Rebel Without a Cause

Directed by Nicholas Ray, Rebel Without a Cause follows James Dean’s Jim Stark as he attempts to carve out a place for himself within his new school and community – with problems ensuing after Jim runs afoul of several local teens. It’s a familiar premise that is, for the most part, employed to entirely underwhelming and uninvolving effect by Ray, as the filmmaker, working from Stewart Stern’s screenplay, delivers a sluggish drama that contains few compelling attributes and a dearth of sympathetic, interesting characters – with the latter especially true of Dean’s oddball, one-note central character. (The actor’s wildly over-the-top and aggressively showy performance does little to alleviate this feeling, ultimately.) The movie’s pervasive (and persistent) arms-length vibe is compounded by a meandering narrative that suffers from an almost total lack of compelling sequences or set-pieces, and it’s clear, too, that one’s efforts at working up a rooting interest in the picture’s myriad of scarcely-developed periphery figures fall flat on a distressingly regular basis. (The fact that Sal Mineo’s Plato is revealed to have shot a bunch of puppies instantly ensures that the viewer is actively rooting against him, for example.) The anticlimactic final stretch ultimately cements Rebel Without a Cause‘s place as an overwrought, unconvincing endeavor that’s aged terribly in the years since its 1955 debut, which is a shame, certainly, as the picture does contain a very small handful of relatively agreeable attributes sprinkled around its margins.

** out of ****