Banned for many years in Britain, (even the celebrated critic Dilys Powell felt the ban was justified), this hard-hitting Brando movie about a motorcycle gang terrorizing a Californian town is amateurish yet forceful. Like so many movies about alienated youth and teenagers to have been made in the fifties it has dated badly, (for a start the gangs are so old), but this one has a couple of scenes that still feel dangerous, particularly when the gang round-up on Mary Murphy, and at the heart of it there is Marlon Brando as the leader, Johnny.
Brando is big and lumbering and beautiful in his leather jacket; there is a homoerotic Tom of Finland look to him and he is the most charismatic thing on the screen. It is said young American males identified with Brando at the time which says a lot about young American males, though the film is too insular, too like a horror film with the leather clad bikers as monsters, to make much of an impression. (It doesn't crank up the generational/alienation gap the way Nicholas Ray's "Rebel without a Cause" does). And yet it stays in the memory. You can see how teenagers might relate to it.
Brando is big and lumbering and beautiful in his leather jacket; there is a homoerotic Tom of Finland look to him and he is the most charismatic thing on the screen. It is said young American males identified with Brando at the time which says a lot about young American males, though the film is too insular, too like a horror film with the leather clad bikers as monsters, to make much of an impression. (It doesn't crank up the generational/alienation gap the way Nicholas Ray's "Rebel without a Cause" does). And yet it stays in the memory. You can see how teenagers might relate to it.