Wild in the Streets (1968)
(On Cable TV, November 2020) You can often learn more about an era by looking at its middle-grade genre movies than its masterpieces: the id is closer to the surface, and the lack of even trying for timeless relevance can ground the work into the obsessions of the moments. So it is that American Pictures International’s B-grade Wild in the Streets spins one simple but mind-boggling statistic—that in the late 1960s, “52% of the US population was under 25”—into a wild satirical comedy in which a lowering of the voting age leads to the youth taking power. [Note: According to the data I could find, the share of the under-25 as a percentage of the total US population peaked at 45.8 in 1967, with the median age of the US population at an all-time low in 1970 at 28.1 years—in other words, take the film’s central statistic with a grain of salt.] It’s a film that starts out crazy with a capsule demonstration of a rotten family situation, and then wilder and wilder until the end. Clearly made to court the youth audiences, Wild in the Streets is unabashedly crammed with musical numbers, teenage heartthrobs and pointed barbs at older people: Christopher Jones is compelling in the lead role of a teenage rock superstar turned president of the United States, Shelley Winters is thoroughly detestable as the protagonist’s abusive mother, while Hal Holbrook is a likable actor in an ingrate role as a politician (also abusive toward his kids) who gets swept by the youth wave—and Richard Pryor has a small role as a teenage activist! Music is a big part of the film, and for good reason — “14 or Fight” is insanely catchy, far more than the film’s lead anthem “The Shape of Things to Come.” Given the film’s outright satirical aims, it’s no surprise if it ends up taking a real issue (the drive to lower the voting age to 18 across the United States during the late-1960s) and pushing it to extremes. You’re really not supposed to take it seriously: By the film’s last third, anyone over 30 is pushed in mandatory retirement, and sent to re-education camps where they are kept docile with a permanent done of LSD. And then the pre-teen set takes aim at the “older” teenagers… but I’ve said too much. In reflecting a funhouse version of the youth movement that peaked in the alte-1960s, Wild in the Streets does remind us of the incredible demographic forces that were such a strong engine for change in the Sixties—something often buried deep under the headlines and news clips of the era. It does have a good sense of humour about itself (as the coda suggests, the teenagers aren’t getting away with anything here), a really good energy (as per its Academy Award nomination for Best Editing) and enough craziness to make the satire worthwhile. It’s surprisingly fun and teaches us quite a bit about 1968 without the dourness of the then-emerging New Hollywood.