Fourteen or Fight!

In today's environ of political stagnancy we may no longer remember why, but the last months of the 1960's were terrifying to the older generation, and we have WILD IN THE STREETS to prove it. This is the film that made good on the ever-looming threat of amok youth: that they'd spike the water supply with LSD, lower the voting age (the age to vote didn't get lowered to 18 until 1971), and send everyone over 30 off to camps for 're-grooving' (1). The oldest guy in the film is the original Ed Begley as a youth-hating politician advising California senator Hal Holbrook not to make a deal with the devil, or a young rock star, in this case Max Frost (Christopher Jones, who looks like James Dean's reincarnation times Martin Sheen).

Max is handsome and charismatic, and has a fine drummer in Richard Pryor; Kevin Coughlin is his 14 year-old queer super genius accountant and guitar player; Diane Varsi is the ex-child star resident free spirit. Shelly Winters is the broad comic mom, oh my... her schtick has not aged well. Songs include "Shape of Things to Come," which was a hit. Another one is "We're 52%"  and "Fourteen or Fight!" encouraging youth to go on a rampage if the voting age isn't lowered. Eventually it is, Frost is elected prez, baby, and the organized jihad against the older generation begins in earnest.

What's interesting is that this film came out a year before Woodstock, but it's already prefigured in "the biggest block party in history" that narrator Paul Frees calls Frost's Sunset Strip demonstration. Frees also adds that the older "people die of shock just watching TV." Oh if only, man, if only.  The songs were written by the Brill team of Cynthia Weil and Barry Mann who wrote songs in the following year's ANGEL ANGEL DOWN WE GO, which would have been more of a hit had the whole charismatic hippy cult leader thing not have suddenly gotten a terrible rap thanks to the Manson murders (WILD would probably have been pulled from release had it come out a year later).

But that was a year away, let's focus up on 1968, the year this film came out, hitting a nice little nerve during a very turbulent and hopeful time. Up until this point in history, the youth had a pretty serious voice in the country, especially on campus, where they regularly made the news protesting and holding sit-ins. It was the year that battles against sexism, racism, censorship, and sexual taboos and groups like the Rolling Stones could gather hundreds of thousands at the drop of a hat, and no cop on earth could make them disperse. If they wanted, these bands could start a real revolution with their long hair and their rock music.

But the fear that they would has since ceased to matter, overdoses and ennui saw to that. In the end it's really all about Altamont and the fearful way Melvin Belli and assorted city planners are forced to accommodate the crowds and not the other way around. You can feel the unease as the old powers bow to the whims of the young in GIMME SHELTER. And the way the wild anarchy of druggie California weirdness in turn overwhelms the music itself.

On that note, it's to the credit of TV director Barry Shear that he can depict Max's massive shows of youth revolt solely by tinted stock footage of the Sunset Strip, a bonfire, parked motorcycles, stalled traffic, random shots of crowds dancing, tinted windows and shots of blinking signs, footage of rock concert and earlier love-in crowds, skylines, and the Capital Building. An assortment of faces from the counterculture come and go: Bobby Sherman, Peter Tork, Gary Busey. Meanwhile there's probably no more than a dozen people in the whole movie but if you're drunk or ten years-old hearing about it at school it can seem like the most dangerous, expensive movie in the world.

Writer Robert Thom based this on his short story, "The Day it all Happened, Baby." Thom wrote a lot of films about overbearing moms and their beautiful Apollonian sons, like CULT OF THE DAMNED (the mom sleeps with the rock star boyfriend of her heavy daughter), BLOODY MAMA (Mama sleeps with her son's gay lover, Bruce Dern), DEATHRACE 2000 (son runs over old lady), LEGEND OF LYLAH CLARE, and something called ALIAS BIG CHERRY, so obscure it's not even available on Netflix streaming! WILD is though, and man is it ever. Streaming, man, like the angry youth streaming single file into the nation's capital to demand change, baby. But dig, Thom was born in 1929, so you do the math, he was old, daddy, old. Pushin' 40 when this film was made - it's got a Sebastian Venable midlife crisis victim's fingerprints all over its subtexts. Come to think of it, has Robert Thom ever written a straight love scene? Like a genuine no-nonsense straight people being genuinely romantic kind of trip? Oh wow... no, there's no sex in WILD IN THE STREETS, and the one moment of intimacy comes with Jones and another boy. Oh Thom. As Diane Varsi notes with a smile, "methinks you boys are fags."

That's all good though, and awesome thanks to AIP's notorious lack of concern about morals. There's also plenty of psychedelic light show madness, and teeny bopper blonde hair, while Max sings: "Just listen to this music / That's what you gotta do." The music still has traces of AIP's patented corniness; lazy horn sections remind you that the older generation making the film harbor unconscious resentment for their drive-in demographic. Shelly Winters eventually has to bow and gurgle to please them, and methinks we're meant to feel bad for her, or America. But America has always thrived on dissent. Sometimes the greatest patriots are those who would elect a mentally unstable sociopath "just to see what would happen." (you know who I mean). 

There's lots of eerie predilections for the future here, like in the protest song to lower the voting age: "we got the numbers now / we want the vote now / it's time we started rockin' the vote." Wait, isn't that what MTV says? But lowering the voting age to 14?  That's ridiculous, especially when it's put across like Ricky Nelson on Ed Sullivan thinking all he has to do is wear a headband and the counterculture will make him their king.

After WILD was over, I turned cable back on and there was this show on History Channel about '69 - The Sexual Revolution' and Hugh Hefner talking about how he and Shel Silverstein appreciated the free love movement more than the youth because they had grown up in a more conservative time. And I thought, like wow, dig, my generation is living the exact reverse!! I saw enough of it growing up in the 1970s that I've come to feel I'll never--no matter how debauched I become--live that free again, and the younger kids are threatened not by my moral rigidity, but my lack thereof; my preaching of a time before safety, health, environmentalism, and antidepressants which are a lot like the daily LSD supplements in the re-grooving camps set up by Max. It was a time when the idea of freedom and the banners of sex, drugs, and rock and roll had permanently (we thought) done away with the nanny state Safety First Clydes and Anita Bryants. But our nation is nothing if not bi-polar, half terrified family man, half crazed druggie biker. That's the beauty of America - when you're always fighting yourself you just can't lose. 

NOTES
1) Firesign Theater - Waiting for the Electrician or Someone Like Him