Columbia chief Harry Cohn immediately hated The Wild One upon viewing it in a screening.

The Wild One was banned in Memphis, Tennessee, when it was first released in 1954.

Sight and Sound, the prestigious British film journal, called The Wild One an important film, one that "shows the collapse of society's defenses under strain." Still, England did not release the film for fifteen more years and when it finally emerged in 1968, it was given an "X" certificate (which was comparable to an X rating in the U.S. and usually detrimental to a film's box office performance).

The New York Daily News complained that the film's "major weakness is that it fails to place the responsibility where it obviously belongs, with the gangs, and their leaders, who are not juvenile delinquents but thrill-crazy adults...filled with horror and sadism."

Time warned that the themes of "boogie and terror heap up in alternations of juke-yowl and gear-gnash to a climax of violence...The effect of the movie is not to throw light on a public problem but to shoot adrenaline through the moviegoer's veins."

Film critic Pauline Kael wrote that "the picture seemed to be frightened of its subject - the young nihilists who said "no" to American blandness and conformity - and reduced it as quickly as possible to the trivial meaninglessness of misunderstood boy meets understanding girl (Mary Murphy), but the audience savored the potentialities, and this clumsy, naive film was banned and argued about in so many countries that it developed a near-legendary status. In this country, young men were saying, "It's the story of my life" for several years afterward. Some of the scenes, such as the one in which the cyclists circle around the frightened heroine, have considerable power."

Marlon Brando, who was unhappy with the end result, publicly called The Wild One a "sin." He felt that the film was a complete failure. "We started out to do something worthwhile, to explain the psychology of the hipster. But somewhere along the way we went off the track. The result was that instead of finding why young people tend to bunch into groups that seek expression, all that we did was show the violence."