BONUS BLOG -- 1968: WILD IN THE STREETS

What’s it about?

California senatorial candidate Hal Holbrook hatches a plan to pad his support in the electorate by getting the voting age lowered from 21 to 18. In order to get the measure passed before the election, he enlists the help of a major pop star named Max Frost -- a young runaway who commands Beatle-like adoration from millions of American teenagers. But the plan gets out of hand when Max Frost uses the occasion to start a grass roots movement to drop the voting age down to 14 instead.

With mobilized teenagers threatening violence across the country, a compromise is struck to give the vote to fifteen year-olds. But the compromise only further encourages the newly enfranchised youth of America, as they now also demand the right to run for political office -- not excluding the presidency. To pass the amendment, they spike the Washington water supply with gallons of LSD and cajole a two-thirds majority out of a turned-on, mind-blown, psyched-out Congress. The next order of business, of course, is to install Max Frost as president -- and soon he is shipping everyone over 35 to be neutralized at LSD therapy camps.



Is it any good?

I watched this flick on YouTube, so the bad news I don’t have any screen captures. But the good news is that you can watch it too if you want to! And although this is not exactly the greatest movie in the world, it is pretty interesting as a cultural artifact of the 1960s.

Old as I am, I wasn’t around for the sixties, so I have no idea how accurate WILD IN THE STREETS is about the culture and counterculture of the times. My guess is that it’s not very accurate at all since it paints with pretty broad strokes. (Max Frost’s mother -- a stand-in for the older generation as a whole -- is played with very little subtlety by Shelley Winters, if that tells you anything.) But parts of it ring true. For one thing, it’s hard to deny that the laws at the time which allowed 18 year-olds to be drafted to fight in Vietnam but not to vote were certainly unfair. And it’s this unfairness coupled with the rapidly expanding population of young people (who purportedly outnumbered adults at the time) that gives the movie the grain of reality under its layers of escalating silliness.

The cast is also pretty impressive for a relatively low budget picture. Besides Hal Holbrook and Shelley Winters, it features Ed Begley, a young Richard Pryor, a young Larry Bishop, and a handful of media types like Dick Clark in cameos. It was eventually nominated for an Academy Award for film editing -- presumably thanks to a few flashy split-screen montages with bright color washes and that kind of thing. (They really are pretty neat.) And the soundtrack produced a bona fide hit record called “The Shape of Things to Come”, though I’m not sure if the song was written for the movie specifically or if they just recorded a cover of it. The movie, by the way, is not exactly a musical, but there are several full songs since the main character is supposed to be a rock star. In any event, there’s a lot of neat stuff going on in the movie, even apart from the characters and story.



About that story -- it’s not terribly believable. It is a little terrifying to imagine what would have happened if the Beatles had started inciting young people to demonstrate en masse for some cause, but regardless of the numbers involved I cannot imagine any politician actually agreeing to lower the voting age to 15. The bit where the kids use LSD-spiked water to get amendments passed so they can run for office is even more off-the-wall. But the movie obviously needs to get to that point somehow, or else it wouldn’t have a reason for existence. So, implausible as it all is, it’s for a good cause.

Most of the movie could be taken as straight-up wish fulfillment for disillusioned young people. The kids steamroll the adults at every turn simply thanks to their superior numbers and grooviness. But one disappointing thing is that the teenagers don’t seem to have any objective except a pure power grab. Other than not wanting old people to run the show anymore, they don’t really have any clear platform -- yet dumping the old regime seems to be by itself a good enough reason for all the young people in the country to vote as a massive single-minded bloc. As president, Max Frost is most concerned with neutralizing the old people -- that is, anyone over 30 -- so that they’ll never gain power again. The main gear in this machine is to ship anybody over 35 off to a camp where they are forced to drink LSD-laced water so they do nothing all day except wander around in blue robes. Besides this, the only other goal of the government seems to be to establish a hedonist paradise for young people and to get rid of anything that is ungroovy (like a foreign policy).



That’s one half of the story anyway -- the half you might see if you were a young person sufficiently disgusted with the reigning establishment. The other half is a kind of indictment of the hypocrisy of old folks who worship some aspects of youth (like beauty and vitality) but who simultaneously don’t take young people themselves seriously. WILD IN THE STREETS is not really a cautionary tale since the events it depicts are so extreme and unlikely. But it does have a sort of cautionary message about attitudes towards youth. At its not-so-hidden center, the movie advocates a very traditional kind of society -- one where experienced adults are in charge and where young people pass through a kind of regulated wild period on the way to maturity. Permissive adults and adults who inappropriately seek to prolong their youth are the real bad guys here since they are the adults who allow the situation to get out of hand.

But, to be honest, it takes some digging to get down to that message. Rather than clearly impart any single message, WILD IN THE STREETS seems as though it would much rather have its cake (indulge in rabble-rousing youthful rebellion) and eat it too (condemn the people who allow such things to happen). Ultimately I’d say this one is more “interesting” than “good”, but it’s far from a bad movie. If it has any flaws, it’s probably that it cares too much about the mechanics of how this might actually happen and not enough about its characters.