The Movie Book (Big Ideas Simply Explained) (2016)

IN CONTEXT

GENRE

Drama

DIRECTOR

Nicholas Ray

WRITERS

Stewart Stern, Irving Shulman (screenplay); Nicholas Ray (story)

STARS

James Dean, Natalie Wood, Sal Mineo, Jim Backus

BEFORE

1948 Ray’s They Live by Night, about three outlaws on the run, explores his fascination with the outsider.

1955 Elia Kazan’s East of Eden, the first of James Dean’s three movies, is an adaptation of John Steinbeck’s epic novel.

AFTER

1956 Dean is killed in a car crash before the family saga Giant is released, lending George Stevens’s movie added tragic resonance.

The title of Nicholas Ray’s iconic teen movie is misleading, because the movie’s central character is a rebel whose cause could not be more clear: 17-year-old Jim Stark (James Dean) wants his parents to stop lying.

When Jim starts a new school in a new town, his troubled past catches up with him and his home life deteriorates. Jim looks at the respectability of his mother and his weak, ineffectual father and sees nothing but hypocrisy and failure. “You’ll learn when you’re older,” his father tells him. But Jim rejects his parents’ life lessons; he gets into knife fights at school and races cars in a game of “chicken” to prove he hasn’t inherited their cowardice.

Rebel Without a Cause spawned numerous imitations—teen movies noisy with sex, drugs, and rock and roll. But the loudest noise in Ray’s movie is the howl of anguish. He does not exploit his young characters, he sympathizes, coaxing a powerful performance from Dean, who came to symbolize teen angst for a whole generation.

Jim (James Dean) attacks his father, Frank (Jim Backus), for his cowardice. Jim is unhinged and violent, but he’s not a sociopath—he’s a victim, and his cause is the truth.

What else to watch: The Wild One (1953) ✵ Bigger than Life (1956) ✵ Easy Rider (1969) ✵ American Graffiti (1973) ✵ The Warriors (1979)