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.

Rebel without a Cause: Nicholas Ray in the Fifties, by Peter Biskind. Film Quarterly © 1974 University of California Press. 

           

            Peter Biskind argues that director Nicholas Ray’s films are not as subversive as is commonly assumed by fans of the director and even film scholars. During the 1950s, family values reigned: the preservation of the family, with each parent in his or her gender-appropriate role was seen as the solution to emerging societal problems including homosexuality and juvenile delinquency. Biskind contends that Ray’s films never radically depart from these conservative notions. In his reading of Rebel Without a Cause (1955), the centrality of the family is consistently reaffirmed. The source of protagonist Jim Stark’s alienation is attributed to his problematic family life, where in his mother is dominant and over-bearing and his father is atypically passive. The conclusion of the film rights this deviance. The Stark patriarch learns from his son’s conduct how to be a man by 1950s standards, and his wife is finally quieted. Ray’s faith in the conventional family also explains why Sal Mineo’s Plato must die. Plato is orphaned by his parent’s neglect, and has no proper place in the pseudo-family formed by the romance between James Dean and Natalie Wood. He is the true outsider. As Dean and Wood are healed by their relationship, and can eventually reintegrate into the mainstream, Mineo meets a tragic end. To Biskind, the film occupies a political and moral middle ground, situating itself within the comfortable middleclass mainstream and failing to critique the family as a potentially problematic institution. Biskind does not view the film’s stance as a flaw, but rather a product of its time and the demands of the Hollywood machine in which it was created.

            The piece presents a complex and unconventional reading of what is often considered a truly “rebellious” film, contextualizing the response in the political atmosphere of the 1950s. It provides a historical perspective that complicates the typical reception of the film and its enduring  popularity.