Rebel Without a Cause
premiered in October 1955 without many parties.
James Dean, its main star, had died a month earlier in a traffic accident.
The other two, Natalie Wood and Sal Mineo, would follow in her tragic wake some time later.
In Spain we had to wait nine more years to see it: it premiered on February 20, 1964. Censorship was to blame for the delay: it was worrying about latent homosexuality, knife fights and the disintegration of the traditional family unit.
Those young people who went to school with their own cars, their
jeans
and their toupees had no reflection in our country.
Apparently.
Her message turned out to be universal and his influence was present in
Grease
(1978),
West Side Story
(1961), Fonzie from the
Happy Days
series or Dylan from
Sensation of Living
.
Without James Dean from
Rebel Without a Cause
, River Phoenix, Brad Renfro, Keanu Reeves, Zac Efron or James Franco would not have existed, at least as we knew them.
Even Fry's outfit in
Futurama
is inspired by the costumes in
Rebel Without a Cause
.
Not even Warner Bros. was aware of the potential of that script when production began.
Until then, teen movies were considered B series and tended to be part of double programs, inconsequential movies to pass the time.
The young characters lacked their own identity, they were only there to complement the adults.
But
Rebel Without a Cause
immortalized the archetype of the melancholic adolescent, the one who does not understand the world and feels that the world does not understand him.
As if that were not enough to achieve a place in film history, it also showed the first gay teenager, also played by a gay actor, the gorgeous Sal Mineo.
Sal Mineo, James Dean and Natalie Wood: a tragic game of glances on the filming of 'Rebel Without a Cause'.Warner Bros. (Getty Images)
Sal Mineo, James Dean and Natalie Wood in a scene from 'Rebel Without a Cause'.Archive Photos (Getty Images)
Rebel Without a Cause
was going to be the adaptation of Dr. Robert M. Lindner's essay published in 1944 about the psyche of a young delinquent.
Warner had bought the rights to the book in 1946 with Marlon Brando in mind, but that project did not go ahead.
When juvenile delinquency began to become the first concern of Americans, he took the project out of the drawer and offered it to Nicholas Ray, one of the fashionable directors thanks to the success of
Johnny Guitar
(1954), he turned it into what we know. today.
The title of the original book is barely preserved.
“What was all the fuss about Dean when Dean was so clearly imitating Nick [Nicholas Ray]?” wrote his widow, Susan Schwartz.
Director Nicholas Ray was a restless character who had studied with Frank Lloyd Wright and had abandoned architecture for the love of theater.
He was an original and charismatic director, but also problematic.
Ignored by Hollywood from the sixties onwards, France and the Nouvelle Vague came to the rescue.
“Cinema is Nicholas Ray,” Godard wrote.
Ray was the one who suggested an essential change for the success of the film: the juvenile delinquents would not be marginal elements of society, as in Linder's book, they would not come from depressed environments and broken families, but they would be the children of wealthy families. , of the emerging middle class that had developed in the United States after World War II.
That would be much scarier: every American home could harbor a potential criminal behind its whitewashed picket fence.
“And they came from good families!” read the promotional poster.
Natalie Wood and James Dean in a scene from 'Rebel Without a Cause'.Archive Photos (Getty Images)
Nicholas Ray directs James Dean during the filming of 'Rebel Without a Cause'.Sunset Boulevard (Corbis via Getty Images)
We meet the main trio, Jimmy, Nancy and Plato, for the first time in what is a police station, but not one of those sordid rooms where marginalized young people get lost in the twists and turns of the system.
It looks more like the office of the director of an institute and there are three characters in whom any good citizen could see themselves reflected.
The story of the film is simple: there is love, friendship, gangs and exalted feelings and everything happens in a single day because, as Ray emphasized, “when you are a teenager, 24 hours are a lifetime.”
Distribution of fixed ideas
Ray was clear about who Jim Stark would be.
James Dean had fascinated him in
East of Eden
(1955), his only film to date and, although his director Elia Kazan warned him of his eccentricities, nothing stopped Ray, who saw his soul mate in the young actor.
Despite everything, Warner suggested until the last minute names of conventional studio heartthrobs such as Robert Wagner and Tab Hunter.
The role of Plato had no other candidates than Sal Mineo, a star already on Broadway at the time.
More complex was the role of Judy: Warner suggested Debbie Reynolds and Carrol Baker, and even, to Ray's despair, the explosive Jayne Mansfield.
Ray gave him a test to please the studio, but he didn't even put tape on the camera.
Nicholas Ray directs James Dean during the filming of 'Rebel Without a Cause'.Sunset Boulevard (Corbis via Getty Images)
James Dean and his characteristic red jacket in a promotional portrait for 'Rebel Without a Cause'.Michael Ochs Archives
I also didn't trust that Natalie Wood could be a rebel with or without a cause, but she desperately wanted the role to stop playing girls and also to get rid of her mother's iron fist.
Ray knew how to take advantage of that desperation: days after the first screen test, he was in bed with her.
He was 44 years old, she was 16, the same as Mineo, who also stopped by Ray's bedroom.
Wood, at the time, was in a relationship with Dennis Hooper, who appears briefly in the film because Ray's jealousy led him to cut all of her dialogue in the editing room.
Warner Bros. knew that Dean was a star project (with just one movie released, he received 400 letters a week) and wanted a great product for him, but they doubted that
Rebel Without a Cause
was that product.
In fact it was going to be a small black and white film, as Ray wanted, until someone read the fine print of the contract with Cinemascope and discovered that it was mandatory to shoot in color.
Ray had doubts about that overwhelming new format, he feared not being able to “fill” the screen.
Today no one doubts that both the breadth of the visual field and its explosive colors contributed to the fascination aroused by the film.
To add more realism, Ray hired a real gang member, Frank Mazzola, to play one of Judy's friends.
He was the one who told the production department what the cars, the games, the fights and also the clothes should be like, which had to be replaced when going from the initially planned black and white to color.
Mazzola had the wardrobe department buy the clothes at Matson's on Hollywood Boulevard, where his gang dressed.
Then the wardrobe department dirty, washed and dyed more than 400 pairs of Levi's for the cast because they looked green on screen.
It was in those warehouses where they found the iconic red jacket that would become one of Dean's trademarks.
Other masculinities were possible
There was another thing as striking about
Rebel Without a Cause
as its vivid chromaticism: Plato's homosexuality.
Ray was always clear that this character was gay and on that set he did not pose any problem.
Dean was, according to many accounts, bisexual, like Ray, and Mineo was homosexual.
In the case of his character, without dissimulation.
In his locker there is a photo of Alan Ladd, heartthrob of the fifties.
When Plato invites Jim to his house for dinner, it is clear that she has fallen in love with him and intends for dinner to be followed by breakfast.
Everyone involved knew about that subplot.
To make it easier, Dean asked Mineo to look at him the way his character looked at Judy.
Knowing what was brewing, the Motion Picture Production Code office, the infamous Hays Code, sent a memo to Warner Bros. head Jack Warner, warning him: “Of course, it is vital that no homosexual or questionable relationship be inferred between Plato and Jim.”
The entire film revolves around masculinity, which at that time was looking for new references beyond John Wayne.
Marlon Brando had offered an alternative as the biker gang leader in
Wild
(1953) and Dean provided a more sensitive image.
A year later would come the emergence of Elvis Presley.
The new idols of young people were not afraid to show their feelings, their doubts, their fragility.
This construction of a new identity is evident throughout the film: Jim's greatest fear is looking like a coward, so he tries to earn the respect of the school's dominant gang, participates in a knife fight and in "the race of the chicken”, in which two cars speed towards a cliff and the first one to jump is the loser.
In Jim's house there is also an atypical order: the mother is the figure of power, his father is tender, thoughtful and affectionate.
Today he would be called deconstructed, then he was simply called a slob for cooking for his wife.
Jim is horrified by the possibility of ending up like him.
However, if we look at it with modern eyes, it seems like a good reference and the one who is really disturbing is Judy's father, who, aware that his daughter is no longer a girl but a woman and very attractive, prefers to violently push her away from him out of fear. to your own desires.
James Dean and Natalie Wood during the filming of 'Rebel Without a Cause'.Michael Ochs Archives (Getty Images)
Warner was already fully aware of the immense success that was coming when on September 30, 1955, news shook Hollywood.
James Dean had crashed his Porsche on the way to a car competition.
He was only 24 years old.
When Warner Bros. released
Rebel Without a Cause
, just a month after Dean's death, all the promotion focused on him.
The film did not have unanimous support from critics and neither did Dean's performance, which was exaggerated at times.
Wood and Mineo were nominated for Oscars, Dean was not.
With only three films to his credit, two of them released after his death, Dean is an icon who, by being associated with cigarette or soft drink advertisements, runs the risk of ceasing to be remembered as an extraordinary actor who redefined the interpretation.
The impact of the film was immediate: teenagers filled the movie theaters because they felt challenged for the first time.
The violent content scared some distributors and there were theaters in the United States that refused to show it to avoid the proliferation of fights and car competitions with tragic endings.
As film historian Douglas L. Rathgeb explains in the documentary
Defiant Innocents,
there was fear that the film would put the community in danger, that it would introduce the idea of creating an alternative family into the adolescent psyche.
Dean's was not the only tragic ending associated with
Rebel Without a Cause
.
Sal Mineo was only 37 years old when he was stabbed to death by a robber in an alley;
Natalie Wood drowned at 43 in what remains one of the most mysterious deaths in film history.
But the legacy of
Rebel Without a Cause
is stronger than these tragedies.
It was the first film to put teenagers at the center of the screen and you only have to look at today's screens to know that they have never left them again.
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