The Wild One - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

(Triumph Thunderbird, like the one Marlon Brando rode in 'The Wild One')
(image uploaded by striatic on Flickr)

"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 from Columbia Pictures, produced by Stanley Kramer but the central figure was Brando, in a motorcycle jacket, who played a rebel without a cause two years before James Dean.

The film version was based on a short story in Harper's Magazine "The Cyclists' Raid" by Frank Rooney which 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 sparked the formation of Hells Angels MC the following year and is now recreated annually. In the film, the town is located somewhere in Middle America.

The film was banned from showing in the UK for fourteen years.
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