"What’re you rebelling against, Johnny?" says dancing party girl Mildred to the moody, leather-clad biker boy memorably played by a young Marlon Brando. His famous answer? "Whaddya got?"

Such an insouciant toss-off may seem tame by today’s standards, but in director Laslo Benedek’s 1953 "The Wild One" (produced by Stanley Kramer), that type of reckless rebellion (without a cause) pre-Elvis, was a big deal. A very big deal. Indeed, the entire picture had enormous impact. The movie, based on a Harper’s Magazine story that itself was loosely based on a real-life incident involving a gang of bikers invading a small California town on a Fourth of July weekend, was viewed as so incendiary that the picture was banned in Great Britain until 1968. (Think how today mainstream news easily discusses the murder of San Francisco chapter Hell Angels president Mark "Papa" Guardado). Given how forced some of this movie feels today, it seems rather silly, but I love this picture -- from its slinky Leith Stevens score, to its dual versions of the alpha male black leather bad boy -- a stoic Brando and a boisterous Lee Marvin -- two cinematic geniuses stomping out the weaklings and marking their territory with inspired appetites (for destruction).

Concerned citizens were frightened not only of its unresolved message but of its reckless, glamorous appeal. Long before the 1960s made biker movies a standard and sometimes silly subgenre of counterculture cinema, "The Wild One" -- with its wild hogs, swingin’ jazz score, "Go, Daddy-o" slang and slick black leather style (encased in the fuller body of a gorgeous, somewhat camp Brando, whose look remains timeless) -- was the biker movie. A precursor to the social upheavals that would occur a decade later in the tumultuous 1960s, "The Wild One" as occasionally goof-ball and somewhat preachy as it plays today, was a blast in the face to regular "square" society, revealing that the kids were not alright. Particularly the older (and boy do they look older), more experienced "kids" -- those scary, wild boys of the road roaring into your sleepy little town on two big powerful wheels. (Can you imagine that tall glass of menace Marvin plopping your little teenage daughter on the back of his hog? Jesus. Why didn't he roar into my town?)

 Read the rest of my ode to these leather clad bad boys here.

--posted by Kim