As a title, Rebel Without a Cause tells you almost everything you need to know. With absolutely no context, it conjures the image of a young person -- it's always a young person, isn't it? -- rebelling against authority. And with the context that comes from having a passing knowledge of American culture, even people who haven't seen the film can picture James Dean in the lead, grappling with the stiff, square 1950s. There's no question that Rebel Without a Cause has been influential, and that some of its mythic status comes as the result of Dean's tragic death just before it was released. But did it earn its notoriety in other ways, too? Would it still be as highly regarded today if Dean had lived? Put on your red jacket, get out your knife, and let's consider.

The praise: Natalie Wood and Sal Mineo got Oscar nominations for their supporting performances, with Nicholas Ray getting a nod for his story. ("Story" and "Story and Screenplay" were two separate categories back then.) It ranked #59 on the American Film Institute's 1998 list of greatest American films ever made, but didn't make the top 100 in the 2007 revised list. Empire magazine put it at #477 on the list of the world's 500 best movies.

The context: "Juvenile delinquency" was a buzzword in the early 1950s, a catch-all term for basically any teenage behavior that wasn't strictly within the limits of accepted decorum. The advent of rock 'n' roll brought about an epidemic of "juvenile delinquency," insofar as it caused teens to swivel their hips and to occasionally stay out past curfew at sock hops.

We laugh now, as well we should, at the hysterical way some parents overreacted to the changing culture, but you can see why they were afraid. While there had always been a gap between the generations, things were changing now faster than they ever had before. Rock 'n' roll exemplified this shift, but the Cold War and the new emergence of atomic and nuclear weapons also contributed.

The adults of the 1950s had lived through the Great Depression and World War II, and many of them were old enough to remember World War I. Their teenage kids, though, had been little children during World War II, shielded from the most worrying of its effects. And this was the thanks their dear parents got? Carefree attitudes, raucous new music, and a general lack of respect for authority? Such impudence!

The teenagers, meanwhile, rolled their eyes at how their squaresville parents failed to understand them. The kids weren't oblivious to the perils of the world. They had "duck and cover" drills in school. They saw their older brothers going off to war in Korea. Teens had worries, too -- they just didn't have much in the way of movies, TV, or music to help them cope with it. Movie studios didn't consider teenagers an audience worth courting, and their parents' entertainment wouldn't do. It was a different world now. They needed something of their own.

At this moment, an actor emerged on the scene who would change everything. His name was -- you guessed it -- Marlon Brando. Twelve years older than James Dean, Brando had already made a splash in A Streetcar Named Desire (1951), using the new "Method acting" he'd learned at the Actors Studio to bring an unprecedented authenticity to movies. Brando's style was realistic and stark. It was exactly the kind of bold newness that 1950s young people needed to distinguish themselves from their parents. Let Mom and Dad have their Humphrey Bogarts and their Cary Grants. We'll take Brando.

In 1953, Brando cemented his status as an icon of disaffected youth by starring in The Wild One, playing the leather-jacketed leader of a directionless motorcycle gang. When someone in the film asks him what he's rebelling against, he replies, "Whaddaya got?" Audience members in their teens and early 20s understood the sentiment, never mind that Brando, at 29, was too old to really be one of them.

James Dean, a huge admirer of Brando's work, was admitted to the Actors Studio in 1952, in awe of his good fortune to be studying at Brando's alma mater. Around the time that Brando was doing The Wild One, Dean was cast in East of Eden by Elia Kazan, who had directed Streetcar and said he wanted a "Marlon Brando type" for the part.

He certainly got one. Dean didn't bear much physical resemblance to Brando, except that both were exceptionally handsome -- "cute," even, which didn't often apply to leading men in those days. But the actors shared a common brooding intensity, the suggestion that their characters were frustrated and unsatisfied. Moreover, they had learned the same acting techniques and exhibited similar mannerisms, vocal tics, and other markers.

The comparisons were not always well received. In the New York Times, Bosley Crowther called Dean's East of Eden performance -- his first major film role -- "a mass of histrionic gingerbread." "He scuffs his feet, he whirls, he pouts, he sputters, he leans against walls, he rolls his eyes, he swallows his words, he ambles slack-kneed -- all like Marlon Brando used to do," Crowther wrote. "Never have we seen a performer so clearly follow another's style.... Whatever there might be of reasonable torment in this youngster is buried beneath the clumsy display."

Audiences saw things differently, though, and so did the Academy: Dean was nominated for a Best Actor Oscar for East of Eden. He might have gotten a nod for Rebel Without a Cause, too, except that the films came out in the same year, and Eden, based on a John Steinbeck novel, was the more "serious" one.

All the accolades were posthumous anyway. East of Eden was released on March 9, 1955. Three weeks later, 24-year-old Dean started filming Rebel Without a Cause, playing a 17-year-old character clearly inspired by the types in The Wild One. (Brando, now 31, had screen-tested for the lead in Rebel; as good as he was, it's doubtful the film would have been nearly as powerful without someone closer to the right age in the role.) Rebel finished production at the end of May. Four months later, Dean was killed in a car accident. A month after that, Rebel was released theatrically. Half a century later, the release of The Dark Knight six months after Heath Ledger's untimely death would serve as an eerie parallel.

Rebel was directed by Nicholas Ray, a socially conscious filmmaker whose movies tended to cast outlaws and outsiders in a sympathetic light. (His first movie, 1948's They Live By Night (1948), was about a young pair of bank robbers, a precursor to Bonnie and Clyde.) That made him a perfect fit for James Dean, who had earned praise (albeit not from the New York Times) for playing a discontented young man in East of Eden and needed a good follow-up to capitalize on that success.

The movie: We begin late one night in the juvenile division of a Los Angeles police precinct, where three teenagers have been hauled in. Jim (James Dean) was arrested for being drunk. Judy (Natalie Wood) was out alone too late. John, nicknamed Plato (Sal Mineo), shot a puppy. Jim's family has just moved to town to escape the problems he caused in the last town, and the next day he learns that he is classmates with Judy and Plato. The school tough guys, resembling gangsters from West Side Story (which would also star Natalie Wood), harass Jim, who doesn't want any trouble. Trouble, nonetheless, ensues.

What it influenced: Dean's performance quickly became iconic. Just as the mention of "vampire" makes you think of Bela Lugosi's Dracula, a reference to a brooding, anxious teenager probably calls to mind something close to Jim Stark. The role became an archetype, imitated and parodied countless times. Matt Groening has said Fry's red jacket in Futurama was intended as an homage. Just last year, Fantastic Mr. Fox had its moody teenager quote Jim Stark when he told his parents, "You say one thing, she says another, and everything switches back again!"

The film's financial success inspired Hollywood to copy the formula by making cheap, exploitative B-movies about "teen issues." This was inevitable, and it didn't mean Hollywood was going to start taking teenagers seriously, not yet. But it inspired the French critics-turned-filmmakers Jean-Luc Godard and François Truffaut, whose work a few years later would lead to the French New Wave (see our report on Jules and Jim), and the New Wave led directly to movies like The Graduate and Easy Rider, which did change the way Hollywood viewed young people.

What to look for: Knowing only the basics going in, you might be surprised to find that Rebel Without a Cause is not simply a youth-of-control movie but has a clear, unified theme: what it means to be a man. Jim's father (played by Jim Backus, then the voice of Mr. Magoo and later the millionaire on Gilligan's Island) is weak and ineffectual, unable to stand up to Jim's severe, dominating mother (Ann Doran). Judy's father (William Hopper) has treated her with disdain ever since she started to blossom into womanhood, terrified of her sexuality. Plato's father is either gone or dead, depending on which story Plato tells, and Plato is desperately in need of positive male influences.

Jim gets dragged into things by being called a "chicken," an insult that seems quaint to modern ears but riles Jim because it plays upon his masculine insecurity. His own father is a wimp and a coward; he fears he may be one, too, and he knows this would not be "manly." He's pulled into a stupid and dangerous macho game with one of the school punks, Buzz (Corey Allen), even though neither of them really wants to do it. "You know something? I like you," Buzz says, just before their foolish competition begins.

"Then why do we do this?" Jim asks.

Buzz replies: "You gotta do something." Hey, we're men. This is what men are supposed to do. After Buzz is out of the picture, his girlfriend, Judy, automatically becomes Jim's, the dominant male in the pack having been ousted by the newcomer. It's primal.

The question of how to be a man in the modern age is further complicated by the fact that Plato is infatuated with Jim. (He has a picture of actor Alan Ladd, the star of 1953's Shane, in his school locker. Does he envy Shane's rugged masculinity, or does he simply admire Alan Ladd?) I hesitate to say the character is gay; it's more complicated than that. Plato gazes admiringly at Jim, idolizes him, but wants him to be a father or a big brother more than anything else. I've read pieces claiming Plato is jealous of Judy, but I don't see it. He seems happiest at the notion of playing house, with both Jim and Judy as his surrogate parents.

(By the way, Dean was 24 when the film was shot, while Natalie Wood and Sal Mineo were both 16. As rare as it is now for movie teens to be played by actual teens, it was rarer then.)

The film broke some new ground in its treatment of teenagers, but remember: it was still 1955. The movie is about teenagers, yet doesn't seem to have been made for them. The style is like anything else from that era, complete with a lush, orchestral musical score that could have come from a movie Jim Stark's parents saw when they were kids. Ray shot the film in widescreen, which was new and trendy then but today is mostly used for action films, not simple dramas. He shot it in color, too: rich, vivid color that sometimes contradicts the unhappy mood of the film. It's a classical-style melodrama about modern youth -- which is kind of like staging an opera about professional wrestling. Ray, 41 years old at the time, may have been trying to speak to young people, but he was using their parents' language.

What's the big deal: In his essay on Rebel Without a Cause, Roger Ebert writes of James Dean, Marlon Brando, and Elvis Presley that "these three role models decisively altered the way young men could be seen in popular culture. They could be more feminine, sexier, more confused, more ambiguous." Both onscreen and off, Dean had the image of a troubled, wounded young man, his real and fictional personas blurring. His early death cemented the image, freezing him in that position forever, even though he was already trying to shed it: Giant, the film he was working on when he died, had him in a role he'd chosen specifically to avoid being typecast as a brooding teen. Somehow the fact that we don't know what James Dean would have evolved into makes the story of Jim Stark -- who also doesn't know what kind of man he's going to be -- all the more poignant.

And if Dean hadn't died young? His death certainly added to the film's cachet, but I don't think that's all there was to it. Even if he had lived, Rebel Without a Cause still would have been considered unusually astute for its time, and might have had some of the same impact. We'll never know, of course. But think about this: If James Dean were alive today, he'd be the same age as James Earl Jones, Rip Torn, William Shatner, Leonard Nimoy, Dan Rather, and Regis Philbin. Can you picture him doing hammy TV commercials or voicing cartoon characters? Maybe it's best that he left when he did.

Further reading: As always, avoid these if you don't want the story spoiled for you.

You can tell Rebel Without a Cause was making some attempt to relate to youth because a lot of the film critics didn't like it. The review in Box Office Magazine -- and seriously, don't read it if you haven't seen the movie, because it describes the entire story from beginning to end -- was dismissive: "The story has few, if any, believable characters, situations or passages of dialogue." That makes me wonder what constituted "believable" in 1955, because Rebel Without a Cause doesn't strike me as any less realistic than, say, Marty, or Mister Roberts, both of which won Oscars that year.

Roger Ebert doesn't love the movie, but he writes some insightful things about it.

At AMC's Filmsite, Tim Dirks has some smart analysis of the film.

Sam Kashner's lengthy Vanity Fair article about Nicholas Ray, from 2005, has a lot to say about Rebel Without a Cause specifically.

* * * *

Eric D. Snider (website) never rebels unless he has a specific cause, in writing.

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