Rebel Without a Cause

A man aflame runs direct to camera. A girl of sixteen, stripped to the waist, is whipped by three teenagers. Two cars packed with kids race toward each other in a dark tunnel, skidding into a head-on crash.

None of these opening scenes from Nick Ray’s original story outline made it into the movie of course, save for the heavily modified ’chicky race’, but you get a sense of what he was after. Kids turned bad in the 1950s – and their newly comfortable middle-class parents couldn’t understand why. Ray points the finger right back at them: “You’re tearing me apart” rails Jim Stark (James Dean). Mom’s a cold shrew; Dad’s wearing a pinny.

“If he had guts to knock Mom cold once, then maybe she’d be happy and stop picking on him,” mumbles Jimmy into his shoulder. Yet compared to his macho peers Dean himself represents a softer, more sensitive masculinity that’s on more than speaking terms with Sal Mineo’s evidently gay Plato.

Watching Rebel today, the film’s psycho-dynamics feel coercive, but in grasping for tragedy it does tap an intense adolescent poetry of tumultuous sexual confusion and frustration – channeled through Dean’s extraordinary iconic performance and Ray’s boldly expressionist approach to Cinema-Scope, turning the camera on its head more than once.

Dean was dead before the movie even opened. Natalie Wood died at 43, Mineo at 37. To all intents and purposes Ray’s directing career was over before the decade was out. It remains his most famous picture, even if most of its fans probably couldn’t name the director.

An unmissable film, made with a delirious compassion.

Dave Kehr, Chicago Reader