| Vintage Pulp | May 3 2010 |
The fast and the furious.
Above you see the Swedish promo art for the seminal youth rebellion drama Vild Ungdom, aka The Wild One. When it premiered in Stockholm, moviegoers heard this:
“Pops, you pick up on this jive, man?"
“What?”
“You pick up on this jive, this crazy music here, man? Did you dig the rebop?”
“What?”
“The rebop, dad! The rebop! He’s a square, man. Don’t you get this at all?”
We’d love to have seen the subtitles, because after that the dialogue gets so crazy even we can’t transcribe it, but that’s The Wild One—a different type of cinema, and a new kind of star in rough and tumble Marlon Brando. Some people think 1955 was the zenith of the American empire. If that’s so, then The Wild One is the proverbial writing on the wall that change was in the wind. Brando and the rest of his Black Rebel Motorcycle Club roared across movie screens in Sweden for the first time today in 1954.
“Pops, you pick up on this jive, man?"
“What?”
“You pick up on this jive, this crazy music here, man? Did you dig the rebop?”
“What?”
“The rebop, dad! The rebop! He’s a square, man. Don’t you get this at all?”
We’d love to have seen the subtitles, because after that the dialogue gets so crazy even we can’t transcribe it, but that’s The Wild One—a different type of cinema, and a new kind of star in rough and tumble Marlon Brando. Some people think 1955 was the zenith of the American empire. If that’s so, then The Wild One is the proverbial writing on the wall that change was in the wind. Brando and the rest of his Black Rebel Motorcycle Club roared across movie screens in Sweden for the first time today in 1954.
