The camera looks down a stretch of straight country highway, then in bold, white letters appears the following: "This is a shocking story. It could never take place in most American towns—but it did in this one. It is a public challenge not to let it happen again." The words fade away to be replaced by Marlon Brando's voice speaking in a southern drawl. "It begins for me on this road," he says. "How the whole mess happened I don't know, but I know it couldn't happen again in a million years. Maybe I coulda stopped it early, but once the trouble was on its way, I was just going with it." A crowd of leather-clad motorcyclists roar past the camera, and with the confident declaration that what follows is an aberration, Stanley Kramer launched The Wild One in 1954. The truth of...