I watched Rebel Without A Cause last night in a state of constant twitching puzzlement. Why has this film become a cult classic? How can we account for the iconic appeal of James Dean, who moves me not the least bit? How did thirty-five-year-olds manage to pass for high school kids in 50s movies? Why, in those ancient days, did every male seem to wear a tie and jacket round the clock?
The movie seemed like a period piece, dug up from some archive -- which is odd, because I was 16 and a high school student in 1955 when Rebel Without a Cause was released. It should have spoken to me then, or now. But didn't and doesn't, not a bit.
The Eisenhower decade was the great age of suburban "juvenile delinquency," so-called. What do these kids want? They all have their expensive cars and the war is over. The teen-agers, all of them, are utterly inarticulate. They're also shockingly unfeeling. When Buzz Gunderson dies in the "chickie run," he is not mourned, even for a femtosecond, and within a few hours, his girlfriend Judy has fallen in love with Buzz's rival, Jim Stark.
Nor, in this film, is the adult generation is any more admirable -- the wives and mothers are shrews, the men grotesquely henpecked. The film has a strong gay subtext throughout -- most apparent in the Jim Stark-Plato relationship. I'm sure that I wouldn't have noticed it in 1955, but it kind of jumps at you nowadays.
1950s juvenile delinquents came in two categories: urban deprived and rich suburban alienated. I was of neither one class nor the other. True that we had to be constantly on our toes to keep clear of the one group, but the other (those depicted in this film) might just as well have been living on another planet.
A dangerous planet, as it turned out, for the makers of Rebel Without a Cause. James Dean was already dead when the film was released, having been killed in an automobile accident. Sal Mineo was murdered in 1976. Natalie Wood, drunk, drowned in 1981. Nick Adams died of a drug overdose in 1968. The film's talented director, Nicholas Ray, discovered his wife, Gloria Grahame, in bed with his thirteen-year-old son, whom she later married. Ray died prematurely of drugs and alcohol.
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