Rebel Without a Cause (1955)

James Dean gives a riveting performance as a teenager groping for identity and love from parents, peers, and an adult society he believes to be alien and oppressive. Rebel is also the film that forever linked Dean to the restless 1950s generation. Dean plays Jim Stark, a troublemaker who, when the viewer sees him for the first time, has caused his parents to move from one town to another before settling in Los Angeles.

The boy is soon picked up by police for being drunk and disorderly. A patient cop, Ray (Edward Platt), learns from him that he is smothered at home by superficial love from his parents, (Jim Backus) and (Ann Doran), but that neither ever listens to him or gives him advice. Moreover, Jim resents his mother because she so thoroughly dominates his weak-willed father. While Jim is waiting at the police station for his parents, who must break off a dinner date at their swanky country club to bail him out, he notices Judy (Natalie Wood), a lonely girl who has been picked up for walking the streets after curfew, and Plato (Sal Mineo), a disturbed rich kid whose family is always traveling and who has been brought in for killing a litter of puppies.

Challenged by gangleader Upon entering his new high school for the first time the next day, Jim spots Judy and asks her for a date. She rejects him flatly as she gets into a car driven by her hot-rodding, leather-jacketed boy friend, Buzz (Corey Allen). Buzz is surrounded by a group of followers, all sporting the zippered, black-leather jackets of the day. The gang makes fun of Jim and speeds off. Later, when the class attends a lecture at the planetarium, Buzz confronts Jim, picking a fight. Knives are drawn and Jim bests Buzz, but the fight isn't over. Jim accepts Buzz's challenge of a "chickie run," in which both boys are to drive beat-up cars at breakneck speed to the edge of a coastal cliff, diving out before their cars carry them over the edge to certain death. Whoever jumps from the car first is, of course, a chicken, a coward not worthy of recognition by the group or a share in its activities.

That night the teenagers gather at the lonely cliffside area, and Jim and Buzz roar off in their junk-heap hotrods toward the cliff. Jim jumps out at the last minute—but a strap on Buzz's leather jacket catches on the door handle of his car and prevents his escape. The auto plunges over the cliff, taking him to his death. Jim takes Judy, who is in shock, back to her house. He discovers that she's as confused about her relationship with her parents as he is about his. Jim later tries to tell his father and mother about the death of Buzz, but their reaction is concern about their own position, his mother insisting that they move again (her standard response to any crisis). His father will not stand up to her, and in his frustration Jim attacks his father, knocking him down before fleeing.

He picks up Judy and Plato, and the three go to a deserted mansion. There they are sought by Buzz's thug friends—Crunch (Frank Mazzola), Goon (Dennis Hopper), and others. Crunch is shot and wounded by Plato, who has been terrorized by the gang. By this time Judy and Jim have assumed an almost parental role toward Plato, with the pathetic trio banding together like a family under siege. When a policeman investigating the break-in enters the mansion, Plato shoots him as an intruder and then flees, taking refuge in the planetarium.

Jim, Judy, and their parents, with the weeping housekeeper of Plato's family, arrive at the site where a cadre of police has set up something of an armed camp. Jim persuades Plato to let him inside, calming the frenetic youth with the assurance that all will be well if the boy will just surrender. As a precaution, Jim removes the bullets from Plato's gun before stepping outside with him. When Plato sees the brigade of police outside, he panics and begins to run. An officer shoots him dead in the belief that Plato is about to fire. Jim weeps for the misguided boy, dead in his arms, as his father finds the courage to stand up to his mother at last, telling his son that they will work things out. Jim and Judy embrace in an expression of solidarity.

Though its indictment of parents today seems a little anachronistic, Rebel remains a powerful film thanks to director Nicholas Ray's, forceful and compelling direction. Ray spent hours researching hundreds of teenage police cases before filming. He shot the CinemaScope movie in black and white for a few weeks during preproduction to get the mood and feeling for the muted color patterns he would later use in the final color print.

Rebel also draws heavily upon the presence of the intense and fascinating Dean in order to transcend what might have been merely a teenage exploitation film. The young actor's appearance here electrified audiences, especially teenagers who went on to identify with this powerful symbol of their alienated generation. There is much of Marlon Brando's character from The Wild One (1954) in Dean's supercharged performance. Critics accused Dean of mimicking Brando's early brooding, mumbling delivery, but Dean was later recognized as an actor of singular stature. Natalie Wood and Sal Mineo, although fine in their roles, serve mainly as dramatic foils for Dean's brooding exploration of self.

When Ray first suggested this film to Warner Bros., executives enthusiastically supported the idea but proposed as stars, of all people, Tab Hunter and Jayne Mansfield. Ray rejected this recommendation and refused to make the film without Dean and Wood. After a struggle, he got them. Dean's performance immediately prompted a cycle of youth films. Much of what followed in the next decade—with the exception of The Blackboard Jungle (1955)—was of questionable merit at best, Rebel moved the clean-cut juvenile ideal of the past into the adult world of film noir. Not surprisingly, what has now become a cult picture was originally genuinely disturbing to adults. They saw it as promoting violence, indicting parents for spoiling their children, and dwelling on madness, the morose, and death.

Dean was killed just as his career began to expand toward greatness. He died much the same way Allen did in Rebel, speeding at more than 100 mph in a racing car on a public highway in California. Besides killing himself, he seriously injured two other people. Only two hours before his death, Dean was stopped by a traffic cop and given a ticket for driving 75 mph in a 45 mph zone. He took the ticket with a smirk and remarked flippantly, "So what?"

CAST:

PERFORMER, CHARACTER

James Dean, Jim Stark

Natalie Wood, Judy

Sal Mineo, Plato

Jim Backus, Jim's Father

Ann Doran, Jim's Mother

Corey Allen, Buzz

William Hopper, Judy's Father

Rochelle Hudson, Judy's Mother

Virginia Brissac, Jim's Grandma

Dennis Hopper (in his first film),Goon

Marietta Canty Plato's Maid

Platt Ray, Robert Foulk

PRODUCTION:

Producer, David Weisbart

Director, Nicholas Ray

Screenwriter, Stewart Stern based on Irving Shulman's adaptation of "The Blind Run," a story by Dr. Robert M. Lindner

Editor, William Ziegler

Cinematographer, Ernest Haller