Rebel Without a Cause ***** (1955, James Dean, Natalie Wood, Sal Mineo) – Classic Movie Review 658

James Dean gives a mesmerisingly exciting and touching performance as alienated youth Jim Stark, in the 1955 film Rebel Without a Cause, based on an original story by the film’s director Nicholas Ray.

With his brooding, reticent-seeming, inarticulate persona, James Dean became an overnight screen legend as the personification of the restless American teenage youth of the mid-Fifties. After five uncredited bit parts in movies, he was spotted by director Elia Kazan on Broadway and cast as the crazy mixed-up kid Cal Trask in East of Eden (1955).

It was a huge, sensational hit, earned him an Oscar nomination and turned him into a megastar overnight. The Warner Bros studio acted quickly to put their new star in a tailor-made showcase for his new image.

And so James Dean follows up East of Eden with a film with exactly the same theme, but transplanted to modern-day California. Rebel Without a Cause (1955) is based on an original story concocted by the film’s director Nicholas Ray, originally titled The Blind Run, with a screenplay by Stewart Stern.

Again Dean gives a mesmerisingly exciting and touching performance as Jim Stark, a dysfunctional, tearaway youth alienated from the starchy, misunderstanding middle-class Eisenhower-era America of the day and his emotionally abusive parents. His father (Jim Backus) is weak and hen-pecked, his mother (Ann Doran) frosty and domineering.

But at the same time, there’s hope and possible freedom and liberation, as Jim is tentatively reaching out for love (with Natalie Wood’s sympathetic girl-next-door Judy) and for rather homoerotic, caring friendship (with Sal Mineo as the desperately hurt, lonely and soulful Plato Crawford, who adores him).

Jim has had a troubled past in towns elsewhere. So his family has had to come to a new town where they hope he’ll find nice new friends and he hopes to find the love that he doesn’t get from his parents. And he does indeed find some new friends, as well as also some enemies in the town’s wrong crowd. But Jim must still prove himself with the local high school bullies, in a switchblade knife fight with their leader Buzz Gunderson (Cory Allen) and a life-endangering ‘chickie’ game, where Buzz and Jim race each other in stolen cars hurtling towards a seaside cliff, the first to bale out being a chicken.

This time Wood and Mineo were Oscar-nominated for their impressive, touching, charismatic performances, and so was Ray for his original story. Ray researched L.A. gangs by riding around with them for several nights. In the final scene where the camera pulls away from the planetarium observatory, it is Ray who is seen walking towards the building.

Dean originally wanted his friend Jack Simmons, with whom he was living at the time, to play Plato, but he is cast in a small role as Cookie. Mineo said that on the day his death scene was shot, Dean never let him out of his sight the entire day.

The screenplay, direction and above all acting still have the power to move and thrill, and of course both star and movie are glowing icons of their time. The film look glorious in Ernest Haller’s CinemaScope and WarnerColor cinematography, keeping it fresh, lively, ‘modern’-looking and current. The movie was to be shot in black and white, and some scenes were already filmed that way, when Warner Bros happily decided to switch to colour.

Thereby hangs a tale. Warner Bros were reminded of their licensing agreement with 20th Century Fox enforcing all CinemaScope films to be shot in colour. Darryl Zanuck of Fox stated: ‘We believe that any picture, regardless of subject matter, is better if made in colour.’ This was enforced at 20th Century Fox and their licensing agreements with other studios prevented any CinemaScope production from shooting in black and white before 1956 when Spyros P Skouras, president of 20th Century Fox from 1942 to 1962, relented and creative decisions about CinemaScope productions were finally at the discretion of film makers and their studios.

Leonard Rosenman’s jazz-based score is a major feature of the movie, much of it sounding very West Side Story.

Showing again in UK cinemas in April 2014, the film is in beautiful, gleaming condition, restored by Warner Bros in collaboration with The Film Foundation. With funding from them and GUCCI. Speaking at the restoration’s premiere at the Berlin Film Festival, Martin Scorsese said: ‘It was speaking directly to us, the teenagers, the adolescents. It was like a secret language that existed in the film. Seeing it for the first time was overwhelming.’

Dennis Hopper (as Goon), Nick Adams (Chick), Edward Platt (Ray Fremick), Rochelle Hudson (Judy’s mother) and William Hopper (Judy’s father) co-star. Virginia Brissac makes her final film appearance as Jim’s bitchy grandmother.

Though playing a high school teenager, Dean was actually 24, and looks way overage for the role, as do several other of the actors. Tragically, this was to prove the second of only three films Dean made in just over a year before his death in a car crash. The day after his part in director George Stevens’s Giant was completed (on 30 September 1956) Dean ran into another car in his new Porsche and the live-fast-die-young legend began.

Appallingly, all three stars died tragically and in a blaze of publicity.

Screenwriter Stewart Stern died on February 2 2015, aged 92.

James Dean’s five uncredited bit parts in movies: as Doggie in the 1951 Fixed Bayonets!, as Boxing Trainer in the 1952 Sailor Beware, as Copyboy in the 1952 Deadline – USA, as Youth at Soda Fountain in the 1952 Has Anybody Seen My Gal? and as Football Spectator in the 1953 Trouble Along the Way.

The cast are James Dean as Jim Stark, Natalie Wood as Judy, Sal Mineo as John ‘Plato’ Crawford, Jim Backus as Frank Stark, Ann Doran as Carol Stark, Corey Allen as Buzz Gunderson, William Hopper as Judy’s father, Rochelle Hudson as Judy’s mother, Edward Platt as Inspector Ray Fremick, Marietta Canty as the Crawford family maid, Virginia Brissac as Grandma Stark, Dennis Hopper as Goon, Jack Grinnage as Moose, Frank Mazzola as Crunch, Ian Wolfe as lecturer at planetarium Dr Minton,  Beverly Long as Helen, Robert Foulk as Gene, Jack Simmons as Cookie, Tom Bernard as Harry, Nick Adams as Chick, Steffi Sidney as Mil, and Clifford Morris as Cliff.

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© Derek Winnert 2014 Classic Movie Review 658

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