Full Throttle on Hell's Highway

With Brando as its brooding star, 'The Wild One' (1954), loaded with defiant nihilism, exemplifies the renegade alienation and freewheeling machismo that became trademarks of the 'biker' genre and paved the way for the Hollywood 'outlaw biker' movies that followed through the 1960s and '70s. In the first full study of the biker movie, Bill Osgerby explores the history, context, nature and significance of the 'biker' movie phenomenon. From the genre's origins in the 'teenpic' industry of the early 1950s, he traces the 'biker' movie through its belligerent double decade heyday to its decline and subsequent re-birth during the 1980s, '90s and first decade of the 21st century. Special attention is given to the biker movie's seditious nonconformity and sexually charged menace, themes that ensured the 'chrome opera"s status as a film genre that has appealed equally to the hucksters of exploitation cinema and the underground auteurs of the art-house circuit.