Stuart Stern, screenwriter of Rebel Without a Cause: “This is the story of a generation that became adults overnight.” The action of the film covers 24 hours in the lives of three teenagers: Jim, Judy and John. Early in the morning they find themselves in the police, in the department for work with minors. Judy (Natalie Wood) ran away from home in the middle of the night and wandered around the city. She was detained on suspicion of prostitution. John (Sal Mineo) stole a gun from the house and shot a litter of puppies. Jim (James Dean) got drunk and fell asleep drunk on the side of the road.
The next day it turns out that they study at the same school. They get to know each other. Jim wants to get into the party of a teenage gang led by Buzz (Corey Allen). Buzz arranges a test for Jim so that he can join the gang. Jim accepts the challenge. This test leads all the characters to the cliff.
First impression
In 2013, when the dollar was 30, and the US consulate in Yekaterinburg issued tourist visas, my brother and my wives and I went to the States as savages. We decided to look at the East and West coasts a little bit. In Los Angeles, we went to the observation deck of the Griffith Observatory. You can see the whole city from there. But in addition to the development, the Pacific Ocean and the inscription “Hollywood”, I saw a monument right on the observation deck.
It was a copper bust depicting a young man similar to Yuri Gulyaev. There was an inscription on the monument — James Dean. I was already in my fourth year of rockabilly, and I had heard that name. All I knew was that James Dean was a youth idol and died young. I have not seen any films with his participation. But I thought about how great the reverence for him is in the USA. And not as a hero of one role, but as a promising master. And what can I say when the deceased actor has been heard by the Siberian crowd for 60 years. Then I decided that I should see at least one of his films.
I chose a tape that brought him eternal life and early death – on the set, Dean became addicted to car racing. I watched Rebel Without a Cause after Grease. And I fell into the trap of the musical, waited for the fun, cooked dinner, popcorn, told my wife that we were going to watch a funny movie about the fifties. How wrong I was. I was annoyed. I hoped that since the film is about a rebel, it would be an aggressive action movie with a ridiculous outdated production. It wasn’t there. Take the film and turn out to be a heavy classical Greek tragedy. A couple of humorous moments of the film further enhances the drama. You know, when laughing through tears. I didn’t eat any popcorn that night.
Attention! The review contains spoilers!
The problem of fathers and children
The three main characters are troubled teenagers of sixteen. They have the same problem for all of them. Everyone has a problem with their parents. Jim is worried that his father is henpecked. Judy is hard going through that her father at one point stopped treating her the way he used to. John, nicknamed Plato, was left an orphan with living parents.
I, who have not been a teenager for a long time, after the first viewing it was not clear at all what people found in this film. Yes, it’s heavy. But I was forced to read Dostoevsky at school. Even a “Rebel with a reason” would be on my side. Here I figured it out. The joke is that I was already watching as an adult. I couldn’t feel what was hurting Jim so much. I thought like his father: “You have everything, asshole. You look cool, you dress cool, you live in Los Angeles and you have a personal car. What the hell?”
The film was shot for the eyes of teenagers. Teenagers, if you’ve read this far, how do you like the movie? Judging by the reaction of generations, the audience was calculated correctly. Young people saw themselves and their problems in the hero of James Dean. I understand that at 16 I wouldn’t have understood anyway. If I hadn’t knocked my dad to the floor, I wouldn’t have torn up my grandmother’s portrait, and no one would have called me to a duel. I would sit in my corner and chew stress with a sausage loaf, feeling my own opinion deep in my ass. Well, James Dean is not my hero. Maybe that makes it even better.
Teenage rebellion
Having spread out the story of my childhood and Jim Stark’s childhood on the table, I saw two types of history. The first one is scared by the eternal “shut up, what can you know” and the second “you have problems here, we’re moving”. The first and second are very different guys. Both of them can be both good and bad, this is not a credit at all. The first one can’t rebel, it doesn’t seem to exist. Is there a person who is gagged? The second is dragged from place to place, he is friendless. They don’t listen to him either, until one day he explodes. Are they really that different? Now I think that not much. The first seizes stress, the second hammers stress with his fists. How much can you learn about yourself by thinking about a good movie.
And by rebellion, which is mentioned in the title of the movie, here we mean the outbursts of despair of the guys. These outbursts turn into leaving home in the middle of the night, fighting and shooting. Before watching Rebel, I believed that people decide for themselves whether or not to become a rebel. For example, if everyone is forced to wear ties, the person does not wear it. If everyone drives cars, he takes a motorcycle. In short, somehow trying to stand out.
The film showed me rebellion on the other side. Jim, Judy and Plato don’t do anything on purpose to get into trouble. Resentment of conflicts in the family itself leads to problems. I have the ability to cover my impulses with a shell. But these characters both felt and did. There is a pattern in the families of all the heroes — they are a typical American middle class. Plato’s family is just above the middle. This is even emphasized in the beginning, in the scene at the police station. Director Nicholas Ray used the space in a special way: Plato is separated by a partition from Jim and Judy.
Plato freezes, Jim offers his jacket. A symbol of caring. Plato does not accept it.
Happiness is not in money
Frank Stark (Jim Backus), Jim’s father, says so: “We buy you anything you want.” Jim does not need money from his father, but support. Father’s advice. But the father gets lost against the background of the mother, cannot contradict her, only silently agrees. From the outside, and even with Maslow’s pyramid in his hands, it’s easy to judge.
Judy continues to behave like a child with her father. She wants to hug him, kiss him, as in childhood. She’s still his daughter. He pushes her away. Judy wants a sincere and caring man, she compensates for the problems with her father by dating Buzz.
Plato’s father sends his son a check with a note “for maintenance” — that’s all the communication. Plato’s mother is always on the road. Plato needs a family. All he dreams of is to have parents who will never leave him. Real parents quit all the time. He also has a fragile psyche, and at home a loaded pistol is always at hand. So Jim and Judy become salvation for each other, and Plato sees them as his dream parents. And the trio runs away to an abandoned mansion, as in Neverland. There is a reference to Peter Pan here.
The problem is not only in the relationship with parents. Let’s take a more general look, distancing ourselves, we’ll look as if from the site of the Griffith Observatory. All three families belong to the middle class. And all three families live in suburbia — the dream of the Frank Stark generation. His house near the city, a car, a housewife wife. Values of the military generation. We are building up capital, making informed decisions. But their children’s generation made a surprise. It began to ask questions to which it wanted quick, unprepared answers.
It’s funny that thirty years later, a motive appeared in “Back to the Future”: if I had succumbed to a weak one, I would have crashed into a wheelbarrow, broken my arm and would not have become a guitarist. It’s like an advertisement for deliberation. A pure counterweight to “Rebel”, which is all about “did you call me a coward?” and “it was a matter of honor.”
The image of the ideal person turns out to be a policeman talking to Jim, Ray Fremic. A policeman like that district policeman from the word “participation”. He’ll drive you in the face if it’s appropriate, and he’ll give you advice and support. Some kind of Superman. That’s what Jim expects from his bati.
Buzz shows where love lives to one of the gang, Goon, played by Dennis Hopper.
The American dream is no more
The film lives because it tells on behalf of teenagers. Teenagers who in reality see mothers rolling fathers into puree. I do not know what the reason is: uncontrolled female cruelty, thirst for power, weakness of a man. Suddenly there is a cup of power that should always be full. If one spouse has not filled it, then the other will fill it.I don’t know. I think no matter how strong physically or mentally you are, humiliating people at the expense of this power is not good. Jim’s mother does exactly that to his father. Jim is furious that his father, whom he loves and honors, is being treated like this. The only thing that pisses him off more is that his father raised a white flag.
Judy’s dad has everyone on the wall. The man is in the house. But she misses the fatherly love she was used to as a child. Her father seems to be afraid of her. Some people see this behavior as an Oedipus complex. Or even a hint of incest. Mainly because of the phrase “Why don’t you love me like before?” You can interpret as much as you like. My vision is simple — the daughter has grown up, has become a woman from a child, and the father is afraid that parental feelings can become something more. He closed with the help of aggression and discipline. He felt calmer, his daughter was lonely. Judy meets the man of her dreams — strong, sincere and gentle — Jim Stark.
Shooting Rebel Without A Cause
The script of “Rebel Without a Cause” was created based on the 1944 book of the same name. The film was supposed to start with a scene of a gang of teenagers attacking a gift shop, in which they beat the owner and threw Easter gifts into the street. But the movie starts differently. The opening scene is not in the script. The opening scene is Dean’s improvisation at 4 a.m. in a Los Angeles parking lot. It was a continuation of the scene of the attack on the store.
Natalie Wood was a star child actor. In “Rebel” her first adult work. She spent a month persuading the director to audition. Nicholas Ray wanted an actress with gang experience and experience in general. It wasn’t about Wood. It seems to me that she persuaded rather by lies. That doesn’t make her any less of a cool actress. To create a scene where Judy bursts into tears at the police, 12 takes were made. The longest “weeping” scene of the Warner Bros. company.
Stuart Stern, the author of the script, spent two weeks in the lobby of the juvenile police department before starting work. The behavior of people in the scenes taking place in the police are written off from reality. The book “Rebel Without a Cause” tells about juvenile delinquents of the mid-20th century. But Nicholas Ray was also inspired by another famous story of juvenile delinquents — Romeo and Juliet. So there is a couple desperate to find shelter in their family.
Chicken run, in which Jim and Buzz converge, was originally called blind run (blind run, blind race). But in the blind run, the cars did not rush to the cliff. They were rushing towards each other without headlights in the tunnel. But the idea of “who will jump out first” was the same. Nicholas Ray wanted to call the movie Blind Run, referring to the race. At the same time, I think it would be more interesting, like a second meaning. What is the life of a teenager, if not a blind race? “You’re wearing your adult games. But we won’t tell you how to play them.”
Workwear of a rebel and a conqueror of cakes.
Warner Bros. left the name Rebel Without A Cause. Cause — “reason”, “reason”. Literally, the name translates to “Rebel Without a Cause”. There is an alternative option “Rebel without an ideal.” I think it’s very successful, it’s closer to the point. Reason and ideal are not synonymous. But what each of the three heroes experiences is the lack of an ideal. More precisely, the disappearance of the ideal from where it was yesterday. That’s the reason for their rebellion.
Music in Rebellion
There is little music in the film. It catches your ears when you watch after the battle musical. In the scene with the beating of the table, a dramatic background was added, because at the preview, the audience, although nervously, was laughing. Music extinguished the desire to laugh. I was totally blown away at the first viewing and caught every straw to laugh. In this scene, such things happen, you get emotional. You can laugh and cry. In the frame is a cry of the soul. How to express it? The music dramatized.
I was expecting rock and roll in the soundtrack, black rhythm and blues and white rockabilly. Such a stereotype has developed from the films of the 1970s about the 1950s. But in “Rebel” there is a special task. If “American graffiti” by hook or by crook drags you into nostalgia, then “Rebel” shows a teenage drama so that nothing distracts. And rock and roll did not have time to become a way of self-determination for young people. He was still just a fresh, untested direction. In some, less dramatic scenes, bebop or big band jazz sounds.
In continuation of Jim’s conflict with his father, fresh thinking with sour, I would add to the story a conflict of genres — for example, swing and rockabilly. There was an adviser.
Russian footprint
James Dean professed an acting technique called the “Method.” The “method” took the basis of Stanislavsky’s “System”. Dean’s play shows “dramatic realism” according to Stanislavsky. In the film, Dean is inseparable from Jim, he got used to his experiences and emotions. Grew up with him. He himself admitted that even after the filming was over, he could not move away from the sharp points of the plot. Like a quarrel with my parents after the race. In my opinion, in the scene of the quarrel with his parents at the police station, one of the most recognizable from this film, Dean is godlessly theatrical. Come on, I couldn’t do it anyway. Although criticism is not accepted to talk about it.
Dean was striving for the naturalness of what was happening. There was a shooting of a knife fight at the observatory. Protective pads were placed under the actors’ clothes, the knives were blunted. And then Corey Allen hooked James Dean with a knife. So much so that the “live” blood went. Nicholas Ray commanded “Stop!”. Dean flared up: “I say when “Stop”!”, got upset and left the site into the sunset. He was very happy about the real injury in the scene, and the scene was interrupted. In the tie, in the office of policeman Ray Fremik, Dean is hammering a massive desk with his fists without fooling around. And smashes his fists to bruises. That’s how he was a “real” actor.
Natalie Wood, a star child actor, famous for the Christmas movie “Miracle on 34th Street” (influenced by our “Irony of Fate”). In “Rebel” she played her first adult role and was nominated for two awards. In short, she still gave a start to her career. Natalie was born in San Francisco under the name Natalia Nikolaevna Zakharenko. She was the daughter of Russian immigrants: Nikolai Stepanovich Zakharenko from Vladivostok and Maria Stepanovna Zudilova from Barnaul.
The grandmother is shown only at the beginning of the film. Her portrait gets here.
Censorship
Poems, songs, paintings, films — they are like a drawbar. Twist and turn, and with the proper desire you will see what you want. The film was shot in 1955, when the guardians of the cinema code were not inferior to the Soviet censors. This will disappoint those who equate democracy with permissiveness. So in the most intimate scene of the film — the dialogue between Jim and Judy in the denouement — the heroes, although they lie by the fire and confess their love, they do it fully clothed. If we were shooting a movie today, we wouldn’t do without sex.
I don’t think that bed scenes are bad in themselves. Any scene can be done well or badly. I think Hollywood would have rolled out a bed scene that would have been included in the directing textbooks. But it was impossible. Dean was 24 at the time of filming. Natalie Wood and Sal Mineo were 16 years old, like their characters. What kind of bed scenes? Not only were Wood and Mineo not underage, they were still in school. They barely made it to the shooting. That, however, did not prevent Nicholas Ray and Natalie Wood from making out behind the scenes.
More yellowness. When Wood came to act, she was dating Dennis Hopper, an actor who played a minor member of the Buzz gang in the film. And he was supposed to play the second man in the gang, but he was kicking hard because of Wood and Ray, so he stayed in the deep background.
Censorship, both in cinema and in society, has weakened over the years. I don’t think it’s someone’s laziness. Grandmothers in the entrances from generation to generation do not get tired of looking after the neighbors. I suppose censoring means depriving yourself of a part of the profit. Because there is a demand for certain stories, and if censorship does not allow it, the offer creates an underground, and this is lost money for the mainstream. I mumbled again.
So censorship has been weakening and continues in the same spirit. The gay community was once able to gather in the open. They were looking for support in works of art. And one of these works was “A Rebel Without a Cause”. When I learned this point of view, I thought how far-fetched it is! In fact, it is true that Sal Mineo was gay in life.
Rebellious Neverland. The characters are happy that they have found in each other everything that was missing in their families.
But this has nothing to do with the content of the film. They say that Plato did not see his father at all in Jim. Plato’s phrase is quoted: “I’m not tired at all, Jim, maybe we should take a walk to the mansion?” They say: “When I see the scenes with Dean and Mineo, and even with Dean and Backus, I have a boner.” The censors cut from the film the opening scene of a gang attack on a man with Easter gifts, a declaration of love to Judy and hints of a policeman about prostitution. If the director wanted to say something, it had to be well disguised. And who really knows what Nicholas Ray was up to?
Continued to follow
James Dean saw plans to go into directing. There he saw his talent. During the filming, he studied to be a film director. Dennis Hopper recalled that Nicholas Ray listened to ideas about the production from each of the crew. It turned out that Dean himself came up with several scenes in Ray’s film.Dean died a month before the release of the film. The studio thought to postpone the release, but the advertisement was launched during Dean’s lifetime. Advertising lured James Dean as the star of the movie “East of Paradise”, his first picture. Such an aura turned out: come and see what a wonderful actor we have. And the actor has already died. 37-year-old Sal Mineo was stabbed to death in a parking lot near his apartment. Natalie Wood drowned at the age of 43, riding a yacht.
Whatever you say, there is absolutely no one in the film. Propaganda of whatever it is. No one is calling for anything. It’s in a youth drama! Amazing and wonderful.
Periodically I remember what it’s like when they don’t want to listen to you. Do not perceive. Who’s older says: “You’re small, what can you say?” Peers: “Yes, you’re a clown, you won’t get anything serious from you.” They don’t say it in words, they don’t even think in these concepts. It’s like muscle memory — securely recorded in the subcortex by persistent repetitions. I’m over thirty, but my mom still doesn’t take me seriously. And my brother, who is 18 years older than me, always listens. Even, sometimes, he will laugh at my joke. So the film is designed for a viewer with such emotions. If you don’t experience them and haven’t experienced them, I sincerely envy you.
Then just try to imagine: your peers are smacking you, your parents don’t give a damn, like other adults. There are exceptional peers, like Jim for Plato. There are exceptional adults like Officer Ray Fremic. The thin threads between you give hope that you are not alone. These threads can break from a whiff. What happens if all the strings break?
