Avis Metacritic

The first and best biker movie.

This Stanley Kramer-produced film is the original biker movie.

Brando’s tight denims and defiance prefigured James Dean’s archetypal rebellion.

Legions of Brando impersonators have turned his performance in this seminal 1954 motorcycle movie into self-parody, but it’s still a sleazy good time.

Laslo Benedek’s expert megging keeps the action taut and suspenseful, drawing top performances from a capable cast.

Aside from Brando's performance, The Wild One hasn't aged well. Although its leather and chrome iconography and Brando's hipsterism inspired biker and rebel cults for decades to come, it fits all too snugly into the musty category of "cautionary tale." Its story ultimately reduces Brando's biker to the quintessential crazy mixed-up kid. [27 Jan 2002]

Although the reality of it goes soft and then collapses at the end, it is a tough and engrossing motion picture, weird and cruel, while it stays on the beam.

Inspired by an episode when a mob of youths on motorcycles terrorized a Californian town for an entire evening, this feature is long on suspense, brutality and sadism. Marlon Brando contributes another hard-faced 'hero' who never knew love as a boy and is now plainly in need of psychoanalysis.

It’s a mix of impressive on-location cycle spills (the roaring-down-the-empty-road opening is still a grabber) and embarrassingly hokey rumbles on obvious poverty row sound-stages. Lee Marvin is superbly grungy as a supporting troublemaker, and his character doesn’t sell out by reforming for the love of a weedy but decent woman.

This clumsy, naive film was banned and argued about in so many countries that it developed a near-legendary status.