Classic Movie Review: Rebel Without A Cause
By Josh Spiegel
May 24, 2010
BoxOfficeProphets.com
But I fear that people put James Dean on a pedestal he’s not deserving of. Consider this: Dean is possibly the quintessential American male sex symbol, in that he was one of the first and one of the most influential. Yes, I appreciate that there were plenty of male sex symbols in American cinema before Dean, but were there any like him before 1955? There were certainly men like Clark Gable and Cary Grant, but they were older. Dean was the kind of good-looking guy that teenage girls went crazy for; we’d see it again when the Beatles first hit the United States in 1964, it happened with Luke Perry (remember him?) at the advent of Beverly Hills, 90210, and it’s happening right now with some kid named Justin Bieber. But it started with Dean, or the legend of the young actor.
Despite all the hoopla, and all the praise, Dean only starred in three movies (when you don’t count the handful of films in which he appeared as an extra): East of Eden, Giant (which was released the year after he died), and this week’s classic movie, Rebel Without A Cause. Rebel Without A Cause was released on October 27, 1955. James Dean died on September 30, 1955. I learned this after I watched Rebel Without A Cause, and it explains a lot. Anyone who’s read my work on Box Office Prophets knows that one of my recent favorite films, a movie that I love as unequivocally as you can love a movie, is The Dark Knight. In one very important way, the two movies are similar. Some people wondered if Heath Ledger, who died as the film was going through post-production, would have been as lauded or if the box office would have been as high had he lived.
The same goes for Rebel Without A Cause, a movie that garnered three Oscar nominations in 1955. Though Dean was not given a nomination (unlike Ledger, who was nominated for and won a well-deserved Oscar for his role as The Joker), the movie struck a chord, I imagine mostly because it was already tainted by tragedy. That has to be the main reason, because it can’t be the movie, which is dated at best, and an overbaked Afterschool Special at worst. I know what you’re thinking, reader (I do, seriously; I can read your mind as you read the article. We have powers at this site.): didn’t Rebel Without A Cause land on the American Film Institute top 100 list in 1998? Didn’t it top movies like Fargo, Duck Soup, Vertigo, and Raiders of the Lost Ark? How can it be bad? Very easily, believe me; also, seriously, American Film Institute? Vertigo is in the bottom half of the list? Yikes.
So what’s wrong with Rebel Without A Cause? First off, I have to provide a little subjective perspective. I hate Method acting. I cannot stand it. Method acting, wherein the actor burrows themselves completely in the character they’re playing, can work (see most of Daniel Day-Lewis’s filmography for proof), but only when the actor following this style isn’t equating Method acting with mumbling. Marlon Brando would fall into this trap sometimes, and James Dean is guilty of it here. He plays Jim Stark, a troubled 17-year-old who’s just moved to Los Angeles. As the movie opens, Jim is taken into the local police station for public drunkenness. While there, he meets the other two leads of the film, dealing with their own parental problems.
There’s Judy (the luminous yet shrill Natalie Wood) and Plato (Sal Mineo). Judy is 16, and looks a bit older; her dad is thrown off by his daughter turning into a woman and is no longer affectionate to her. Plato has the worst problems of all: his parents are never around, but rich enough to fob him off on their maid, who does her best without being a maternal figure. Oh, and he’s a closeted homosexual. Seeing as this film came out during the era of the Hayes Code, of course, the film’s writer-director, Nicholas Ray, can’t tell us this directly. No, we figure this out through such subtle hints as Plato having an address book with only male names, always looking longingly at Jim, and having a bedroom made of pink. Yes, this is not a movie whose themes are going to sneak up on you.
Over the period of about 36 hours, Jim, Judy, and Plato will all become very close friends, but also suffer great tragedy that will aid them in being very filled with misplaced, pointless angst. Again, I want to point this out: I’m 25, so if I come off here sounding like an old man grumbling about those damned kids on his lawn, it’s not my age. But these kids are some of the whiniest teenagers I’ve ever seen. Jim complains that his parents don’t understand him and that his dad will say one thing, but his mother will contradict it. Well, how about that, Jimbo? You’re a human being. Get over it. What’s more baffling is how his parents act as the film progresses, and how their actions are divorced from any kind of reality. Then again, maybe I’m wrong; however, if your son witnessed a murder and could be considered some kind of inadvertent accomplice, would you encourage him to lie for no reason?
No. Of course you wouldn’t, because real people don’t do that, unless they are cursed with the stupidest genes ever. But reality and this movie don’t go together. Another example: as Jim and Judy walk to school, comparing notes about how his parents suck, but hers suck more, Jim asks her, “How do you live?” Judy responds, seriously, by looking in the distance and saying, “Who lives?” I’m not saying that this dialogue is terrible (though Wood’s delivery is pretty wooden), but I don’t think any teenager from 1955 or from 2010, or any other time in between, would talk like that. I was a teenager, and I never talked like that. Why? Because I knew that talking like I was a character in a bad movie was a fast trip to an ass-whooping. And unfortunately for me, the people in Rebel Without A Cause who do the ass-whooping are just as unrealistic.
See, Jim has to prove his manhood when Judy’s uncouth, leather jacket-wearing, greasy-haired boyfriend Buzz (yes, Buzz) calls him a chicken. Yeah, Marty McFly’s not the only movie teen who flinches when someone calls him a chicken. So, Jim takes up Buzz on a challenge to do a “chickie” run. The two get in separate cars, side by side, and drive them off a cliff. Whoever jumps out first is the chicken. In this movie, the person who jumps out second is dead. Since the chickie run happens one hour into the movie, guess who jumps out second? Yes, Judy is soon without a boyfriend, which would be sad and tragic, except no one seems to mourn Buzz. Judy is the likely candidate for some serious weeping, but within a few hours, she’s professing her love for Jim. Because her boyfriend being dead was just a roadblock in the way of their love, I guess.
Rebel Without A Cause, if you haven’t figured out by now, has some interesting views of masculinity, about what it takes for a man to be a man. A man doesn’t jump out of the car first; he either gets to jump out second, or he crashes to his death. A man doesn’t get called chicken without getting in a knife fight. A man doesn’t, in the case of Jim’s weak-willed father, make his wife food if she’s feeling bad or clean up messes he makes on the floor, or stand up to said wife because she’s kind of mean. Yes, fellas, next time your lady is sick and she asks you for some soup, you tell her to make the damn chicken soup! You’re a man, and someone just challenged you to a chickie run! You have a date with manliness or death, depending on your courage! Chicken soup has to wait!
So, is James Dean a quintessential man’s man? Is he a whiny kid who can’t act but looks half-decent in a red leather jacket? Obviously, I’m leaning to the latter. Even now, though, the James Dean mystique lives on. It’s not for his talent, because I’d be very shocked if Rebel Without A Cause, a movie that buries its most fascinating character (that’d be the very conflicted and naïve Plato) in the background for the pretty couple, was half as regarded if Dean made it into the 1970s. Wood and Mineo also died relatively young (she lived longest, drowning in 1981), but their careers lived on. In Wood’s case, she was a child actress who managed to transition into more adult fare pretty smoothly. Dean never had that chance (and the irony of his character in a deathly chickie run when he died in a car crash is inescapable), but the performances he’s left behind don’t inspire much hope for whatever future career he’d have had.
Take a look at the young actor who wants to model himself on James Dean in 2010. I’m talking, of course, about Robert Pattinson. His first non-vampire role was earlier this year, in Remember Me, a movie that shows him as a bad-ass rebel. How do I know this? Just look at the trailer, dude; someone tells him he can’t smoke in the lobby, so he throws his cigarette into a piece of art that looks like an ashtray! What a rebel, right? And he likes to wear white T-shirts, just like James Dean, plus he’s got crazy hair and a sullen face! Pattinson’s popularity and attractiveness are baffling to me, in part because a pale, gaunt young man is more a candidate for getting some decent food in him, not a bevy of drooling teenage girls.
That said, he owes a great debt to James Dean, whose legacy would be nothing if it weren’t for the three movies in which he starred and for his too-early death. For all we know, James Dean could’ve grown into a brilliant actor. What’s on display on Rebel Without A Cause is a mix of mumbling dialogue and randomly shouted words. There’s something close to charisma on the screen, but nothing close to true acting talent. But still, the icon lives on. The posters will sell and be hung on dormroom walls. The image of James Dean will live on for 55 more years, and 55 years after that. Rebel Without A Cause, a movie that was the 59th best American film in 1998 and wasn’t even on the qualifying list in 2007, and with good reason.