Rebel Without a Cause review
The film, which gave James Dean a big part of his definition as a
Hollywood icon, was released in 1955 and shook up one of the country’s most
bountiful times with a sultry, restless story of youth going to hell in a
handbasket.
Now, in a 40th anniversary revival, “Rebel Without a Cause” opens
today for a week’s run at the Castro Theater in San Francisco. Cinerama,
WarnerColor . . . it’s all beautifully clean in director Nicholas Ray’s muted
shades that gave the film a noir complexion — this is, after all, one of
the greatest black and white movies ever made in color.
You can have a James Dean feast at the Castro this week. “Rebel
Without a Cause” is preceded by a quirky 11-minute compilation of his
screen and wardrobe tests from “Rebel” and “East of Eden” that was
pieced together from Warner Bros. vault materials. Dean seems foppishly full
of himself, but at times so raw he’s about to break.
Plenty of people, some of them movie critics, like to dismiss
“Rebel Without a
Cause” as oozy, slightly provocative sentimentality, shaped into amusing
and dated angst by Dean, whom Hollywood has been trying to replace for 40
years (he died in 1955 after finishing “Giant”).
But it takes only a blink to visualize “Rebel Without a Cause” as
a movie so audacious it can only be poetry, a kind of cinematic free verse
whose tone saves it from caricature and the now disregarded sociological
assertion that parents are entirely to blame for the alienation of kids.
FAMILY VALUES
In the proverbial back then of 1955, “Rebel Without a Cause” boldly
went where almost no Hollywood film had gone before. It needled family
values in the mid-
’50s, when America had healed itself after war, and the proud, rich,
muscular nation had honeymooned and borne an unprecedented number of
children to fill up burgeoning tracts of homes.
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The movie came along like a slap, saying something was dangerously wrong.
And it gave audiences the lost and tender Sal Mineo as Plato. Tragedy was
inevitable.
These were rich white kids, stalked by trouble, by violence, by a sense
of being trapped in a universe that could blow up at any time — a metaphor
introduced on the kids’ high school field trip to the Griffith Park
Observatory and powerfully threaded throughout the film. Will the world end
at night? That’s what Mineo’s hurt boy wants to know.
For teenagers at the time,
“Rebel Without a Cause” was a tone poem that hit home. In its switchblade
scene at the observatory, with glittering Los Angeles — the Promised Land
– spread out before them, the teens are huddled in their own violent
universe. The knife fight scene somehow miserably echoes the gang stand-
offs of today.
Natalie Wood, playing a girl whose father is so sexually repressed
he’s filled with rage, sits on the fender of a dark Mercury and pants with
excitement. She was
the first girl the movies ever allowed to have sexual hysteria on the
screen.
(Growing up in L.A. in the ’50s, I drove a ‘49 Ford convertible in high
school, and I always fantasized about Natalie Wood — who was in my older
brother’s class — and longed for her to sit on my fender. My buddies and I
made bleak trips to the observatory, drank cheap beer from quart bottles and
smoked Camels, but no girls ever came to sit and pant. We needed the Judy
that “Rebel Without a Cause” turned us onto.)
HUNTED PUPPY
James Dean was so cool in the film that guys ached to be him and spent
hours training their hair into messy pompadours. He’s like a lost puppy
being hunted by trouble. But he’s also a cat stalking elusive prey, and he
even seems at times a sinewy cool serpent ready to strike. But he’s always
lonely.
Looking back at the movie, it now seems natural that Dean took that death
drive to Bakersfield. Looking at all his movies now,
you’re glad he never got to be old and fat and foolish like Brando.
Forty years after Dean’s tormented “You’re tearing me apart” outcry
to his ineffectual, bickering parents, “Rebel Without a Cause” retains a
throbbing, edgy essence and an off-kilter intelligence (what a twisted joke
to cast Mr. Magoo, Jim Backus, as Dean’s bumbling, wimpy dad).
Director Ray — who fought studio executives in their desire to cast the
film with Tab Hunter and Jayne Mansfield — formulated his poem in shades of
night. But Dean’s eyes up on the Castro screen are so blue they look like
deep Pacific water or tempered steel. The red jacket he wears sets him apart
like a male siren. If he had gone off that chicken run bluff, the universe
really would have exploded. When he reached for Woods’ hand it was one of
the sexiest connections ever made on screen.
STRANGE DEATHS
The movie has ghosts, and a still living Dennis Hopper. Its stars —
Dean, Wood, Mineo — all died in strange ways . . . Dean’s Porsche crash,
Wood’s mysterious drowning off Catalina while boating, Mineo’s murder near
his West Hollywood apartment. Mineo might have been the first boy perceived
as gay in the movies.
“Rebel Without a Cause” is not the greatest movie ever made, but
a look every decade or so gives its richness and layers and moody manner
surprising staying power. The crack in the pretty picture of America goes a
lot deeper than we thought, thanks to Ray’s brooding vision.
