'50s films that stoked the "60s

In the mid-1950s, when I was growing up in West Philadelphia, there were six movie theaters within walking distance of my house: the Byrd, on Baltimore Avenue; the Commodore, on Walnut Street; and the Locust, Nixon, Rivoli and State, all on 52nd Street.

The Rivoli seemed to show nothing but black-and-white films that no ten-to-12-year-old would consider, like Niagara or The Picture of Dorian Grey. The Byrd was good for catching up on Francis the Talking Mule or Ma and Pa Kettle. The Locust played sophisticated fare"“ also of no interest to my pals and me— like Mr. Hulot's Holiday or the odd British import.

The Commodore was the place where, during the opening of It Came From Outer Space, when the 3-D meteor shower rockets in toward earth, a new boy in the neighborhood, who'd seen it before, earned his spurs by flinging a handful of pebbles into the air and setting everyone screaming. The Nixon featured cinematic excellence in the form of Four Guns to the Border and Riot in Cell Block 11.

But the State had the best Saturday matinee. Admission there was 15 cents (plus a nickel for candy bar or a dime for a bag of popcorn). For this outlay you got, maybe, a Joe Penner short, three cartoons, a chapter in a Don Winslow or Dick Tracy serial, and a double feature (say, The Crimson Pirate with Go For Broke). Sometimes you got to see filmed races between funny men in cars or on bikes. And if your ticket stub bore the winning number, you won a box of jujubes.

During yo-yo season, you could come on stage to perform tricks. Even if you lost in the first round, you'd receive a coupon for an ice cream sandwich.

Venturing downtown

Once you'd attained a certain degree of maturity and wisdom"“ which in my home occurred between the ages of ten and 11"“ you were permitted to take the 42 trolley (later bus) downtown, where another near-dozen, mostly first-run movies played. The Mastbaum, Fox, Trans-Lux, Goldman.... I forget the rest. If we were unable to wait for their general release, it was here that my friends and I caught House of Wax and Rear Window and Abbott and Costello Meet Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.

Admission cost more and bought fewer extras at these palaces than in the "'hood, but Center City offered other treats. Penny arcades filled with pinball machines. Army/navy stores loaded with the surplus from recent wars. Mustard pretzel carts and Horn & Hardart automats. Bookstores, where we peeked at nudist magazines until the owners threw us out. Downtown took us a lot farther from our parents than 52nd Street.

Learning from John Wayne

We didn't go to movies for cathartic soul-cleansing or philosophical challenge or the appreciation of montage and mise en scène. If we saw a comedy, we wanted to laugh. If we saw a Western or war movie, we wanted excitement. But we couldn't help being schooled. We learned patriotism and foreign policy from John Wayne. We learned that the FBI would protect us from Communists (Walk East on Beacon) and giant ants (Them).

We understood that while it might be fun to ogle Marilyn Monroe, we really ought to settle down with someone perky and wholesome and steadfast like June Allyson. (I can't tell you how shocked I was to learn, even 50 years later, that she had been two-timing Dick Powell with, of all people, Dean Martin.) And we knew to a certainty that evildoers would be punished.

It went down as easily as vanilla.

The film that shook my world

Then, on December 30, 1953— a year in which I had rushed to see Peter Pan— a movie opened in New York City that would shake my world. I don't recall when or where I first saw The Wild One, but within the 12 months after I did— a year that also saw me imbibe Rebel Without a Cause and Blackboard Jungle "“ the experience, interacting with the hormonal additives by which age had seasoned me, so altered my viewing tastes that soon I was plunking down my allowance for admission to I Am a Camera (at, of all places, the Locust), The Man With the Golden Arm, And God Created Woman, and Baby Doll.

I doubt market researchers had fingered pre- (or even post-) bar mitzvah Jewish boys as a likely audience for a paean to motorcycling like The Wild One. Though commentators would link the film to "disaffected youth" and "juvenile delinquency," Marlon Brando was nearly 30 when he made it; so was Lee Marvin; and Mary Murphy was 23. (Rebel, with James Dean at 23, Sal Mineo at 15 and Natalie Wood 16 "“ though looking older than Murphy "“ was a closer demographic fit.)

Generic jukebox music

The Wild One didn't bind us with matching cultural adhesives, either. The music on Bleeker's juke box, to which Brando's gang partied, was an assortment of anonymous instrumentals styled to rouse the temperatures of earlier generations. (Blackboard Jungle, on the other hand, blazed with the embedment of Bill Haley's Rock Around the Clock over its opening credits, a clarion hit whose relevance overshadowed the fact that when the students smash their teacher Richard Kiley's jazz records, they call for Frank Sinatra and Joni James, not Chuck Berry or Laverne Baker.)

And motorcycles"“ motorcycles were about as forbidden to us as swastika tattoos or Gentile girl friends.

But for the next decade and a half, when I would strike up a lasting friendship with a kid my age from Philadelphia or Boston or New York, one point of commonality on our resumes"“ not always, but often"“ was our repeated viewing of this film, three times, six, a dozen.

Learning from Mad and Jean Shepherd

It came down to Brando's Johnny Strabler. He was revelatory: tough; sensitive; tender; cruel; leader of the Black Rebels but always apart; catnip to the ladies but utterly contemptuous of squares. We were already receiving instructions about the evils of the establishment, the costs of conformity and the dangers of repression from Mad Comics and Bob and Ray and Jean Shepherd and other resisters of the Eisenhower '50s— voices that, a decade later, would help us establish the parameters of an actual counter-culture.

And here was Brando, three years before Jack Kerouac, laying down the ecstasy of the road and the end-all and be-all of "Go." His lines— "I don't like cops," and "Nobody tells me what to do," and, most famously, when asked what he's rebelling against, "What've you got?" were catechistic and as valuable to us as Machiavelli's instructions to the prince.

We were assessing, building, equipping ourselves for our own futures with the salvageable and useful, whether we eventually wound up as doctors or lawyers or something even farther off the expected grid than tribal chief.

James Dean's example

None"“ well, damned few"“ of us would follow Johnny into the nihilistic pit where Stanley Kramer left him: no family, no job, no girl, not even the stolen runner-up trophy from a race he hadn't run.

Fortunately, we also had Dean's searching, struggling, wrenching Jim Stark to draw from. In Rebel, it is Corey Allen (born, by the way, Alan Cohen) as Buzz Gunderson who flaunts the Wild One ethic.

"Why do we do this?" Jim asks before they race their stolen cars toward a fiery doom.

"You've got to do something," Buzz answers.

That proves insufficient. "I want to do something right," Jim tells his parents later. A boy has been killed, and they must not pretend it didn't happen. "We are," he says, "all involved."

That sense of involvement, that wish for proper action would also surface within kids like me. But first I needed to get my hands on a motorcycle jacket. Its black leather and silver zippered pockets offered the best hope for offsetting my acne and horned rims.♦


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