At its final stages, the 1979 revolution of Iran ruled out multiple leftist revolutionary bodies, as well as moderate Islamists, to assume a traditional-fundamentalist Islamic identity. This came as a surprise to observers and the left-out participants alike. The highly modernized appearance of the urban scenery, as well as the prevalent intellectual discourses, made it hard to predict that the revolution would consolidate as exclusively traditional-Islamic in the end. Contrary to this feeling of unpredictability, an examination of popular media of the time reveals extremist tendencies of the masses, not necessarily presented in intellectual discourses and objective structural analyses. Turning to this largely ignored source of data, this paper has employed pre-revolutionary popular cinema to reveal the mass’s preparedness to break into violence in order to confront all manifestations of the prevailing modern social order. In this cinema, I have focused on the representations of traditional patterns of masculinity, i.e. the so-called Lutis and Jahels, and outlined their reactions to the fall of their familiar social world under the modernizing Pahlavi regime. These were arguably the most popular cinematic characters: male superstars rose to fame and were established in the Jaheli roles they performed. That is to say, the audience cherished the heroic traditional men that felt the unsettling wind of change and resisted it. I have performed a meticulous content analysis on more than 100 movies produced from 1958 until the Revolution, trying to rebuild the social world represented in them and the protagonists’ everyday practices. The study reveals that the modern social order is understood to radically contradict traditional masculine values of chivalry and responsibility for one’s neighborhood (as an extended family), and is confronted by the protagonists. More importantly, a transition to more violent forms of confrontation takes place as we move from 1958 to 1978. In the first decade of Jaheli cinema, Jahel condemns manifestations of modern ethos only in words: he tries to “talk” the community out of the emerging morality. In 1969, however, with the production of the seminal movie Qaysar, the confrontations decisively turn into revengeful violence. Given the popularity of Jaheli movies and self-identification of the audience with its male heroes, this radicalization reveals that a large part of the urban population has the potential to see fundamentalist Islam as the realization of its hopes and desires, a conclusion that eliminates the element of surprise attributed to the Revolution’s ultimate character.