Wild in the Streets is the story of rock and roll singer Max Frost, whose massive popularity allows him to become both a political force and a messiah of the “youth liberation” movement. After folk singer Phil Ochs turned down the role, producers went with James Dean look-and-sound-alike Christopher Jones.
Max first gets political by backing the Senatorial ambitions of Johnny Fergus, a Kennedy clone, played by Hal Holbrook. Fergus supports lowering the age of suffrage from the then-current 21 to 18.
At a rally for Fergus, Frost electrifies the audience by advocating a voting age of 14 and debuting the rabble-rousing protest song “Fourteen or FIGHT!”
The masses take this message to heart and after some back-and-forth between the political establishment and Max’s band and brain-trust, everyone agrees to the less controversial platform and slogan: “Fifteen and Ready.”
Fergus is swept into office on the youth vote. Max’s gang then use the only member of their entourage old enough to run for office – blissed-out former child star and acid casualty Sally LeRoy – as their puppet in Congress. They succeed in amending the Constitution to allow Max to run for the Presidency, which he does on the Republican ticket. Thanks to a wave of public anger over a police massacre of young demonstrators--a truly chilling cinematic premonition of the Kent State Massacre, which was still two years away at the time--Max gets elected and almost immediately assumes dictatorial powers
Wild in the Streets is a remarkable film on a number of counts, over and above its tremendous commercial success. Though decades of hindsight render its satirical ambitions all too obvious, it was taken as a dead serious Orwellian warning upon its release. This is most likely because Wild in the Streets is, at its core, a deeply conservative film. In fact, upon close inspection, its politics are damn near reactionary.
