REBEL WITHOUT A CAUSE

James Dean's appeal to a whole generation of young people isn't hard to figure out. His persona in this film is that of teenager with the cute dial maxed-out. You can transfer anything you want to him; his character is just sketched in. In fact, other than hate his dad's slavish devotion to not making waves, he's not much of a rebel. Faced with the first time in history that teenagers didn't fall in line behind the older generation, the sociologists insisted that they must be rebelling. The idea that teenagers were making a culture from scratch didn't occur to them. The tag-line of the film was "Teenage terror torn from today's headlines"; a mighty exercise in alliteration. But the studios weren't about to show him doing anything remotely bad, unless breaking into an abandoned house is bad. American society was so innocent in those days, and moviemakers fears of "going too far" paralleled that of American girls of the time.

The story begins with Dean unaccountably lying in the street in a seeming drunken stupor. The scene is not explained, but it was part of a sequence that was cut out of the film. The next scenes were of his family moving into a new area, apparently because he did something bad in the last location; so his rebel days are already behind him. The film does show him owning a classic '49 Mercury that's chopped and lowered; a genuine California cultural artifact. And he's lucky enough to have moved in next door to Natalie Wood, whose career needed a jump-start from the living death of being a Hollywood child actress. She did what it took to get the part from director Nicholas Ray, and her show-biz career caught fire from being involved in this hit film, including one of the longest crying scenes yet filmed. Although far from being a glamour girl, she brought the girl-next-door quality, which in this film she literally was.

The film is really Dean's vehicle. He'd already made one film, East of Eden (I955), where he had a much meatier role. In Rebel, he does have his famous "Your tearing me apart" speech to his parents. Jim Backus, the voice of a then famous cartoon-character, Mr. Magoo, plays Jim's dad, a thankless part that has him wearing an apron and other cross-gender garments establishing that Jim has nothing to emulate in his father.

But Dean's role does give him lots to do. All a young man's check-list of high or low points are squeezed into the first day of school. In short order he: starts in a new school, gets in a fight, drives a car at high speed toward a cliff, and falls in love. Doe he pass the acting test? He became a legend from the day the film opened. The filmmakers - not sure if he would be well-received, - built in the part of Plato, the odd kid who nobody hangs with, so that Jim could befriend him and be his protector. Plato's yearning for a parental figure; Jim's yearning for self-esteem and acceptance, are gut-wrenchingly portrayed. It must have been reassuring to all the kids over the years who hated the whole idea of high-school society and it's kid cliques.

In fact, there's no role in the film that in any way threatens Dean's dominance of the film. The man who plays Dean's rival in the school comes close to stealing a couple of scenes - he looks like he could have stolen the film, but he chews the scenery a bit, then conveniently dies. The women knew; Dean was a romantic heart-throb - more so that Elvis. Dean underplays his scenes; his romantic interludes with Ms Wood are curiously soporific; he's an Apollonian, not a Dionysian on-screen lover.

The sweetest part of the film has the three stars, Dean, Wood and Mineo, in the abandoned mansion (the same one used in Sunset Boulevard), playing house. Each one feels estranged from their families, and so in the edenic grounds of the mansion, they bond into a more loving unit. It's a tender and moving sequence. Ms Woods character's behavior is a little unbelievable; her last boyfriend having died a horrible death only hours before; but it's useless to quibble; the film's real-time format decreed that everything takes place in a day. They're in the Garden of Eden of Genesis - God has not yet cast them out.

On the flip side, it's interesting to note that Southern California also brought forth another famous family, the Manson family, whose notorious exploits were used as a club by the older generation to beat down the whole counter-culture; never mind that Manson was a hardened criminal and mental case playing at being a hippie. Anybody who's lived in a modern American suburb knows that they're designed so that teenagers will have no place to gather and nothing to do together that's not approved by adults. For instance, shortly after the film wrapped, the real abandoned home where the teens cavort was torn down. There used to be such places where kids could let their imaginations soar, but those without imagination are determined to have an air-conditioned; cleaned-up and well policed martial camp where kids will absorb the approved values of hard work and making money. One can only ponder what Tom Sawyer would have done amongst the manicured lawns and paved sidewalks of today's bourgeois towns, although in truth the multiple temptations of today were not all available in Tom's day.

James Dean the man now overshadows his work on-screen. There are many secrets he took with him when he died in his Porsche 356 Speedster shortly before the release of the film. What was his sexual orientation? What were his career intentions? What was his true age? His bio says he was born in 1931, but that would make him only 24 at the time of the film. He looks older, although he's playing an 18-year-old. He's already fallen into mannerisms that he thinks are cute. But he certainly would have been better than Paul Newman in The Left-Handed Gun (I958), a role Dean had signed to do, although Newman does his best impression of Dean. Curiously, Newman picked-up on the car-racing circuit where Dean left off, and adopted some of the Dean mannerisms. Dean was certainly much more charismatic than Newman, who was never much of a teen hearthrob. Dean and Newman were the only two male American leading actors to be minted in the I950s, and Newman was the only one to make it into the 60s.

Scenes from the Film: Opening Ten Minutes --- Fight scene at the Observatory --- At the Cliff scene