Wild in the Streets

Christopher Jones

A garish kaleidoscope of a movie, Barry Shear's Wild in the Streets is more a bizarre artifact of the 1960s than good cinema. This would be 1968 comedy posits Christopher Jones as Max Frost, a rock star whose rise in popularity enables him to become the virtual dictator of the United States. He sends everyone over thirty five to concentration camps where they are dosed daily with LSD. Groovy. Of course, if your mother happened to be an abusive Shelley Winters, at her most grotesque and self indulgent here, the end result might have been the same.

Christopher Jones and Diana Varsi

It must be said that, despite the plethora of name talent, this is just another AIP quicky trying to cash in on the then topical "generation gap". Director Shear throws a lot of trickery at us, multi-screens, freeze frames, colored filters, faux cinema verite, and lots of television parodies, but the film seems like series of skits thrown together. The satire is feeble whether it is directed at youth or seniors. The film received an Oscar nomination for best editing, but that just goes to show that the Academy often mistakes quantity for quality. Shear, who mostly worked on television and directed at least one interesting exploitation flick (Across 110th Street), seems to be trying too hard to pump up thin material.

Richard Pryor

The songs that Christopher Jones and his band mime to were written by Brill Building veterans Cynthia Weill and Barry Mann. They offer up a reasonable simulacrum of the rock hits of 1966. There is a Bo Diddly rip, something every garage band of that era attempted, and a pretty good Yardbirds pastiche entitled "Shape of Things to Come" which rode to #22 on the pop charts. The well crafted tunes are little too tame and seem just behind the curve. The tell is the presence of Mike Curb as the soundtrack's producer. A noted schlockmeister, Curb was not down with the hippie youth. So, instead of something edgy we get bubblegum.

The band is made up of Hollywood flotsam. Rising comic Richard Pryor plays the drums and Joey Bishop's son, Larry, plays a musician with a prosthetic hook. A nod to Moulty who drummed for the Barbarians after losing his hand.

Diana Varsi

The only reason to watch this film is if you want to indulge in 60s nostalgia, suffer from senile dementia or if you are too tired to change the channel. The supporting cast and cameos are strange if not rich: Hal Holbrook, Diana Varsi, Millie Perkins, Ed Begley Sr., Melvin Belli, Dick Clark, Pamela Mason, Army Archerd, Walter Winchell, Barry Williams (Greg on The Brady Bunch), and Kevin Coughlin. This is the best vehicle for the troubled (and pernicious, perhaps) Christopher Jones and his James Dean like charisma. A year spent filming Ryan's Daughter while jousting with David Lean ( Jones' voice was eventually dubbed over) soured him on the movie biz. Robert Mitchum, badly miscast in the film, compared working with Lean to building the Taj Mahal with matchsticks. If you enjoy the flip, campy humor of the Batman TV show of this era, you might like Wild in the Streets, but I don't think either has dated well.

Shelley Winters meets the band