Warner Home Video VHS & DVD
1 hr 51 mins
Director: Nicholas Ray
Recently re-released to video, director Nicholas Ray’s “Rebel Without a Cause” has not so much mellowed with age as it has ripened into something more than nostalgic kitsch: It has become the epic of American teenage angst (and I mean that as a compliment). Shot in glorious Cinemascope and Warnercolor, “Rebel” seems larger than life even on the diminutive confines of a home theater screen, with director Ray’s trademark widescreen close-up shots of his actors’ faces filling the screen like giant emotive planets.
The story of “Rebel” is reflective of the WASPish, American middle class paranoia of the day (in films anyway): the fear of society breaking apart. We are introduced to teenager Jim in the opening credits, drunk and playful on a suburban sidewalk, and Ray films his head and torso so close up that his image is one that jars the viewer (Dean reminds me of a teenage Gulliver in Lilliput, only with quaffed hair). Jim is picked up by the police and taken downtown where he is detained with Judy (Natalie Wood) and Plato (Sal Mineo). Eventually Dad (Jim Backus) and Mom (Ann Doran) come to pick up Jim and both stop to listen to the police rant on the evils of the youth of the day while Jim coolly scoffs at their tirades. Jim knows it is at home where the real story lies.
The audience soon learns that Jim’s mom is a tyrannical alcoholic and his emasculated dad makes feeble yet touching attempts to connect with Jim. We witness apparently nightly arguments and the problems that are manifested in Jim, whose rebellious acts in other towns have caused the family to move many times. “You’re tearing me apart!” Jim cries to his parents and, shouted through James Dean’s ultra sensitive anguish, we believe his torment.
Jim, however, also has a sensible paternal side that he enacts with Plato and Judy. Through a series of famous film events that include the switchblade fight at the Griffith Park Observatory and the chickee run, he starts his own surrogate family with the two and it is here that the film’s strange poetry launches it into a unique stratosphere. We feel for these kids because they are not condescended to or canonized: They have deep problems, and the unembellished performances of Wood, Mineo and Dean, and the largeness of director Ray’s camera, are the film’s crux.
What really makes “Rebel Without a Cause” stand apart from other films of the day is its heated emotional tones acted out by a curiously mature looking Dean (he was 23 when he made this film). In fact, the film handles all its teenage characters as their own idealized version of adults, with long passages of dialog (especially in the abandoned house) that seems to have been hiccupped from a Eugene O’Neil play. This disproportionate reality embellishes the material: Jim’s story seems more mythic with the violent aftermath as the only plausible outcome.
–Joe Ramirez
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