Graine sauvage

The great Conrad Hall (the original Outer Limits) photographed Wild Seed in black & white and his mastery of light and shadow fit the noir mood of this melancholy story. The late Michael Parks is excellent and Celia Kaye in an early role perfectly projected the innocence of am earnest young girl inexperience in life. An experienced actress would have come across as artificial and "Hollywood." Their growing love story is completely believable. The direction by Brian Hutton is effective. Much of the story takes place on freight trains which gets a little tedious but the logistics of shooting these sequences had to have been complex and somewhat dangerous. It was produced by Marlon Brando's production company and it would not have been a stretch to see a 50s era Brando take the Parks role but not in 1964. Parks was more Dean than Brando in demeanor and it's hard to understand why Then Came Bronson hasn't been released on DVD when every piece of junk is. Turner Classics made a bad decision to pair this with Parks' and Ann- Margret's Bus Riley's Back In Town for a 2AM showing Nov. 25, 2017 on TCM Underground instead of giving it an 8PM time slot with a guest when more people would have tuned in to appreciate this little-seen gem. These films are all wrong for Underground which focuses on psychotronic, whacked-out films.

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!

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.

An obscure film set in the mid/late 1950's about a youth running away from her grandparents (NewJersey) to find her father (CA). She is unexpectly rescued and befriended enroute. Trust and friendship blossom as they travel by freight trains to California. The ending begs a sequel. Both genders will enjoy, independently or together. ///---Where can I get a copy ?!?!?!?---/// The "Journey of Natty Gan" is a lightweight, rambling version of this tale.

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?