Rebel Without a Cause Nicholas Ray (USA: 1955)
Rebel Without a Cause Nicholas Ray (USA: 1955) James Dean, Natalie Wood, Sal Mineo
viewed Star and Shadow Cinema 4th Spt 2025: ticket £7
Film without cause but with purpose
Nick Ray’s ‘Rebel without a Cause’ doesn’t stack up to the 70 year viewing test. It feels ponderously paced, labouriously scripted with a scenario that lacks tension. It looks like a film whose purpose was to promote James Dean. A film crafted around his persona and faciality, his alternating looks of confusion and defiance registered through the lens of a camera instructed to magnify him.
‘Rebel’ was made to be Dean’s rocket to Stardom.
Ray’s movie makes considerable demands on its audience to suspend belief. Of course this is ‘film’ and we go to see films on the understanding that we will often have to ‘go along’ with hiatuses jumps multiple implausabilities or impossibilities because theme mood and intention override litterality. This said the actors representing High School students all look a lot older than 18 years old, the idea that they are all at school, looks a stretched notion. The accelerated animosity between new boy ‘Jim Stark’ and his school contemporaries feels like a plot artefact, not helped by unconvincing dialogue AND Ray’s centre piece the ‘Chicken Run’ also leaves a question hanging as to: HOW when Jim jumps out of the speeding car which barrels on, why doesn’t it go hurtling over the cliff onto the rocks below?
None of the above would register if Ray had made a film with a coherent theme. Dean’s character represents the generation of the ‘50s that was the first to enjoy the fruits of the huge wealth generated by the American capitalist industrial machine (gorged on war). This wealth found its way not just into the pay checks of the middle classes but also to their children who were now recipients of many of the accoutrements of money, including use of automobiles exemplified by Jim as he drives about in a buggy with white wall tyres. Of course he doesn’t rebel against any of this. It simply further feeds into his evident family derived neurosis and insecurity which he shares with the other two adolescent leads Judy and Plato. Psycho-disturbance is the actual focus of ‘Rebel’. I suppose a film title such as ‘Neurotic without a Cure’ wouldn’t have done box office.
The pacing and developmental structure of Rebel always feels ponderous. There is something about a lot of 50’s Hollywood movies that viewed today come across as stilted in the playing out of their core expressive content. Certainly there are many exceptions in particular some films by Wilder, Hitchcock and Siegle but where the theme of a movie revolves about relations often the restraining hand of self censorship inhibits both actors and scripts. Today’s audience are often left with the feeling of a crabbed scenario, as sexual relations and intense emotion are swerved or avoided. Of course there is the obvious consideration that films as cultural products will reflect their society but the best of 50’s films were able to create expressive modes that went beyond these inhibitions. ‘Rebel’ is not one of them.
Ray’s laborious pacing of ‘Rebel’ is characterised by the opening sequence of the film after the credits. During the opening credits we see Jim dead drunk pushing himself along the ground fondling a little mechanical toy he’s found. Ray then cuts to the key establishing scene in the police station where we’re introduced to the lead characters, Jim Judy and Plato who’ve all for one reason or another been picked up by the cops. At the station we get the background gem on the three ‘kids’. The script of course centres on Jim and being interviewed, he reveals to a detective something about his home situation. The tec dropping his police persona evinces a paternal concern for Jim. Eventually he’s led away by his parents in a manner that suggests Jim is a prisoner of his own family. But the scene is slow characterised by archetypal dialogue and has a forced scripted feel. The same applies to other key scenes such as Jim’s clash with the high school gang leading to the knife fight and even celebrated the chicken run sequence.
The real core of ‘Rebel’ is a substrate of the scenario: the depicted isolation and warping of the nuclear family relations in the middle classes. A class that had become highly mobile and moved out of the city into the isolation of the suburbs, moves made possible by the expansion of car ownership. This is the actual theme of ‘Rebel’. As suggested when James is led way from the copshop by his family, the feeling is that he is being taken from a place where he is understood, back to being misunderstood. In the long confrontation between Jim and his dad, dad wears a frilly apron. The apron suggests a cross dressing proclivity that together with his fathers subservience to his wife and her insistence on continually moving, create in Jim neurotic anxiety and insecurity. The scenes in Judy’s home reveal a heightened state of sexual tension between Judy and her father pointing up a terrified fear of incest, a fear of course intensified by the enclosed nature of suburban living. And Plato abandoned by his mother is left only with the recourse to murderous violence, violence perpetrated on defenceless puppies, as helpless as himself, but a means to deflect his rage and anger away from either himself or its real cause, his parents. This is a fucked up society creating emotional mutants. And of course the evident love felt by Plato for Jim is far more convincing than the formulaic ‘falling in love’ relationship scripted between Jim and Judy that effuses the last scenes of the movie, culminating in their: ‘First Kiss’.
It’s understood that Ray’s movie is a product of its times. It’s true that some of the graphic scenes in particular the switch blade fight, ‘cut’ into new ground of film depiction ( the knife scene caused ‘Rebel’ to be banned in several countries including the UK). But as the graphic spectacle element in popular films has become ever more extreme, Ray’s knife fight now looks on the tame side. Movies that endure tend so to do not because of particular scenes, but because at some level they express some kind of truth. A truth that resonates with audiences across time. A truth that can be political perceptual situational social or psychological but is imbedded in the heart of the film.
‘Rebel without a Cause’ has elements of ‘truth’ in its peripheral domestic scenes. Otherwise it’s a a formulaic period melodrama that panders to Hollywood values and is devoid of truth content.
adrin neatrour
adrinuk@yahoo.co.uk