A more able director than the TV-veteran Barry Shear might have better nurtured the parodic core of Wild in the Streets (1968), but greater tonal cohesion would rob the film of the odd tension that makes it perfect October viewing ahead of yet another most consequential election of our lifetime. The film plays “pin the tail on the donkey” with a host of ‘60s tendencies: Nixon, Reagan, and the Kennedys all get their knuckles rapped with sneering namechecks; acid gurus, antiwar activists, leftists, and pop idols receive hyperbolically threatening portraits. If there’s a message here, it’s calling for a pox on all their houses. Like the counterculture youth that are both its subject and primary audience, it’s a petulant mess of contradictions that is both intentionally and unintentionally funny in practically equal measure. Whenever Shear seems in on the joke, he’s a scene or two away from a stone-faced Lumetian thought experiment. Drowning in all of his rich material, it’s clear that Shear did not find a thread to follow. Intrepid viewers shouldn’t have the same problem.
Christopher Jones, squinting and whimpering like a butterfly-collared James Dean, stars as Max Frost, a pop millionaire who converts his army of fans into a voting bloc rabid enough to propel him to the White House. After a brief run-through of Frost’s childhood that includes witnessing his parents have coercive sex as a toddler and blowing up his father’s car as an angry young man, a narrator creepily informs us that he matured into a twenty-something “leader of men, and of little girls.” In addition to fronting a psychedelic group called The Troopers, he controls over a dozen companies in the music business and travels with a retinue of ‘60s archetypes (typewriter heiresses, PhD revolutionaries, bisexuals, playboy bunnies) who’ve had it with the establishment.
Hal Holbrook’s senatorial hopeful, Johnny Fergus, seeks Frost’s celebrity endorsement for his platform to lower the voting age to 18. The pop star responds on live television with the anthem “Fourteen or Fight!” Behind the scenes, Fergus and Frost renegotiate the song’s lyrics and the platform simultaneously, landing on the neutered compromise “Fifteen and Ready.” The successful campaign snowballs quickly, embroiling Frost in political dealing and galvanizing his fans (the 52% majority of Americans under 30) to riotous demonstrations across the country. These mass protests come courtesy of resourcefully integrated stock footage of the antiwar movement, which provides the film with a magnitude beyond its budget.
Shear can’t decide how circumspect we should be toward pop revolutionaries, whose demolition of the gerontocracy includes concentration camps for everyone over 35. The description sounds amusingly, unambiguously absurd when typed out on a screen, but the movie never shakes the ancient anxiety over youthful excess. If all of the above doesn’t seem to add up to a worthwhile night at the movies, be prepared to marvel at Shelley Winters’s turn as Frost’s mother, whose flight from postwar harpy, to turned-on lovechild, to Jackie O. stand-in, to delusional burnout encapsulates the entire decade better than any boomer-bait CNN documentary.
Wild in the Streets screens this evening, October 24, at BAM on 35mm as part of the series “The Baffler Presents: Facing the Future.”
