Product: The Wild Ride (1960)
Rating: 5.0
Great Satire Mixed with the Real Thing
None of the reviewers I've read so far seem to mention the structure of this movie - they go right into Nicholson, love or hate him, and also the beatnik scene, love it or hate it. The structure alone is quite compelling, but I won't give it away.The movie is a classic portrait of the demented combination of qualities that seems to have characterized the generation following the Beats, those heavily influenced by the slang and cool of "On The Road" but oblivious to most of the existential elements, but not to all of them. This is the heart of the message here. They don't read books or carry guns; they don't do DMT or LSD; homosexuality does not exist, but, and it's a big but, there is an intensity that emanates from conditions not unlike those faced by the hippies in the 60's and ethnic inner city gangs in the 90's: namely, absentee parenting, no meaningful work, weak enforcement of the "rules" and their accompanying arrogant desperation in which sudden death is no biggie: it's part of the scene.Nicholson is the white Eddie Murphy here, with one exception: he doesn't need 300 years of slavery to give him a reason to humiliate white guys: it's youth out of control, at war with the world and with itself, in a pure form that alone makes this film very much worth seeing.Jack Nicholson is not an actor. He is a punk. He is also an intellectual. His films that I've seen either portray him as pure evil, "Batman" or as a cracked egg that sooner or later gets cooked: "One Flew Over the Cuckoos Nest," About Schmitt, this film. The atonements are brief because Nicholson lacks patience if you've noticed. His acceptance of his fate is just as irreverent and cocky as his mocking of it and, oddly, this makes the moral of the story all the more powerful, even if JN can't stand the smell of it. Jean-Paul Sartre, get out of the way, you're blocking the action, man. This film is pure gold.I could go on and on, but I think young people should watch this movie because they are going to be confronted, not by Jack Nicholson, but by the big, great question: There's a right way to live and a "dead scene." Basically no more than a shell game, you get to pick a shell. (You're free remember? Hopelessly, eternally free.) And there's simply no thumbing off Jean-Paul. Pick the wrong one and you're "history man, you don't exist." The only nonsense associated with this film is the negative criticism of the script by wannabe reviewers. The script is one of the slickest forms of satire I've ever seen and the structure of the film I alluded to at first takes full advantage of this virtue.Our world currently is presented with this big question and is far less adept at addressing it than the juvenile delinquents in this movie: thumbing your nose or whining on and on about how bad things are is so "then" man. The answer is simple, though. You - yea You - stop stinkin up the place and get a life.