Rebel Without a Cause is a classic movie, but it was never a really good movie. It's just a 50s teen panic movie with a little extra gloss.
The film begins in a police station where all the cops seem like helpful social workers. After a brief look at James Dean we get a tedious scene of Natalie Wood crying about her father that drags on forever, but when James Dean starts chewing the furniture it gets a little more interesting, and Sal Mineo keeps things going as a sad little psycho.
These three introduce the basic concept, which is teens are miserable and don't quite know why.
That's pretty much it for the internal lives of these characters - angst and anger - but it's more than the adults get. Their role is to simply be object for the teens to interact with, and they have no internal lives of their own. Sometimes you can guess what's going on - Natalie's father is clearly freaked out by her puberty, but you get that from the script, not from his performance.
Perhaps that makes sense - it's a teens-eye movie, so like the Charlie Brown cartoons adults are just things that go waa-waa-waa and have no purpose outside of childraising. But it's a clunky construct.
Anyway, James Dean can't make friends, Natalie is in a gang that picks on him for no good reason, and Sal seems to want Dean as his daddy, since the real one is gone. There's some fighting, a famous "chicken" race, Dean's dad in a frilly apron, and Dean's mother looking directly at the camera and saying "you never realize something like this could happen to your child" in a "THIS IS THE MESSAGE" kind of way.
The characters are poorly developed, and while Wood's animalistic pleasure in the violence is rather fascinating her character overall makes a series of absurd left turns that makes her almost as much of a prop as the parents.
But none of that takes away from Dean, who yes, can be a bit much, but who is a riveting presence who fully commits. Without Dean and Mineo this would be just another forgotten teen exploitation film, but with them it's worthwhile.
The film begins in a police station where all the cops seem like helpful social workers. After a brief look at James Dean we get a tedious scene of Natalie Wood crying about her father that drags on forever, but when James Dean starts chewing the furniture it gets a little more interesting, and Sal Mineo keeps things going as a sad little psycho.
These three introduce the basic concept, which is teens are miserable and don't quite know why.
That's pretty much it for the internal lives of these characters - angst and anger - but it's more than the adults get. Their role is to simply be object for the teens to interact with, and they have no internal lives of their own. Sometimes you can guess what's going on - Natalie's father is clearly freaked out by her puberty, but you get that from the script, not from his performance.
Perhaps that makes sense - it's a teens-eye movie, so like the Charlie Brown cartoons adults are just things that go waa-waa-waa and have no purpose outside of childraising. But it's a clunky construct.
Anyway, James Dean can't make friends, Natalie is in a gang that picks on him for no good reason, and Sal seems to want Dean as his daddy, since the real one is gone. There's some fighting, a famous "chicken" race, Dean's dad in a frilly apron, and Dean's mother looking directly at the camera and saying "you never realize something like this could happen to your child" in a "THIS IS THE MESSAGE" kind of way.
The characters are poorly developed, and while Wood's animalistic pleasure in the violence is rather fascinating her character overall makes a series of absurd left turns that makes her almost as much of a prop as the parents.
But none of that takes away from Dean, who yes, can be a bit much, but who is a riveting presence who fully commits. Without Dean and Mineo this would be just another forgotten teen exploitation film, but with them it's worthwhile.