The Wild Ride (1960)

Director: Harvey Berman
Writers: Marion Rothman and Ann Potter, based on a story by Burt Topper
Stars: Jack Nicholson, Georgianna Carter and Robert Bean

Index: The First Thirty.

Oh boy! Everything I expected from obscure teen exploitation films like The Cry Baby Killer and Too Soon for Love manifested here instead. I stand by both of those being better than we’re conditioned to expect. I can’t say that here.

This is a pretty dismal and rather unlikeable teen exploitation flick, only an hour long and that at least half an hour too much. Most of it boils down to a dick measuring contest for no particular title except that of far out stud in a small town juvenile delinquent clique.

Top stud when we begin is Jack Nicholson as Johnny Varron, who’s done precisely nothing at this point except force a motorcycle cop off the road. “Chicken!” he says, as the cop hits a tree, and then he goes about his day. We learn a little later that it’s Officer Neely who’s now fighting for his life in hospital.

The cops track him down soon enough and there’s a very telling scene at the station when a sergeant interviews him.

It’s telling for Johnny Varron because he’s a clearly amoral psychopath who doesn’t care a fig about anyone or anything except his status as big fish in a very small pond. Winning out against that cop was nothing to him except a slight boost to that status. If we’re supposed to find any sympathy for him, we don’t.

It’s also telling for Jack Nicholson because it shows for the first time hints at the actor he’d become. His voice was already recognisable in his first two films but his mannerisms show up here too. The confidence is there, the patented Jack Nicholson swagger. The soft, slow pace of his delivery of dialogue is there too. It doesn’t take a lot of effort to hear Randle McMurphy here or even the Joker. The intonation’s on its way, along with the sass and presence, but this feels like the true beginning of the Nicholson we all know from much later in his career.

Sadly, Johnny Varron is just a pissant waste of space, hardly a memorable character for the nascent actor to get his teeth into. He finds a brief moment at the very end of the film, not of salvation but of acceptance and it marks the end not just of this picture but also the legend of Johnny Varron, just a day after it began, at least for us but probably not much longer for his disciples.

After all, his claim to fame seems to be that he races cars. However, when we actually get to a race halfway through the picture, hot rods on a dirt track over ten laps, he’s introduced to the assembled throng as a newbie. Not only is it his first race, it’s likely to be his last, as he wins by bumping another car off the track on the final straight, prompting his mechanic to quit and the car’s owner to throw him out.

The overall approach the film has feels like it ought to be a Roger Corman picture, but it’s unable to reach those heights. However cheap Corman’s films were, we could always see and hear everything we needed to and that simply isn’t the case here. The camerawork is shoddy and sometimes far too shaky. The music ends up frustratingly repetitive with the very same themes played over and over again, especially during the final scenes.

What’s more, the script does a terrible job of introducing characters. I struggled to tell one character from another for the longest time. It doesn’t want to give us their names or even a reason for them to be there, at least until the point we give up wanting to know and then it might let us in on the details. Or it might not.

At least we know who Johnny is, the top dog in this juvenile delinquent wannabe gang. His number two is Dave, who’s presumably a long term friend and also his trusty mechanic. But Dave’s with Nancy now and all the dumb crap he was doing just doesn’t seem important any more. Nancy isn’t into any of it either, so he’s on the way out. Johnny doesn’t want to lose a trusty mechanic, possibly also a friend, and so orders him to ditch the chick. And yes, I mean orders him, even though this gang is so cheap that it doesn’t have a name, let alone colours. It’s like they’re all in high school, except there aren’t any classes to ditch or nerds to rob.

Barny is the most prominent member of the clique in the absence of Dave. IMDb suggests that there are characters called Joyce, Cliff and Ann, but I have no idea who they were. Maybe Ann is the married woman Johnny dumped. I’d thought that was Dave’s girl, but that’s Nancy. Really, it doesn’t matter at all because they’re interchangeable.

Of all the bad aspects to the film, the worst is surely that the script never manages to get past the Johnny/Dave/Nancy triangle. It isn’t even a love triangle, merely a triangle. Johnny only seems more and more pitiful as he tries to keep Dave firmly under his thumb instead of losing him to a healthy relationship. When we finally meet the girl that Johnny dumped, it turns out to be a married woman, maybe Ann, who tells it how it is. “You’re not a man,” she suggests. “You’re an arrogant little child.” And she’s not wrong, folks. Johnny may think of himself as being like Marlon Brando in The Wild One, but he’s just an arrogant little child.

The only time the film picked up for me was at the racetrack. I’ve never attended a hot rod race, let alone one eleven years before I was born, but there’s an authenticity to the track here that is sadly unable to extend to anything else in the picture. Even if it isn’t authentic, it does at least seem that way, especially before the race actually begins.

The announcements seem real. The fact that a couple of hot rods fail to start until they’re given a push by a regular vehicle seems real. Even the commentating feels real, right down to the way that whoever’s voice that is wants to know the condition of drivers bounced off the track during the race. The actual driving is a little drawn out and poorly filmed, but that doesn’t hurt the authenticity.

It looks like the track was the Contra Costa Speedway in Pacheco, California, which was a dirt oval speedway track with the laps only a fifth of a mile each. It closed right after the 1960 season, so maybe this film gained access after it was done but before Interstate 680 was built over the top of it.

Just in case there was a salvageable movie in The Wild Ride somewhere, it was re-released in 1999 as Velocity, with half an hour of additional footage added as a framing story, Joe Richards, a Jack Nicholson impersonator, doing that job as an older and maybe even grown up version of the character looking back. At least Velocity has Dick Miller. This has nothing but an early glimpse at the future Jack Nicholson.