It’s delivered as a dry comic quip – and accepted as such as by the two characters that hear it. And the way that Brando pouts, camply, just before he delivers, shows as much contempt for the answer as it does for the question. One suspects that if any other of our male ’50s teen stars had said the line – even James Dean – they would’ve oversold it, gone all deliberately wide-eyed and evil in an attempt to convey the threat of violent revolt. But Brando . . . Man, Brando is not interested in rebellion. He’s interested in nihilism. The idea that life has nothing at all to recommend it. The ‘What have you got?’, not the ‘rebelling’. And the only sure way to convey true, black, futility is with ironic distance . . . a conscious lack of interest in living. For one second, Brando is the greatest actor of all time. Because conveying a blank absence of ambition, love or future – The Abyss we all fear – and making it sexy, funny and inspiring enough to be one of the most quoted and admired lines in popular culture . . . this – not rubbing your bald pate in Vietnam nor stuffing your mouth with cotton wool to sound Sicilian – is genius. When I watch this scene I feel 50-plus years of youthquake shoot from my head right through to my shaky knees, and can barely laugh to keep from crying. Everything great about the latter part of the 20th century and beyond begins with those two words spoken by this strange, curmudgeonly man. It’s the entire ‘destroy to create’ imperative in two seconds of screen-time.
There are good reasons why the question has to be asked by a girl. Because when trouble starts, Kathie is advised by a man to ‘go home and stay there’. This is what 1950s men wanted women to do, and this is exactly what Kathie doesn’t do. She roams the streets, looking for Johnny, looking for trouble, looking for risk over safety. When Johnny threatens to slap her around, an entirely un-scared Kathie taunts him about his fear of women. She’s the only person in the movie who isn’t either shoved into violence or entirely intimidated by Johnny. The only trustworthy agent of control. And the only person, aside from Johnny, who makes individual decisions. Johnny’s male gang are his bitches. Like most soldiers, they really would jump over a cliff if the man in charge told them to. The men of the town can only stand up to Johnny when they’ve organised themselves into a lynch-mob, accusing him of rape without bothering to give the girl herself a voice. Johnny aside, men are useless in this movie. And even he’s a mumbling emotional cripple.
I’m not going to go so far as to call The Wild One a feminist movie. But the nihilism that swirls around it is created and sustained entirely by men, and its only leading female character is a non-conformist possessed of both courage and optimism. This is somewhat undercut, though, by The Bad Girl, who begs Johnny for sex (OK . . . she doesn’t say ‘sex’, but we get the picture if we get the picture) with such an ugly absence of dignity you suddenly see why the more misogynist strain of gay man saw something in the movie for them. And there’s the sado-masochistic gleam in the eyes of the lynch-mob as they beat sexy Johnny to a bloody pulp. Can’t forget that.
No, but really, some of the sexual imagery in The Wild One is outrageous. My favourite none-too-subtle hint is when Johnny finally asserts himself with Kathie, threatening to trash her bar if she doesn’t stop ‘needling’ him. He makes the fateful decision not to leave town as he promised her father, sits down at the bar, grabs a beer, swigs, and bashes it down. Cut to the phallic bottle, gushing over with a fountain of white spray. It’s a seminal moment.
Almost as good is the aftermath of Johnny and Kathy’s long bike journey into the woods at night. When Kathy . . . erm . . . dismounts, fondly fondling Johnny’s formerly throbbing engine, she wears the unmistakable, mussed but dreamily serene look of a girl who has just felt the Earth move. The biggest blow to the motorcycle manufacturing business came when the first woman sat on her tumble dryer.
Critics have always been sniffy about The Wild One, particularly in comparison to supposedly heavyweight early Brando flicks like the wildly overrated On The Waterfront and A Streetcar Named Desire. Here, Johnny ignores the bad girl and falls for the nice, homemaker type . . . the civilising, emasculating influence. He is then dependent on her love to get him out of trouble. The biker riot – despite the intimations of potential rape – is about as scary as a Sunday School picnic. Johnny ain’t no anarchist – he’s just misunderstood! So retrospective reviews of The Wild One often write it off as typically sentimental, liberal Hollywood fudge. But you can’t judge a pre-’60s American movie by its ending, any more than you can expect a Soviet-era director to have devoted his life to anti-communist movies. There was a code in place, and in the 1950s great movie people’s careers were ended if they even got close to trespassing against the self-appointed guardians of American morals. If you wanted to say something interesting in Hollywood between 1934 and 1968, the years governed by the paranoid self-censorship of The Hays Code, then you went ahead and said it . . . but made damn sure that the plot – and particularly the ending – said something entirely opposite. As long as subversive characters either conformed or got their just desserts – prison sometimes, death mostly – you could give the people exactly what they wanted in the bits of the film that really mattered . . . the images and the dialogue.
But the ending of The Wild One has a few more dimensions than the surface would suggest. Because the key character – the one who represents what the target audience really feel – is obviously Kathie. We learn gradually, every time she speaks, that her attraction to Johnny is not down to the irresistible lure of the heathen he-man. He’s simply a symbol of freedom. As she finally fingers the neighbourhood bullies who she’s presumably expected to live the rest of her life with and protests Johnny’s innocence, Kathy puts the film’s real theme most eloquently. ‘I wasn’t trying to get away from him. I was trying to get away.’
The other key scene develops beautifully as a cop delivers the ’50s cliché ‘conform and be grateful’ speech to Johnny as he deigns to let him go. In the majority of ’50s delinquency movies, the Bad Boy dies or sees the error of his ways and pleads to be allowed into society. But Johnny is apparently unchanged by the liberal generosity of the cop and Kathie. He refuses to be grateful or conform. He won’t even look at Kathy, not even when she talks about him like he’s an errant dog. The potential humiliation of being patronised by an alliance of cops and sex object washes right over him.
He and the gang appear to leave, but Johnny does return. He still can’t thank Kathy. And he sure as hell ain’t asking her for dinner and a movie and suburban marriage. He gives her the bike trophy – which Lee Marvin’s Chino slyly labels as a ‘beautiful object, signifying absolutely nothing’ – and smiles, and leaves for his wild, wild life, away from society. Because the beautiful object does signify something. It’s a universally recognised symbol of achievement . . . and is therefore useless to somebody who still doesn’t acknowledge the worth of society’s approval. He leaves it and he leaves the girl who might civilise him. I reckon this is pretty cool for a movie made for a newly recognised audience in the most repressive years of the 20th century.
The Wild One gave a generation of youth who were finally becoming conscious of their own power – spending and otherwise – exactly what they wanted: sex, rebellion, and a celebration of violent action and rebels that boys wanted to be and girls wanted to fuck. Considering how quickly Brando’s dress was adopted as the ultimate in universally identifiable gay male iconography, it’s a crying shame that a generation of women didn’t go on to a life of riding big motor-sickles and beating up Lee Marvin.
The rest of the pleasure is purely aesthetic – Leith Stevens’s sleazy jazz score, pumped full of deliberate jungle juice. The gorgeous monochrome. Brando’s clothes. The Triumph sickles. The queasy slant of the camera angle on Brando’s face when the gangs signal riot with the ceremonial beeping of horns, as the world prepares to tip into chaos. It’s a great-looking, great-sounding movie which can be taken as trash and laughed at, or just as easily seen as the film that invented the modern world. What I can say with certainty
is that it’s the film that invented this book and all who sail in it, and that’s plenty good enough for me.
THE BLACKBOARD JUNGLE
1955
Starring: Glenn Ford, Sidney Poitier, Vic Morrow
Dir.: Richard Brooks
Plot: The inner-city classroom as Theatre Of War.
Key line: ‘Take it easy, Chief. He’s crazy. He’s high. He’s floatin’ on Sneaky Pete wine!’
Famously, this movie started a riot in a cinema in south London. The British teen was apparently such a hormonal explosion waiting to happen that, in a picture-house in rough old Elephant And Castle, an unruly horde of Teddy Boy types heard the opening blend of hep cat jazz drum solo and military tattoo segue into Bill Haley’s ‘Rock Around The Clock’, and went bug-eyed mental, dancing frenziedly in the aisles and slashing the seats with flick-knives, the ’50s juvenile delinquent equivalent of a mobile phone with Bluetooth. The same sort of thing reputedly happened in America and, once the controversy and hand-wringing had calmed down, a new genre was born. No self-respecting capitalist could turn down the kind of free publicity generated by teenage film.
I wonder if these crazy kids even bothered to look at the words of warning that roll across the screen at the outset of The Blackboard Jungle. To assure the censors and adults generally that the movie’s makers had America’s best interests at heart, the captions assure us that The Blackboard Jungle is ‘concerned with juvenile delinquency’ and performs a necessary social function because ‘Public awareness is a first step towards a remedy.’ For a few weird years in the 1950s, juvenile delinquency was an American obsession and rivalled communism as the No. 1 source of dread under the bed. Blame rock ’n’ roll, or post-war affluence, or working mothers, or a decline in the practice of respecting your elders, but a series of lurid headlines and learned academic reports insisted that America’s kids were out of control and coming for your daughters. In the end, it was the US military coming for your sons that gave this apparently causeless rebellion a sense of purpose and genuine anti-establishment threat.
But right now, in 1955, at New York’s North Manual High School, those rough boys have something less noble on their minds.
In the opening scenes of this wonderful black and white orgy of hysteria, these thugs’ idea of communicating with the laydees involves becoming literally animal – rattling and gurning through the bars of the school fence, topped off by much post-The Wild One (see here) bottle play. Vic Morrow’s Artie West, the villain of this piece, goes as far as holding the bottle of pop at his groin like a phallus before dispatching the foamy contents roughly in the direction of a sophisticated blonde.
This is one of the things I love most about pre-’60s movies. Nowadays, if a kid in a teen film – or a guy in a grown-up one, for that matter – pulled the bottle-as-cumming-penis gag, the character would know exactly what he was doing, and would shake it all about with knowing irony. In movies like The Blackboard Jungle, the male aggressor doesn’t appear to know anything about symbolism. He is shoving his dick in our faces in deadly earnest, which is both scarier and funnier.
But as well as being a movie about juvenile delinquency, The Blackboard Jungle is also about male humiliation. Or, to be precise, the potential humiliations men suffer at the hands of a society that had changed radically since the Second World War. As we know, men risked their lives to fight fascism between 1939 and 1945 and, if they made it back whole, soon realised that no place had been found for them in civic life. Women had entered the job market while they were away and many had no intention of returning to domestic drudgery. The US economy needed to rebuild. So vets like Rick Dadier (Glenn Ford) found themselves pleading for work.
In the opening scenes we see that Dadier – who only seems to get this unlikely French name so the kids can call him Daddy-O – is among a large group of teachers looking for a job at Hooligan High. Most are men. When Dadier enters the office for his interview he is greeted by a cold, pompous, authoritarian Principal. This Dadier is nervous and cringing. It turns out that he earned his teaching degree at a girls’ school that made a place for ex-military. His interviewer barks at him about his quiet voice and forces him to recite Shakespeare at top volume. Staff and rival interviewees smirk at the sound of his desperation. Dadier is being humiliated at every turn.
So The Blackboard Jungle is, on one major level, about an emasculated man who must quest to find his testicles. Instead of traversing across dangerous terrain, he has to locate his bollocks by taking on a bunch of children whose entire demeanour is a threat to the authority of the adult male. And he’s not going to get any help. After getting the job, Dadier asks about ‘the discipline problem’. He is brusquely and aggressively informed that it doesn’t exist. Principal Halloran is King of Denial.
This school is a war. The Principal is the aloof general, cosseted away from the action. The teachers are the foot-soldiers on the frontline. The men, led by über-cynic Murdoch, immediately hit Dadier with war stories and call the school ‘The garbage can of the educational system,’ while making wisecracks about the sentences for statutory rape that would apparently be inevitable if they worked at a girls’ school. The one female teacher who wanders into view is gawked at like a stripper on a building site. ‘Uplifting’ ending aside, The Blackboard Jungle is a bitter and angry movie that implies that the education of children can only be improved by an individual – a strong leader – who is prepared to meet violence with violence. And that men of any age are unable to control their primal desires when confronted with any female under the age of 40. We’re not in William McKinley High any more, Toto.
But enough about Daddy-O and the wrinklies. This is a book about cinematic teens, right? And the best thing about The Blackboard Jungle is the best schoolroom bad boys this side of a Daily Mail editorial. Immaculate in their rockabilly rags, greasy of hair and sneery of lip, these multi-ethnic Bad Bwoys are exactly the juvenile delinquents you’ve always wanted to hang out with. They talk in high-pitched Beastie Boy whines and yelps. They read the Racing News at school assembly. They drive stolen wheels so fast that they knock parked cars a-rolling and a-tumbling into shop windows, ’cos being stationary is strictly Squaresville. And they snap their fingers and bebop to Bill Haley, all day and all night. OK, that last bit might get wearing after 15 minutes or so, but otherwise, this is the gang of your wildest rock ’n’ roll dreams. What’s more, the fantastic Morrow (who famously and tragically died in a stunt-gone-wrong on the set of The Twilight Zone movie in 1982) and his partners-in-grime actually look like boys you would prefer not to meet in an alley no matter what the lighting situation was, unlike your usual podgy whitebread ’50s hood-from-Central Casting. Morrow’s West, in particular, looks like he lives on speed and raw roadkill.
Poitier’s Gregory Miller is from some other planet entirely. Luminously beautiful, he looms over teacher and pupil alike, dwarfing anyone else’s attempts to attract viewer attention, no matter how wildly they overact. He is, of course, the redeemable Bad Lad. But it is still fascinating and bravely progressive that Brooks chose a young black actor to be the movie’s pop idol and moral compass while much of America was still living under pre-civil rights apartheid. How the hell did he convince the studio to risk alienating half of The Blackboard Jungle’s potential audience? Or was everybody involved aware, perhaps prompted by the young’s love of mutant rhythm ’n’ blues, that racism was already the older generation’s problem, and that the coming decade’s politics, art and entertainment would sweep away the last vestiges of Klanism? I know – it’s a lot to project onto a dumb old movie. But someone took the decision, and, although Poitier was already 27 years old and a veteran of six previous movies, it was his impact as Gregory Miller that set him on the road to being Hollywood’s first black Best Actor Oscar winner (in 1963 for Lilies Of The Field) and, in 1967, America’s No. 1 box office leading man.
We soon suss out the eternal triangle being drawn here. Dadier and West are locked in a battle for the souls o
f the class, who, like most humble infantry, are little more than easily led by the toughest tough guy in close proximity. But, in order to win, they have to win over Miller, who, apart from being the coolest and handsomest – and, because he is black, the most authentic – dude in the theatre of war, is tough . . . but reasonable. If he has been a bad boy up to now, it’s not his fault. He’s a strong and intelligent young man – which means he knows when to conform and when not to. Nope, he’s a victim of society, poverty, bad environment and, until Daddy-O comes along, untrustworthy authority figures. It being the 1950s, the best role model for a misguided black boy is a white soldier.
But Daddy-O’s blend of military experience and Psych 101 is a little too blatant at first. After the first fractious class meeting he pulls Miller aside, flatters him with a bunch of shuck and jive about being ‘a natural born leader’, and basically asks him to control the animals for him. Miller seems to agree. But nothing comes that easy.
By the time hierarchy and order are inevitably restored, we’ve had an attempted rape (including an awesome fight scene where the foiled teen rapist attempts to escape Daddy-O by diving headfirst through a window!), a neat exercise in civil disobedience as the boys deliberately get a blackboard exercise wrong, a kid who just grins who’s creepier than all the scowlers combined, teachers sadistically clobbered in a back alley, the symbolic destruction of briefcases and swing-era record collections, a visit to a ‘good’ school where the kids appear to hail from Stepford, the constant backdrop of unbearable train and workshop noise, showing rather than telling us about the distractions and pressures of the big bad city, a racism debate featuring more ‘niggers’ and ‘spics’ than the average episode of Oz, Miller successfully finding that Dadier isn’t quite the anti-racist crusader he wants to be, a violent truck-jacking, and West reasoning that jail time is better than the draft, his blank glare when the rest of the class are watching a cartoon Daddy-O brings into class proving that he’s the kinda guy who even sees laughter as compromise, with his insistence that the real meaning of Jack And The Beanstalk is ‘crime always pays’.
Stranded at the Drive-In Page 3
