Rebel Without a Cause

Directed by Nicholas Ray
Starring James Dean, Natalie Wood, Sal Mineo
USA, 1955
Not Rated (some violence)

B+

THOSE YEARS
When Rebel Without a Cause was released, it was a novelty. It was one of the very first mainstream films to depict the turmoil of adolescence. Prior to this movie, Hollywood avoided any difficult themes and every family on screen was a template for the perfect, happy American family. The families in Rebel Without a Cause are not perfect. They all have their missteps. I don’t believe there is one family in America that is as superficial and completely joyful as the Brady Bunch and Rebel brings to light the tortures of parenthood and, primarily, the tortures of youth.

Jim Stark (James Dean) is a teenager whose parents have moved around so much just so he will get a chance to make good friends. His parents are good and affectionate and nurturing but they just don’t understand him. I suppose that it is difficult for any parent to understand the struggle of a teenager because they have already passed that awful stage in life and probably can’t or don’t want to recall it. Jim’s family is devoted to him; they buy him whatever he desires but, as any teenager knows, material things can never fill the sense of emptiness and frustration that comes with the age.

We first meet Jim at the town’s police station. He has just been caught drunk on the streets. Rebel Without a Cause is not a spectacular movie. It is the power of several scenes that make the movie so good. The first sequence is one such powerful moment. When Jim’s parents come to pick him up at the station, his father comforts him, his mother chides him, and his grandmother is a bit cold towards him. He yells, "You’re tearing me apart!" and has a private talk with an officer at the station who asks Jim to visit him if he feels the urge to do something wrong again. I think the brilliance of this scene lies in how honest it is. It doesn’t sugarcoat as many movies do and it doesn’t make the teenage situation so extreme. Though the dialogue seems a tad banal, it brings to the surface wounding issues that plague my age group.

What struck me initially about this scene was when Jim tells the officer the weaknesses of his father, who always allows his mother to mock and step on him. Later in the sequence we meet Judy (Natalie Wood) who was found walking the streets alone at night. She too is a teenager and suffers from conflicts with her father. He calls her a tramp and she believes he hates her. Teenagers take everything to heart and calling your children ugly names will inevitably have an effect on them. She, like Jim, does not come from an indifferent family. Her parents know that adolescence is a painful stage but they have no idea how to help her.

At school, Jim meets Judy and her gang friends. They tease him with a switchblade fight and invite him to a gathering that night on a dangerous cliff. Another thing that struck me about the character Jim is that he doesn’t want to get involved in trouble but he wants to prove himself to his violent peers. He accepts the invitation but later asks his father what to do. When his father has no answer, he turns angry. What follows is the famous scene near the cliff in which the gang leader and Jim measure who is more cowardly by seeing who will jump out of their car first as it nears the edge of the cliff. The gang leader is killed.

Jim meets Plato (Sal Mineo), a social misfit who comes from a broken family, and begins a strong friendship with him. With Judy, whose involvement in the gang is, of course, but a facade, Jim begins a romance. These three characters are lonely and without friends and they create their own little world by caring for each other. The climactic sequence is both painful and saddening.

Rebel Without a Cause has been said to be about juvenile delinquency and what spawns it, but, to me, it has never had anything to do with that subject. For me, it’s always been about what troubles teenagers the most: family, frustration, isolation, and the certain urge to prove something. It is sensitively created by one of the lesser known poets of the screen, Nicholas Ray, who gives the film a distinct pictoral quality. James Dean, in his second acclaimed role of 1955 (after his debut in Elia Kazan's East of Eden), has been dubbed a Marlon Brando for youth. His performance as Jim Stark is splintering and so sensitive. He is not macho at all but he reflects what is nearly always behind the tough exterior of young men. Despite his tragic death two movies later, he remains very much alive in our culture, an epitome of anguish-ridden youth. His image and his red jacket have become the symbols of the distressed youth cry. This is by far his best performance. Natalie Wood gives a good performance here but would top herself in Elia Kazan’s Splendor in the Grass, an equally moving film about adolescents struggling with sexuality. Sal Mineo plays the timid Plato and he gives a career-changing performance.

Some say Rebel Without a Cause’s elements are dated and, yes, several elements are. However, Rebel makes itself not about issues that tortured teens in the ‘50s, but about the central, inner, sometimes self-inflicted pains that plagued teens then and still, to this day, plague teenagers. That is why I can relate to Rebel and why generations of youth will. Rebel Without a Cause is not a great movie, but parts of it are simply brilliant. It is still one of the best teenage movies ever made, though segments of Truffaut’s The 400 Blows and many scenes featuring Timothy Hutton in Ordinary People moved me, too. Rebel Without a Cause will be relevant for as long as adolescense remains the period of angst.

By Andrew Chan

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