The Wild One

The first and best biker movie. Read full review

This Stanley Kramer-produced film is the original biker movie.

Brando’s tight denims and defiance prefigured James Dean’s archetypal rebellion. Read full review

Legions of Brando impersonators have turned his performance in this seminal 1954 motorcycle movie into self-parody, but it’s still a sleazy good time. Read full review

Laslo Benedek’s expert megging keeps the action taut and suspenseful, drawing top performances from a capable cast. Read full review

A well-acted, soft-centred example of pre-rock rebelliousness with one of Brando's finest performances, it features the celebrated exchange between local lawman's daughter Mary Murphy and Brando: "What are you rebelling against?" - "What have you got?" [31 Aug 2014, p.48]

Aside from Brando's performance, The Wild One hasn't aged well. Although its leather and chrome iconography and Brando's hipsterism inspired biker and rebel cults for decades to come, it fits all too snugly into the musty category of "cautionary tale." Its story ultimately reduces Brando's biker to the quintessential crazy mixed-up kid. [27 Jan 2002]

Although the reality of it goes soft and then collapses at the end, it is a tough and engrossing motion picture, weird and cruel, while it stays on the beam. Read full review

Inspired by an episode when a mob of youths on motorcycles terrorized a Californian town for an entire evening, this feature is long on suspense, brutality and sadism. Marlon Brando contributes another hard-faced 'hero' who never knew love as a boy and is now plainly in need of psychoanalysis. Read full review

It’s a mix of impressive on-location cycle spills (the roaring-down-the-empty-road opening is still a grabber) and embarrassingly hokey rumbles on obvious poverty row sound-stages. Lee Marvin is superbly grungy as a supporting troublemaker, and his character doesn’t sell out by reforming for the love of a weedy but decent woman. Read full review

Effectively banned in Britain until 1968, Brando's biker seems disarmingly tame by comparison with the wild angels he spawned. Yet the film isn't half bad as it sets up characters and situation with neat economy, tracing the seeds of explosion when the Black Rebels ride into town, are detained by a minor accident, and hang around trading insults with a rival gang. Read full review

This clumsy, naive film was banned and argued about in so many countries that it developed a near-legendary status.