NFR Project: 'Rebel Without A Cause' (1953)

 NFR Project: “Rebel Without A Cause”

Dir: Nicholas Ray

Scr: Stewart Stern, Irving Shulman

Pho: Ernest Haller

Ed: William H. Ziegler

Premiere: Oct, 27, 1955

111 min.

“Why do we do this?”

“You got to do something.”

The last, a rejoinder from Buzz the teenage bad guy, and nearly his last words. A minute later, he’s plunging off the edge of a cliff to his doom, screaming.

The mood of Rebel Without A Cause is nihilistic. In the American society of the time, it judged that nothing the adult world had to offer was worthwhile. Their hypocrisy and self-involvement invalidated them from being able to lead their families. Teens were cut loose from both dependency and responsibility, living in an intense, confused time when everything was unsatisfactory, crazy-making. Being a teenager was a curse. A naturalistic drama that plays out like a horror movie, Rebel persists because of its incredibly well-written script and enthusiastic and innovative direction from Nicholas Ray. (Ray started making it as a black-and-white B movie; when Dean became popular, the studio decreed he remake it in color and in Cinemascope.)

The movie was supposedly based on Robert M. Linder’s 1944 book of the same name, a case study of a criminal psychopath. Stern’s screenplay is vastly different and, fortunately, brilliant. It outlines and justifies the alienated feelings of its teenaged central characters, drawing us into compassion for them as the adult world contracts around them, literally killing their souls.

It’s the swan song of actor James Dean, his only starring role (he died at age 24 in a car crash a month before the movie’s premiere), and his charisma and appeal cannot be understated here. Whatever one may say about his Method approach to the role, he shows that he was rapidly understanding film acting in a fairly profound way. It would have been fascinating to watch his progression as an actor. He remains a perpetually youthful teen icon, largely because of this film.

Here he is Jim Stark, the teenage Everyman, a would-be knight of maturity and compassion who just wants to be left alone. His Jim has just moved to town after moving away from trouble somewhere else. His parents are well-off; his mother is castrating, his father is impotent. Seventeen years old, he starts his first day at his new school, and is immediately picked on by the cool kids, who happen to be brain-dead thugs.

Jim makes friends with Plato (Sal Mineo), a not-so-repressed gay fellow classmate. An outing to the planetarium ends up with a knife fight, and a pledge to race later in the evening. Jim looks for guidance from his parents, but they are useless. Jim lashes out angrily, and drives away furiously.

At a nearby cliff overlooking the ocean, Buzz challenges Jim to a chicken race in cars to the cliff. First one who jumps out is chicken. Buzz gets stuck inside his car, falls off the cliff, and dies.

Now his friends are after Jim. They attack his house, track him down. Meanwhile, Jim falls for the late Buzz’s girlfriend Judy (Natalie Wood). Jim tries to turn himself in, unsuccessfully. Jim and Judy escape to an abandoned house where they meet up with Plato, who unknown to them is packing a gun. The bad kids go after Plato – and he shoots one of them.

The cops and the parents show up. Plato is trapped inside the observatory; Jim goes in to get him out peacefully. He takes Plato’s bullets away. They walk out, but Plato panics, running and brandishing the gun. The police kill him. Jim grieves; he’s assured by his dad that he did “all that a man can do.” He introduces his parents to Judy.

Rebel can’t give us a happy ending. Jim and Judy’s troubles, we feel, are just beginning. Buzz dies following the code; Plato dies because he can’t follow the code. There’s no way to win.

The NFR Project is one writer’s attempt to review all the films listed in the National Film Registry in chronological order. Next time: The Court Jester.