I showed my students one of Marlon Brando's iconic early films, The Wild One, produced by the ultimate well-meaning liberal film-maker Stanley Kramer (of Guess Who's Coming to Dinner fame). This is Brando as Rebel Biker, the legendary image that James Dean passionately emulated -- to the point where he once went to a party dressed like Brando's Johnny from this film, knowing Brando would be there. (He was crushed to see his hero in a tux.) This is Brando as "saintly motorcyclist" image-inspiration for perhaps the most notorious line in Allen Ginsberg's Howl. This is the great nihilist-youth who, when asked, what are you rebelling against, answers, "whaddaya got?"
But amid all the image that this film has constructed around Brando, it's easy to forget that he was as great an actor as ever lived. The story itself is actually pretty mundane, and presented in a fairly typical fashion in the Kramer style (though directed by Laszlo Benedick): after Johnny's gang leaves a motocross race they'd disrupted, the cop turns to a racing official to talk about how such gang members seem to go out of their way to find trouble, and that they usually end up finding it. (I waited for a flashing caption to say: "MORAL OF THE STORY HERE!") But even in these early moments of the film, you can see Brando providing nuance to the character. While the rest of his gang openly mocks the races and the "cheap" trophies the winners get, you can see it in Brando's face that despite his pose of cool, he wants very much to belong. The trophy is something he does want, to signify his desire to be a part of the society that he outwardly rejects.
One of his "boys" steals the second place trophy off the table as they are being kicked out by the local cop. ("First Place was two feet high!" he explains to another member, who had got mad that "Johnny only won second place, huh?") After Johnny's very cool, arrogant exit, putting on his shades and starting up his cycle defiantly, we cut to a shot of him leading his gang on the highway, and the trophy has been tied to the front of his bike. Afterward, it becomes the central symbol of the film.
As he arrives in a small town, he makes conversation with Kathy, niece of the owner of Bleeker's Cafe, where the gang hangs out while one member gets fixed up at a doctor's office after an accident involving a really old man too old to drive occurs. He offers it to her, but she tells him, no, you ought to give that to a girl if you really liked her... ohhhh...! but soon Johnny finds out her dad is the sheriff, and he gets annoyed. The gang is about to take off when they find that a rival gang has shown up, and their leader, Chino (a brilliant, I mean brilliant performance by Lee Marvin), has gleeped the trophy.
It turns out that both gangs were part of one big club that has split up. Chino needles Johnny, dishing out the disses, and eventually they begin to fight when Johnny tries to take the trophy back. "Oh, no, Johnny. Don't take Chino's trophy away. Chino needs it, to make him feel like a big strong man." Chino's mock-whining further needles Johnny, but he is right: Johnny needs that trophy to establish an identity. Eventually, Chino takes the trophy and hands it to Kathy: in a big show, he presents the trophy, "signifying absolutely nothing," to the girl, who will watch as "her hero" gets sucker-punched by his old friend, and the two have a vicious brawl that will eventually lead to the town's near-destruction.
But Chino is wrong; that trophy, while really signifying absolutely nothing, since it was a stolen item, is Johnny's way of communicating with a world he has fought all his life. He has rejected any attachments to girls, and he refuses to make long-term plans. (We don't go just one place, we just go, man! he tells Kathy.) When he gets Kathy alone in a park, she asks him if he still wanted to give the trophy to her. He doesn't directly answer her, but at the film's end, the trophy does become an acknowledgment of her kindness in helping him out of a jam that could have led him to be charged in connection with the accidental death of the cafe's elderly barman.
And all the while, Brando slides back and forth between this confident cocky angry rebel and this confused youth who wants so desperate to be heard and accepted in a world that has already rejected him long before he had a change to rebel against whatever it has. The film is a classic because Brando's acting makes it so. A Streetcar Named Desire is a beautifully written play, irrespective of whoever plays the leads. Brando is the gold standard against which all other Stanley Kowalskis must be measured, but Williams' poetry surely is a key part of the play's success when adapted for Hollywood. The Wild One was a run-of the-mill social melodrama that Brando's performance uplifts beyond the ordinary.
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