts in expression, the large street scenes filled with bikers and citizens, and the dark streets and alleys of Wrightsville late at night are all vividly rendered. Except for an occasional flicker, the source material appears to be in excellent condition, and leaving aside some light occurrences of video noise, there are no artifacts or other tell-tale signs of digital manipulation. With no extras, Mill Creek has devoted the entire BD-25 to the 79-minute film, resulting in an average bitrate of 29.42 Mbps, which is excellent.

The Wild One Blu-ray Movie, Audio Quality 

The film's original mono soundtrack is encoded as lossless DTS-HD MA 2.0, with identical left and right channels. It's a functional mix that sounds just fine. The roar of the cycles has decent bass extension for the era, and the top end is neither brittle nor fatiguing. The dialogue is clear, and the jazzy score by Leith Stevens (The War of the Worlds) suits both the era and the mood.

The Wild One Blu-ray Movie, Special Features and Extras 

The disc contains no extras.

The Wild One Blu-ray Movie, Overall Score and Recommendation 

Besides being the grandfather of biker pictures, The Wild One also anticipated a new kind of anti-hero who would begin to take shape in the next decade with such films as Bonnie and Clyde and Easy Rider and the explosion of cinematic creativity accompanying what was then known as the counterculture. All of that still lay in the future in 1953, but if you listen closely to Johnny talking to Mary, or the B.R.M.C. members talking to Jimmy (William Vedder), the elderly dishwasher at Frank's tavern, you'll notice that the rhythms, slang and style are borrowed from the lingo of jazz musicians (or what the gang members imagine jazz musicians sound like). Long before media and fashion companies learned how to merchandise rock 'n' roll and gangsta rap, rebellious young American males signaled their anti-establishment status by adopting the lingo of "outsider" music. Most of the B.R.M.C. was dorky, but Brando made them cool—which is why The Wild One is essential viewing for any student of American cultural history, let alone American cinema. Mill Creek's Blu-ray is very good and highly recommended.