Not much of a rebel but a bit of a cause.

WARNING: SPOILERS

For such an iconic movie, it’s not great.

That was my thinking when I first saw “Rebel Without a Cause” in my early 20s, and it’s still my thinking after seeing it on the big screen in downtown Seattle last week at age 62. It’s a 1950s film saturated in colors and melodrama—basically Douglas Sirk for teens. It’s about spoiled kids who don’t know they’re spoiled, and the adults who are cool with that. 

What’s the timeframe here—36 hours? The three teenagers, strangers all, wind up at the police station in the wee hours of the same morning. Each has parental issues. For Jim Stark (James Dean), it’s a bit all over the place—parents bicker, father doesn’t stand up to mother, father wears apron. It’s more specific for Judy (Natalie Wood), who worries her father doesn’t love her anymore, and for Plato (Sal Mineo), who doesn’t even have parents around to complain about. His father abandoned him when he was young, his mother more recently.

The next day the three go to school, there’s the field trip to the Griffith Observatory and the knife fight afterwards. The evening is the chickie run and the death of Buzz (Corey Allen), its aftermath a swirl of desires and revenge, leading to the death of Plato as dawn breaks. So not even 36 hours. 

And during that short timeframe, everyone changes. Jim is a drunk until he isn’t, Judy is a jerk (thrilling at men battling) until she turns sensitive, Plato is gay until he just becomes crazy. Buzz goes from bully to bro to dead, while at the 11th hour Jim’s dad (Jim Backus) finds the resolve to man up.

The title isn’t even true. Jim Stark isn’t much of a rebel, and he most definitely has a cause.

Upstanding slouch
What is his cause? He gets provoked by kids calling him “chicken” because he sees his father as one and fears it runs in the family. So his cause is to have the courage to confront the thing, whatever the thing is. Despite the slouch on the poster, he wants to be upstanding. At the same time, he’s part of that run of 1950s sensitive male heroes—he talks about his feelings and listens to people—so there’s a bit of needle threading. He’s sensitive, sure, but, Dad, can’t you take just one sock at mom? For me?

We first see him lying prone on a city street, playing with one of those cymbal-playing toy monkeys. He covets the monkey. He objects when the cops try to take it away so they let him keep it. He’s a kid here. He’s also solicitous and offers his jacket to a shivering Plato in the police station.

Why were the others picked up by the cops? Is it just curfew? Judy has daddy issues, while Daddy (William Hopper, the future Paul Drake of “Perry Mason”) has Judy issues, in that she’s blossomed into Natalie Wood and he may be attracted to her. I tend to think adolescents push parents away but here it’s the opposite; here, they all want to get closer to them. And what understanding they don’t get from mom and dad, they get from … cops? Yes. Particularly Ray Fremick (Edward Platt, the future “Chief” of “Get Smart”). It’s at the police station where backstories are revealed, and where, as his parents bicker, Jim emotes “You’re tearing me apart!” 

It's implied that the Starks moved to the area because of Jim’s problems: he can’t make friends, he gets into fights. (Me at 20 and 62: James Dean can’t make friends?) But it’s more indicative of the Starks’ problem: they don’t confront, they run away. And Jim is trying to stop the running away.

Next morning he starts chatting up Judy, the literal girl next door, and then tries to get in with her friends, Buzz’s gang, but they’re all a bunch of jerks—including Judy. At the observatory he tries to get in with them again, mooing while the lecturer talks up the Taurus sign in the stars, and then looking expectantly at them. Instead of friendship, he gets a knife fight.

Does anything reveal how spoiled American kids are more than the chickie run? The rest of the world is still recovering from WWII while these kids take two stolen cars, race them toward a cliff, and the first to jump out is “the chicken.” Meanwhile, below, a helluva lot to clean up—and that’s if it’s just cars. Here it isn’t. A strap from Buzz’s leather jacket gets caught in the handle and he can’t get out. Cue that great, terrifying shot, from Buzz’s perspective, of the car going down.

It's at the chickie run that James Dean begins wearing one of the most iconic outfits in Hollywood history: jeans, white t-shirt and red windbreaker—which photographs like suede but apparently was thick nylon. Before this, in the film, he was a dress shirt and sports jacket dude. You could say the dress code for young American men changed forever with Jim Stark’s mid-movie wardrobe change. And sure, leather jackets were already a phenomenon: Brando in “Wild One,” Clift in “A Place in the Sun,” John Derek in “Knock on Any Door,” hell, Jean Gabin in “Le jour se leve” from 1939. But Dean popularized the look more than anyone. It never went back.

Then the long evening of swirling. Jim decides to fess up to the cops but he can’t get their attention and doesn’t think to say “I was there when Buzz died.” He only gets the attention of three of Buzz’s gang, including Dennis Hopper as Goon, who are leaving the police station as he’s entering. They think he finked but … finked how? What’s to fink? During the evening, Jim is with Judy, then with Plato, then Judy again. The three find Plato alone and steal his address book, then taunt Jim’s parents by hanging a live chicken outside the front door.

By this point Jim and Judy have already lammed it to an abandoned mansion near the observatory—the same mansion from “Sunset Boulevard”—and Plato meets them there. They goof around, talk about being a family, Jim does an imitation of his father—i.e., James Dean doing an imitation of Jim Backus/Mr. Magoo. (I so love that.) Jim also gives Plato his iconic jacket, which Plato cradles like Mrs. Danvers caressing the underthings of the original Mrs. de Winter in “Rebecca.” We get a nice kissing scene between Wood and Dean, she rubbing her lips against his cheeks until he turns toward her. But then the gang of three shows up. One nice thing you can say about them? They haven’t forgotten Buzz the way Judy has. Dude’s body isn’t even cold. 

In panic, Plato shoots one of the gang. Increasingly hysterical, he blames Jim and Judy for abandoning him, as his own parents did, and flees to the observatory. Now the cops are there, and various parents, and Jim and Judy rush inside to talk Plato down. Referencing the lecture they’d seen earlier, Plato asks Jim if he thinks the world will end at midnight and Jim goes “Nah, dawn,” and so it is for Plato. Jim brokers talks between Plato and police, both sides panic, and Plato is shot dead even though—in Dean’s other famous emoting scene—“I got the bullets!” Impressed with his son, Dad promises to be a more standup guy, and gives Jim his jacket as Jim had given his to Plato. All the parental strife is handled facilely, and Jim makes a laugh-out-loud intro as everyone stands over Plato’s lifeless body: 

“This is Judy.”

The George W.S. Trow thing
James Dean famously starred in only three films before his death in a car accident on September 30, 1955, and he was Oscar-nominated as lead actor in two of them. This is the other one. But Mineo and Wood were nominated, both for supporting, while Nicholas Ray was nominated for script (which is so-so) rather than his direction (which is superlative). Nobody won. Ray was never nominated again.

All three are good but it’s Dean who makes the movie. If you don’t believe me, see two other Nicholas Ray films about misunderstood teens, “Knock on Any Door” and “Run for Cover,” both with John Derek. James Dean is able to project the strength, sensitivity, and sense of humor in the whiny little shit; John Derek was just a whiny little shit.

Watching the movie at SIFF Downtown, I kept doing the George W.S. Trow thing and backdating to get a sense of the characters and what they lived through. Let’s assume most are 17. Born in 1938, they grew up and became cognizant during WWII, were 7 when the Atomic Age began and 8 when the Cold War began. In junior high they were ducking beneath school desks against an imaginary Russian attack. And they were exactly this age when rock ‘n’ roll started. The movie was filmed between March and May 1955, so production began with “Ballad of Davy Crockett” at the top of the charts and finished it with Bill Haley’s “Rock Around the Clock” there. Everything was breaking.

That timeline actually works for Natalie Wood (b., July 1938), and Sal Mineo (b., January 1939), but not James Dean, who was born February 8, 1931. The ultimate misunderstood teen was older than my father.