Nicholas Ray (1955)

The misleading title sounds like it’s borrowed from The Wild One (1953), in which Marlon Brando’s Johnny Strabler famously answers the question ‘What are you rebelling against, Johnny?’ with the words ‘Whaddaya got?’[1]   You can’t argue with the impact of Nicholas Ray’s film at the time of its release – a month after James Dean’s death – or with its status as the popular paradigm of American youth alienation cinema of the period.  Seeing Rebel Without a Cause years after its name had passed into the language and its star had been mythicised, it’s both easy and difficult to see what the fuss was about.  The opening titles literally announce this as a red-letter movie and the dialogue is nothing if not florid.  (The screenplay is by Stewart Stern, from a treatment by Irving Shulman, from a story by Ray.)  The generation gap message comes through so relentlessly loud and clear that it seems an honest relief when, at the film’s climax, a policeman actually uses a megaphone.

There are foreshadowings of West Side Story – in a knife fight, in the well-meaning psychiatrist (Edward Platt) whom the satirical singers of ‘Gee, Officer Krupke’ might have had in mind, in the edgy, turbulent, melodramatic score by Leonard Rosenman.   The main, misunderstood teenagers – Jim (James Dean), Judy (Natalie Wood) and Plato (Sal Mineo) – lament the constraints and pointlessness of their lives.  When Jim asks Judy, ‘Is this where you live?’ she replies, ‘Who lives?!’   Much more striking than the monologues, nearly all of which sound as if they’re being delivered from a public platform rather than by a character, is the insignificance-of-human-life speech of a scientist (Ian Wolfe) lecturing to the high school kids at a planetarium, where the film’s climax also takes place.   This calm description of how the universe was created and how the Earth will die gives the story an odd, circumscribing sense of futility more disquieting and implacable than the ‘What’s the point?’ histrionics of its young protagonists.  The problems of Plato, a pathological case of parental neglect, aren’t, for the most part, as hysterically exaggerated as the less extraordinary traumas being inflicted on Jim and Judy.  Perhaps this is because Plato’s parents are absent and therefore, unlike the parents of the other two, are not overacting before our eyes.

John ‘Plato’ Crawford is so admiringly devoted to Jim that you might think Fido a better choice of nickname if it weren’t for the fact that Plato is in the police station at the start of the picture because he’s been shooting puppies.   (There’s little in what follows to substantiate the psychopathology that implies:  Plato mostly seems just another mixed-up kid.)   At this distance in time, the movie often feels generic, with set pieces like the ‘Chicken Run’ car race between Jim and the high school gang leader Buzz (Corey Allen).  But the direction and performances have an exceptional bombastic intensity, even if most of the acting is intensely bad.  To call Ray’s direction overemphatic would be putting it mildly.  For example:  Jim’s parents (Jim Backus and Ann Doran) have a fractious marriage and Frank, the ineffectual father, is dominated by his snooty bitch of a mother (Virginia Brissac), who lives with the family; Jim arrives home to find his father wearing an apron, on his hands and knees, picking up things from the supper tray he’d prepared for his mother and dropped.  We get the point instantly; it’s briefly justified by the way Jim grabs his father by the straps of the apron and yells at him to become a man he can admire; but Frank is still in the damned apron even in the next scene.  It could be argued there’s a generation gap in the acting (William Hopper and Rochelle Hudson as Judy’s parents are perhaps the worst of all, although it’s close) but most of the youngsters aren’t too hot either.  It’s no surprise that Dennis Hopper went on to a more substantial screen career than anyone else – as one of the gang members, he has very few lines but he’s already a strong presence and the confidence not to work at projecting it.

James Dean’s performance isn’t as free and affecting as in East of Eden but he conveys Jim’s vulnerability delicately and with an unpredictable humour.  He draws you in through a combination of emotional transparency and opacity.  There are some brilliant details, such as Jim’s imitation of a police car siren and a tiny gesture he makes to Judy after she’s given him dirt to rub on his hands for the car race.  Dean can turn the emotional temper of a scene instantly and his playing is wonderfully quick and economical compared with the deliberate, predictable acting of Natalie Wood and Sal Mineo – although, to be fair, Wood is, by her standards, unusually convincing in Judy’s opening outburst at the police station.  James Dean’s intelligent reserve enables him nearly to bring off the film’s impossible big finish.  In trying to mediate between Plato and the menacing adult world, Jim acts not merely like a man but as the father figure that he is to Plato.  Jim’s mature courage shows the grown-ups how parents should really behave.    Thanks to the cluelessness of the actual grown-ups, his efforts are thwarted.  The scene thus expands both Jim’s heroism and how much he suffers at the hands of the older generation.  What’s finally distinctive and effective about this manipulative piece of work (and ironic about the film’s cachet) is that its teenage hero is a rebel with an unassailable cause – that of moral superiority, validated through physical and emotional courage.  The rebels without a cause, such as they are, are the gang of lesser teenage mortals, who can express themselves only in acts of hollow, violent bravado and whose collision with Jim’s integrity and insecurity catalyses the plot.  Nicholas Ray and Stewart Stern wisely keep quiet on whether the gang members’ parents are the cause of their maladaptation.  Perhaps they do suffer at home but they need to stay bad boys to keep us aware that Jim, Judy and Plato are admirably different from their contemporaries.

28 May 2010

 

[1]  According to Wikipedia, the source was actually a 1944 book, Rebel Without a Cause: The Hypnoanalysis of a Criminal Psychopath, by the psychiatrist Robert M Lindner.