All Slights Deserved

It's a reflection of just how vibrant a time the late sixties were, both in the cinema and the world at large, that a film like Wild in the Streets is largely forgotten today. In fact, this tale of a rock star who becomes President actually earned an Oscar nomination for its modish editing. This represented a rare distinction for a film by AIP , a company best remembered today for Roger Corman's Poe adaptations but whose teen-centric productions had grown increasingly more stylish and 'turned on' to the counterculture as the decade continued, with work such as The Wild Angels and The Trip . Although the idea of the euphoria surrounding pop star being exploited for political ends had been explored by Peter Watkins in Privilege the previous year, that film had centred on the notion of the celebrity as a Warholian facade ripe for manipulation. Wild in the Streets offers a premise that's superficially more progressive but ultimately far more reactionary. Max ...