From crises including two World Wars and the Great Depression, the United States emerged in the 1950s as an unprecedented global power, intent on peace, and energized by remarkable prosperity. But new threats to domestic tranquility quickly arose in the immediate postwar period. Racial tensions ran high, Communist plots against the government were being routed out, and perhaps most shockingly the youth turned against society, violently so. Headlines abounded declaring that the youth were now a dangerous social problem. Nicholas Ray's "Rebel Without A Cause" took an unconventional look at juvenile delinquency, one that located the problem in what had once been the peaceful suburbs. This project examines the immediate reception of this enduring depiction of teenage alienation, using sources that situate the film in its historical context.

Noriega, Chon. "Something's Missing Here!": Homosexuality and Film Reviews during the Production Code Era, 1934-1962. Cinema Journal, Vol. 30, No. 1. (Autumn, 1990), pp. 20-41 

            Chon Noriega’s piece chronicles the depiction and reception of homosexuality in Hollywood using film reviews from major periodicals as source material. As the Production Code demanded that "Sex perversion or any inference of it is forbidden," the period of the 1930s and 1940s was characterized by films that had few if any allusions to the existence of homosexuality. Instead, as films were adapted from materials that featured homosexuality as a part of the narrative, the issue was substituted for other social problems. Noriega looks at the three such films in which homosexuality is recast, as the evils of gossip, alcoholism, and anti-semitism, respectively. Reviews at the time rarely mentioned the exchange, or if they did, praised the substitution as making the film better. From this “conspiracy of silence” came acknowledgment of homosexual themes and characters in the 1950s. As long as homosexual characters faced a character arc that was sufficiently tragic, and thus didactic, films were acceptable and homosexuality was no longer explicitly criticized in the reviews. Beginning in the mid-1950s and continuing to the 1960s the dominant perception of homosexuality was no longer that it was criminal, but that it was a psychiatric disease that individuals could be pitied for being afflicted with, but could be cured of.

            Rebel Without a Cause (1955) is often cited as one of the first films to depict a homosexual teenager, Plato, played by Sal Mineo. However, the film initially had more daring content. Upon submission to Joseph Breen’s office, the film was found to have latent homosexual themes that had to be re-edited. The article illuminates the attitudes towards homosexuality at the time of Rebel’s release and the perceived necessity of the changes.