Me? I voted for Max Frost!

5 comments November 4th, 2008

 

There are plenty of lists on the Web today naming great political films, and they mostly stick to the usual suspects — MR. SMITH GOES TO WASHINGTON, CITIZEN KANE, THE CANDIDATE, ELECTION and other well-known movies. Those are all fine films (especially ELECTION, a movie that looks sharper and smarter every time I see it), but there’s one political film that always seems to get forgotten in the effort to be serious.

I’m talking about WILD IN THE STREETS, a Roger Corman-produced slice of teensploitation from the far off year of 1968 (when, not entirely coincidentally, politics did get genuinely wild in the streets at the Chicago Democratic convention). Christopher Jones plays Max Frost, a rock star who tumbles into the White House on a tidal wave of youth voting. Once he tastes that power, Max wants more of it, and before you know it, he’s forcing everyone over the age 0f 30 into prison camps where they’re forcibly dosed with LSD. (I did say it was made in 1968, remember?)

Like the name implies, it’s a pretty wild film, and while everything doesn’t work, it’s strange and fast-paced enough to make you forget the slow spots. Jones is great as Max, bringing a real sense of menace to the role, and Richard Pryor has an early role as Max’s comrade, Stanley X (!) Hal Holbrook, Shelley Winters and Ed Begley Sr. fill out the grown-up roles, and be sure to watch for Barry Williams — aka Greg Brady — playing the young version of Max. There’s a big, would-be-profound plot twist at the end that you’ll see coming a mile away (what do you expect when you appeal to ever-younger youth?), but it actually works in a twisted, see-how-bad-the-’60s-could-get kind of way.

The best part of the movie is the genuinely solid soundtrack. The song “Shape of Things to Come” became a garage rock staple, and the rest ain’t bad either. The movie is available on DVD, paired with with Corman’s post-apocapyptic hippie epic GAS-S-S-S!, which, believe it or not, is even stranger.

Here’s the original trailer for WILD IN THE STREETS:

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