Wild Seed

I rarely watch a movie twice, but I have seen this many times. I fell in love with Michael Parks. This film is so moving and I love the slow character development. Yes, Ms. Kaye's acting is a bit stiff, but I think as the movie goes along, you begin to feel her fall in love with him. It was for me, a movie that I hated to end. This movie can be found now on YouTube for free. Enjoy.

Had this little film been made five or ten years earlier, it might have achieved minor classic status. Unfortunately, it allows us an image of a 1950s style rebel that showed up on screens in 1965, a year after the Beatle invasion and the hippie movement had begun. Bad timing! But not a bad movie, by any means. Celia Kaye, who was briefly hyped for stardom, plays a runaway girl searching for her biological father. On the road, she meets a Jack Kerouac/James Dean drifter, in a black leather jacket of course, played by Michael Parks, who was then being hyped as the new James Dean - unfortunately, Dean style acting had gone out of fashion a few years earlier. Too bad for Parks, because he really had a nice quality to his performances, if something about him seemed to belong to an earlier decade. He had his last big shot at potential stardom four years later playing a biker in Then Came Bronson, sort of TV's watered down answer to Easy Rider, but when it didn't click in the ratings, his career never recovered. Hollywood was looking for a new kind of late sixties/early seventies star; Dustin Hoffman, Al Pacino, Robert De Niro, etc. Anyway, back to Wild Seed: the relationship of the two leads, as they experience anecdotal misadventures, is truly touching and quite compelling, as you wait to see if friendship will bloom into romance. One of those films that almost never plays anywhere anymore, not even on Turner Movie Classics. Worth rediscovering, certainly!

Universal released some odd balls during this period, in a faint attempt at developing new talent and making some higher-brow pix.

They tried to give "Wild Seed" the art house treatment by having the world premiere at the short lived Playboy (yes, that Playboy) theatre in Chicago on May 5, 1965. Some dates were in the midwest that summer, and it was often double billed with "McHale's Navy Joins the Air Force". All in all, this film barely had a release and is VERY obscure today. How did you people even see it?

Back in 1967 Wild Seed received a TV showing on one of the networks' night at the movies. I was so delighted with Michael Parks' performance, I went out of my way to see the film again at a second-run movie house. This is a film which should still be available. It's surely one of Parks' best cinematic appearances and makes one wonder how his career never really took off. (Perhaps he figured after playing Adam in The Bible, he'd given his all to start mankind on its road to perdition.) This would be a great movie to receive the Anchor Bay DVD treatment. In truth I remember the actual details of Wild Seed rather sketchily but the character of the drifter has remained in my memory for four decades. Wild Seed is a realistic depiction of alienation and redemption.

America must have been asleep at the wheel when this movie came out - Michael Parks was one of the best emerging actors of the time - in the footsteps of James Dean and Marlon Brando - just a bit more sane and unlikely to be self-destructive. Yes, back to the movie - the plot was simple, but the character development, the cross-country journey, spoke to the angst of the American youth in post-World War and pre-Atomic Apocolyptic era. Love began to take on new relationships and new meaning, and the USA class-caste system began to breakdown along the lines of the theme of this movie in that very decade. Good luck trying to see this one - can't find it anywhere - it is just a great black-n-white movie that will forever be in color in my mind.