Rebel Without a Cause (Warner Bros., 1955)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2022 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

First up on the Turner Classic Movies program for last night was the 1955 juvenile-delinquency classic Rebel Without a Cause, which they offered as part of a tribute to costume design in films in conjunction with an exhibit at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York consisting of various rooms outfitted by well-known film directors and costume designers. I’ve read a lot about Rebel Without a Cause for years, ever since I first heard of it in 1968 in an article in a rock-music magazine written by a person who’d stumbled into a theatre showing it in a revival, and so far nobody had mentioned it in connection with costume design. The only thing I’d ever heard about Rebel in connection with the clothes worn in the film was that the so-called “WarnerColor” (actually Eastmancolor – the Eastman Kodak company allowed studios to use Eastmancolor but call it “WarnerColor,” “Metrocolor,” “Pathecolor” and the like) process didn’t reproduce blue jeans accurately, so the jeans worn by the characters had to be re-dyed. Rebel Without a Cause was the second of James Dean’s three major films, the only one in which he was top-billed and the only one that took place entirely in his own time. (His first film, East of Eden, was set before and during World War I; his last film, Giant, starts in the 1920’s and moves forward in time, with Dean and the other principals, Rock Hudson and Elizabeth Taylor, wearing age makeup in the final reels.) By chance, Dean was killed in that famous auto accident just four days before Rebel was released, and Warner Bros. went ahead with the release plan they’d started on before Dean’s death (complete with poster art showing Dean in the trademark red jacket and blue jeans, with the slogan, “He’s Got a Chip on BOTH Shoulders!”). But many of the original reviewers noted the irony that, as one of them put it, “In the movie, Dean wins an auto race with death. Just four days ago, in real life, he lost one.”

Rebel Without a Cause started life as a nonfiction book by psychiatrist Robert Lindner about a teenage psychopath he’d treated in the early 1940’s, during World War II. It was enough of a best-seller that Warner Bros. bought the movie rights in 1946. Intending the part of the teen psycho for a hot young New York stage actor named Marlon Brando who hadn’t yet made a film, though they thought the psycho in Rebel might be the part that would lure him. It didn’t, and the property lay fallow in the Warners vaults until 1954, when after East of Eden was released and made James Dean an instant movie star, the studio assigned director Nicholas Ray to develop Rebel as a Dean vehicle. Ray immediately wrote his own story – inspired, at least one source said, by the time he caught his then-wife Gloria Grahame in bed with Tony Ray, Nicholas’s son by a previous marriage – and he used almost nothing of Lindner’s booki except a bit of backstory for Sal Mineo’s character. One of the things that amazes about Rebel was the degree to which Ray and his eventual writers, Irving Shulman (who had previously written a novel about New Jersey youtube gangs called The Amboy Dukes, filmed by Universal as City Across the River with Tony Curtis as one of the teen gangsters) and Stewart Stern. sneaked in Gay content despite the Production Code’s flat ban on “sex perversion or any inference of it.”

The sexualities of the three main characters reflected the real lives of the actors playing them: the Bisexual Dean, Gay Sal Mineo and straight Natalie Wood. When the three come together in the old, deserted mansion that had been used just five years earlier in another movie masterpiece, Sunset Boulevard (complete with scenes taking place in the swimming pool, drained in Rebel, into which William Holden fell when Gloria Swanson shot him), they form what becomes both a surrogate family (earlier there’s a scene in which Mineo’s character opens up a latest envelope received from his father,who has long since left his mom, which contains nothing but a check and a typewritten note reading, “For Support of Son”) with Dean and Wood as Mineo’s substitute parents, and also a love triangle with Wood and Mineo competing for Dean’s affections. Throughout the movie Ray and his writers identify Mineo with femininity, from giving him the real name “John Crawford” (reminiscent of Joan Crawford, whom Ray had worked with just a year before in the film Johnny Guitar, in which he cast her in a butch role) to posting a photo of Alan Ladd in his school locker just below a mirror in which he first glimpses James Dean. Even his nickname, “Plato,” references Queerness; it comes from the famous Greel philosopher Plato, who in his dialogue The Symposium at least obliquely celebrated the joys of same-sex love.

Rebel has its flaws, and as I’ve pointed out on previous occasions a number of them have to do with the film’s almost worshipful attitude towards the theories of Sigmund Freud. Much of Rebel seems as if the writers were deliberately creating a story to illustrate Freud’s ideas in dramatic terms, from the apron Jim Backus wears as Dean’s father (he’s bringing Dean’s mom breakfast in bed) while he lectures his son on the obligations of manhood to the visceral fury with which Wood’s father reacts when she tries to kiss him. I’ve long read their relationship as a hint that he’s sexually attracted to her and at the same time he’s ashamed of it and so scared by it that he’s afraid to show her any physical affection at all, even in socially and morally legitimate ways. At the same time there are fascinating scenes illustrating the “generation gap” between parents and children, including two key scenes between Dean and Backus which highlight the differences in their perspective. In the first, which takes place before the “chickie run” in which Dean survives and his acquaintance Buzz Gunderson (Corey Allen, who would resurface in the late 1970’s as director of the pilot episode of the short-lived David Cassidy: Man Undercover show, in which he played a young-looking adult cop assigned to infiltrate a high school to bust its drug dealers), Backus assumes the role of a worldly-wise father figure (even though he’s still wearing that apron, indicating how much he’s been “de-balled” by his domineering wife and mother-in-law) and tells his son, “Look,.in ten years you’ll laugh at yourself for ever thinking this was important.” Dean replies, “Ten … years Ten … years?,” a line which becomes poignant not only for the contrast between the philosophical dad and the headstrong son who needs an answer now but also in light of our knowledge that the real Dean didn’t even have ten months, let alone ten years, left to live when he shot this scene.

Later on, after the “chickie run,” is the even greater scene in which Dean appears to step backwards from the 1960’s (even though he missed surviving to that decade by at least four years) as his parents urge him to cover up his involvement in Buzz’s death. His parents say that if no one saw him there or identified him in any way, there’s no reason for him to stick his neck out and get involved – and Dean, sounding like a voice from the future and the next generation of teen rebels with various causes, says, “But I am involved! We are all involved!” The more often I see Rebel Without a Cause, the better I love and admire it, especially the depths Ray and his writers were able to sound; though Ray didn’t use the technique Elia Kazan had in East of Eden of using the broad expanse of the CinemaScope screen to place Dean off to one side while the rest of the characters interact on the other, thereby visually dramatizing his alienation, he shoots the confrontations in the various characters’ living rooms (all of them seem to live in two-story houses with staircases between the floors) from oblique angles to emphasize the dramatic tension between the generations. One critic pointed out that even the last names of Dean’s characters in his first two films are anagrams of each other – he was “Cal Trask” in East of Eden and “Jim Stark” here – and oif course in both films he’s desperately trying to have a social and emotional relationship with a cold and distant father.

Something I hadn’t noticed before was that both Wagner and Brahms appear in this film – in the opening scene in the police station Dean hums the “Ride of the Valkyries” and later, in the mansion, Wood hums Brahms’ “Lullaby” – and though the filmmakers probably had no intention of doing this, they unwittingly referenced the alienation of teenagers in 1890’s Germany, in which Wagner was considered the hero of youthful rebellion and Brahms the symbol of clueless fuddy-duddy adulthood. (We known this from conductor Bruno Walter’s autobiography, Theme and Variations, in which he recalled his own youth and his celebration of all things Wagnerian against the antagonism of the immediately older generation.) The tragedy of Rebel is only heightened by the early deaths of all three of its leading players (I remember once watching a documentary on PBS called James Dean: The First American Teenager, made by a British film crew in 1975 ahd which was ballyhooed for including interviews with both Natalie Wood and Sal Mineo; obviously its makers had got them just in time), and as Ray later boasted, teenagers were taking their parents to see the film to tell them, “Look, this is why I’m so alienated.” And this time around I was also struck by the way Rebel observes the unities of time (a single day’s duration) and place (just one part of the world) Aristotle prescribed as the correct way to write dramas.