New at BOP: Review: Matrix Resurrections Movie Review: Moonfall Movie Reviews: Scream The #1 Movie in America November Forecast The Many Saints of Newark October Forecast New Trivia Question All site updates Share & Save   Tweet Print this column

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.

Continued:       1       2       3