Conformity and Challenges in the Eisenhower and Kennedy Years 377known role was as Jim Stark, a high school “rebel” who ran into trouble with
both the school bully and the law in Rebel Without a Cause [a role, inciden-
tally, that Brando read for]. He symbolized the dissatisfaction of many young
people with the materially abundant but conformist world in which they lived.
In the film, Jim befriends a troubled young kid, played by Sal Mineo, who gets
shot by cops. With Rebel Without a Cause, and his “bad boy” persona, and
tragic but romanticized death, Dean was, like Kurt Cobain in a future gen-
eration, a symbol of the entire era.
Brando had a much longer career than Dean, and was already well-known
by the early 1950s. His role as Stanley Kowalski, a brutish worker married to
a southern belle with an alcoholic and mentally ill sister-in-law in A Streetcar
Named Desire made him a star and gave him his “anti-hero” status. He was not
a sheriff wearing a white hat riding a steed to the rescue, but a loud and angry
man surrounded by troubled people. Brando also starred in, and won an Oscar
for, his role as Terry Malloy in On the Waterfront, a film directed by Elia Kazan,
who had “named names” before HUAC earlier. In this movie, Brando played
a young man troubled by corruption and violence among union officials [not
a coincidental theme given Kazan’s past career as a snitch] who eventually [as
Kazan had done, but under much different circumstances] stood up for “good
guys” and helped rid the union of its old bosses. But Brando’s iconic role in
that decade came in The Wild One, a 1953 “outlaw biker” film set in California.
Americans were nearly hysterical about the threat of thugs on motorcycles.
Brando played Johnny Strabler, the leader of the Black Rebels Motorcycle
Gang. The film was nearly hysterical in its depiction of the bikers, who
engaged in cruel pranks, not violence like the Hell’s Angels would in the next
decade, and the “threat” they posed to decent American values. When the
gang “invades” a small town called Wrightsville [obviously not “Wrongsville”],
the townsfolk are frightened but some, especially the young women, are curi-
ous or even attracted. When one young woman, seeing Johnny’s jacket with
the gang’s name on it asks him “What’re you rebelling against, Johnny?”
Brando utters the famous response, “Whaddya got?” Like Dean, Brando was a
rebel, not a conformist, and their popularity, like that of jazz musicians, rock
stars, and others, clearly indicated that millions of Americans, especially but
not limited to the young, were deeply moved and drawn to this “other” cul-
ture in a period of conformity and “traditional” values.