The Wild One

Man, kids were weird in the 50s. It's a good thing most of the classics are about adults, because otherwise Old Hollywood would be as incomprehensibe as Mars. Apparently the way to hang with the cool kids is to act like a total doofus. And to look like you're 40. It would even make sense if everyone in the gang acted and looked like that, but the leader, Marlon Brando, still seems "cool" enough in our sense of the word, so you're wondering why he would choose to hang out with clowns - instead of, say, other people who have some cool.

Watching one particular scene of motorcycle gange buffoonery confirmed what would have been my academic paper on the ambiguity between frightening and funny, and how this would answer Bakhtin's theory about the Carnival.

Speaking of which, it just occurred to me that had this movie not been a Brando piece, I bet it would have gone down in the annals as B-list teen-sploitation.

Marlon Brando is ridiculously good-looking, the original James Dean. So it pains me to say that he never had a great butt. I always maintained that the butt is the index of the male physique overall, and young Brando's was like a preview to the infamous shape of Dr. Moreau.