Rebel Without a Cause

It was during this week 55 years ago that Rebel Without a Cause, one of the most iconic films of the period, was released, just about thirty days after its star, James Dean, perished in an automobile accident. I've seen the film a few times, but watched it again this weekend.

The first thing that struck me was how incredibly dated it is, at least in its attitudes about juvenile delinquency. The JD film was a staple of movie theaters those days, and they were usually cheap exploitation flicks that preyed on the fears of the respectable classes about the lawlessness of the underclass. The teen-age culture was a relatively new things in those days, really only dating from World War II, when the combination of men at war and working women left teenagers (a word that only goes back to the 1920s) alone for the first time.

The first films about this new class of young adult were mostly squeaky-clean (think of the Andy Hardy movies), but after the war, pulp novels and quickie movies about kids committing crimes were popular. The Blackboard Jungle, from earlier in 1955, was one of the first more prestigious films to tackle the subject, and Rebel Without a Cause upped the ante, casting stars and being filmed in CinemaScope.

It also did two profoundly different things from the usual JD film: it focused on the teenagers themselves, and their point of view, with the adults in the periphery and mostly clueless; and the kids were middle-class. Most assumed that delinquency stemmed from poverty and broken homes, but director Nicholas Ray wasn't interested in that story. The troubled kids of his film are from wealthy families.

Ray used a lot of research for the film, but one can't help but be bemused by its depictions of teenage hoodlums today. The film begins with Jim Stark (James Dean), drunk out of his gourd, hauled into a police station for public drunkenness (he finds a wind-up monkey on the street and playfully puts it to bed under a sheet of newspaper). From the opening scene in the station, it would appear that every night is busy, as there are several kids waiting to be processed. They include Natalie Wood as a girl who has a conflict with her father, and Sal Mineo as Plato, who is there with the family maid, since his mother is off on vacation. He's brought in for shooting puppies.

Wood and Dean talk with patient but firm Ed Platt (best known as the Chief on Get Smart), and are released to their parents. Dean's are his domineering mother (Ann Doran), and weak-willed father (Jim Backus). His biggest problem is with his emasculated father, who can't stand up to his mother (later in the film he's wearing her frilly apron). Dean wants a strong father, and ends up finding it with himself.

The film covers about twenty-four hours, consisting mostly of Dean's first day at a new school, which is quite memorable, in that he gets in a knife-fight; gets in a "chicken run," which ends with the death of his rival in a fiery auto wreck; falls in love with Wood; and gets involved in a shootout with police. All of this is handled without much subtlety, and one can't help but smirk with contemporary notions about the behavior of the teens. Yes, juvenile delinquency was a problem in those days, and was the fly in the ointment of an otherwise idyllic period of history (at least for white America). But you can't help but wonder what these people would make of the Crips and the Bloods.

If one steps back and views the film without that kind of prejudice, it's really very moving. Yes, the pop psychology and oatmeal sociology is obvious and simplistic, blaming the parents for everything. But at its heart, Rebel Without a Cause is a fine character study of three kids, all of them longing for family. When the three end up in abandoned mansion in a kind of surrogate family, with Dean as father, Wood as mother, and Mineo as son, the pathos is palpable and transcends the news-worthiness of the subject matter.

Above all, Rebel is shot by Ray expertly. He didn't know quite what to do with such a wide screen, but he managed it ably, with some terrific framing, especially in a scene with Dean on a staircase, between his mother at the top and his father at the bottom. The knife-fight and chicken scenes are thrillingly shot and edited, and the use of the planetarium, to suggest both the cosmic insignificance of our lives and the inevitably of death, is handled well.

The film is also well-acted. Wood and Mineo were nominated for Oscars (Dean was nominated that year for East of Eden), and Backus, who would later be best known as Thurston Howell III, is heartbreaking as Dean's dad (this time I caught an inside gag when Dean says a line as Mr. Magoo, who of course was voiced by Backus).

Being one of only three films that Dean would ever make, Rebel is the one that has most forged his legacy, with his iconic red jacket and blue jeans and his Brando-esque method acting (the scene in which he covers the toy monkey with a newspaper was improvised, but ended up being repeated when he covers Mineo's dead body at the end of the film). His line reading to his parents, "You're tearing me apart," never fails to give he a chill, and it's hard to watch his performance without wondering, "What if?"

If Rebel Without a Cause ends up being a snapshot of its time period that is not socially relevant today (they didn't know how good they had it), it is still a classic of its kind that bears viewing.