Based on a 1947 incident when the town of Hollister, CA, played unwitting host to a motorcycle convention of 4,000, The Wild One scared a lot of people in 1953 who thought that, thanks to Marlon Brando's affecting portrayal of Johnny, the brooding, leather-clad leader of the “Black Rebels,” their town might be next. (The British Board of Censors banned the film for fourteen years just to be on the safe side.) The first of the Cycle cycle of American films choreographed for bikes (spectacularly photographed by Hal Mohr), it was also an early entry into the j.d. genre of the fifties, and probably the most explosive among them in its depiction of the random violence of angry young men without a war on their hands. But The Wild One was irksome in other ways, too, for produced by Stanley Kramer, it locates the roots of maladjustment not in the rebellious heroes but in the very town they terrorize. Like Fritz Lang's Fury, it forced on the audience an image of themselves as a small-minded, bitter people whose “justice” was more vicious than the rebels' terror.