Wheelie-Poppin’ Brando, The Wild One of the ‘50s, Forged Foothold for Elvis

“Hey Johnny, what are you rebelling against? “

“What’ve you got? “--Marlon Brando in “The Wild One”

Back when Elvis Presley left the building, some name brand rock critic or another’s obituary mistakenly attributed that all-negating rejoinder to the Big El. They are icons easily confused--Elvis’ unfettered rocker and Brando’s disaffected biker--because each was an affront to the American consciousness.

“The Wild One,” which screens at UC Irvine tonight as part of its “Cult Personalities” series, may seem hopelessly quaint and tame today but in 1954 it was scandalous. Hollywood was careful to distance itself from the content of the film, opening it with both a repentant Brando voice-over and the stern printed caution “This is a shocking story. It could never take place in most American towns--but it did in this one. It is a public challenge not to let it happen again.”

Indeed derived from a news account of bikers running wild in a small town, the “shocking” activities in the film chiefly consisted of boisterousness, poor manners and littering. Pretty tame stuff compared to today’s brutal, graphic films where a guy’s got to staple-gun at least a whole pep squad to even get our attention, and he’s the good guy .

Still, the idea contained in “The Wild One” ran entirely counter to the American ethos of the time, seeming almost beyond reason. Weathering even the Depression, the constant model for life here had been “Work hard, defer or deny pleasure, salute the guy at the top, build for the future, and good things will follow.”

There had been dissenting voices (such as Henry Miller’s) but always safely out of the mainstream (Miller’s books remained banned in the United States until the ‘60s). Suddenly, with a roar of Triumphs and Harleys, there was a character up there on the big screen who flat-out just didn’t care about anything, least of all saving for that aluminum siding or attending sociable picnics.

Self-absorbed, sneering at authority and convention, Brando’s Johnny and his Black Rebels Motorcycle Gang were living only for the moment, outside logic, pursuing a nearly Dadaist existence--there is a great surreal scene where some of the bikers jitterbug on the sidewalk with chromed beauty salon helmets covering their heads.

On the sidelines, authority figures make repeated comments like: “I don’t get your act at all. I don’t think you know what you’re doing or how to do it.” And unlike the gangster movies where the bad guy would always articulate his motives, this new breed of malcontent didn’t have any. Asked where he’s going, Johnny merely replies, “Oh man, we’re just going to go .”

That generalized discontent and urge for immediate, palpable sensation also were delivered by Elvis’ music and gyrations. And rock ‘n’ roll was similarly treated as a gateway to the abyss, castigated as being animalistic jungle rhythms and, in Frank Sinatra’s immortal estimation, “a rancid aphrodisiac.” Cities all over the nation banned its performance.

Without singing a note (was that really singing in “Guys and Dolls”?) Brando may have been the first rock star. Whether Presley consciously adopted him as a model or not, Brando’s character in “The Wild One” defined Elvis’ early film roles--always the smirking outsider slowly brought into the fold--until the Army permanently wiped that smirk off Elvis’ face in 1958. Gene Vincent and others up through the Clash took up Brando’s look and attitude.

(Brando’s sartorial impact, anyway, has lessened in more recent times. Few people took to dottering around with orange slices in their mouths after “The Godfather.” Around the time of “Apocalypse Now,” a number of people did take to shaving their heads and mumbling, though most of those turned up in air terminals with copies of the Bhagavad-Gita.)

In any case, looking back today through the soft filter of nostalgia, one feels tempted to reach through time, grab Johnny’s lapels and shout, “Jeez, what are you rebelling against? You can buy a DeSoto Firedome convertible for $3,114! And fins are just around the corner. The atom is your friend; when your President lies to you, he goes to the trouble of looking sheepish when he’s caught; and if you hang onto that boomerang-shaped Formica furniture long enough, you can make a fortune selling it to yuppies in the ‘90s.”

Sex may not have been easy then, but at least it wasn’t entirely fatal . And one might note that when folks plunk down money for a beer in “The Wild One,” you hear the sound of a single coin.

So what was there to be sullen about? Well, while the America of 1954 functioned, it wasn’t fresh. It had lost its sense of wilderness. To the poet William Carlos Williams, we were “riding our fears to market, where everything is by accident and only one thing is sure: The fatter we get, the duller we grow.”

One can’t say that history would have been much different without “The Wild One,” but it did present one of the first well-distributed peals of youthful discontent, which grew progressively louder from that point until it peaked with the ‘60s counterculture. It may be idealizing to presume that American institutions weren’t corrupt before the ‘50s, but the distrust for authority in “The Wild One” has certainly been matched by authority being untrustworthy ever since.

It’s not a film that would stand up particularly well to a remake, which isn’t to say that things are so fresh and lively today that they couldn’t use a redress. One suspects that if the Black Rebels were to roar into, say, Irvine, they’d start looking back on the small burg in “The Wild One” as a hotbed of activity. How much frozen yogurt and beehive condo action can a guy take?

However, instead of engendering outrage, Johnny and the boys would probably go all but unnoticed today. They’d be shouting, “Hey, whoa, look! We’re littering and doing wheelies!” while folks would be watching the latest numbing drive-by shootings and government cover-ups on TV.

Blunting their edge even more would be the way in which rebellion now has been institutionalized. Wanna cut loose? They’re already doing it for you in the beer ads. Distrustful of authority and the status quo? Since Watergate nearly every news source and entertainment medium ratifies daily that positively everything is corrupt from the top on down, but do get those taxes filed on time, OK?

Want to be a loner? Just get on down to the Banana Republic and ask to be directed to their Sullen Young Rebel department.

“Hey Johnny, can we interest you in our line of pre-distressed leather jackets, caps and such?”

“Hmmm. What’ve you got?”

“The Wild One” will be shown tonight at 7 and 9 in the UCI Social Science Lecture Hall, Campus Drive and Bridge Street, Irvine. Admission: $3 and $4. Information: (714) 856-6379.